Glenn Diaz’s second novel is set in the busting-at-the-seams capital of Manila, in a district named only as T—, characterized by “the density, the closely packed, in-your-face life that sometimes felt like drowning.” Diaz’s complex female protagonist is ex-academic Yñiga Calinauan, now reduced to ghost-writing theses for foreign students. She also believes in astrology which “made better sense than religion, just a nice, healthy balance between faith and free will. And at night when you look up you see proof of it every time.” She survives on coffee, diet Coke and cigarettes and dotes on her rescue cat Jestoni, yielding “first waking thoughts, punctual and constant: caffeine and cat.”

In Indonesia, the colonial past has a conspicuously low profile in public consciousness and political debate, but the national revolution—”Revolusi” in Bahasa Indonesia—that threw off colonial rule once and for all nonetheless remains the single most defining moment in the country’s history. Countless murals, quirky dioramas, annual Independence Day celebrations, place names, monuments, official and unofficial histories celebrate this struggle. Meanwhile, interest in decolonization has grown exponentially, but Indonesia has figured much less in international discussions than cases such as Algeria or India.

Centered on the eastern half of Java and coming to control most of what would later become Indonesia, as well as Singapore, Malaysia and parts of Thailand during the 14th and 15th centuries, Majapahit may be the most significant empire that most people have never heard of. There are physical remains, but not as well-preserved or grand as those of Borobudur or Prambanan from an earlier period. And insofar as one might have heard of someone from Majapahit, it’s more likely to be the formidable prime minister Gajah Mada than one of the kings. Majapahit was calling out for an accessible history.

The late British historian Paul Johnson devoted an entire chapter of his 1983 classic Modern Times to what he called the “Bandung Generation”—the leaders of former European colonies in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia who in April 1955 gathered in Bandung, Indonesia to form a non-aligned movement in the midst of the Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. Johnson dismissed the group as a collection of moral poseurs “adept at words, but not much else”. Andrea Benvenuti, an associate professor of international relations at the University of South Wales, is not as dismissive about Bandung and its organizers as Johnson was, but he, too, concludes that Bandung failed to bring about its professed goal of “Afro-Asian solidarity”. 

Traude Gavin’s Borneo Ikat Textiles, Style Variations, Ethnicity, and Ancestry is a beautiful book replete with magnificent color plates documenting the author’s fieldwork. Gavin’s research included tracking down examples of a now defunct textile tradition, the warp ikat weaving once practiced by Ibanic-speaking ethnic groups in West Kalimantan.

The Unruly Dead: Spirits, Memory, and State Formation in Timor-Leste, Lia Kent (University of Wisconsin Press, August 2024)
The Unruly Dead: Spirits, Memory, and State Formation in Timor-Leste, Lia Kent (University of Wisconsin Press, August 2024)

“What might it mean to take the dead seriously as political actors?” asks Lia Kent. In Timor-Leste, a new nation-state that experienced centuries of European colonialism before a violent occupation by Indonesia from 1975 to 1999, the dead are active participants in social and political life who continue to operate within familial structures of obligation and commitment.

Magdaragat is Filipino for “seafarer” or “mariner.” Its dictionary meaning is straightforward enough, and even those with only cursory knowledge of the lands colonially known as “the Philippines” will understand why one would choose that word as the title for an anthology of Filipino diasporic writing. After all, the Philippines is an archipelago of approximately 7,000 islands in the South Pacific; the sea, as both literal and metaphorical entity, has dominated Filipino life—economically, politically, and culturally—since time immemorial.

Forsaken Causes: Liberal Democracy and Anticommunism in Cold War Laos, Ryan Wolfson-Ford (University of Wisconsin Press, July 2024)
Forsaken Causes: Liberal Democracy and Anticommunism in Cold War Laos, Ryan Wolfson-Ford (University of Wisconsin Press, July 2024)

In the wake of anticolonial struggles and amid the two world wars, twentieth-century Southeast Asia churned with new political, cultural, and intellectual realities. Liberal democracies flourished briefly, only to be discarded for dictatorships and other authoritarian regimes as the disorder and inefficiencies inherent to democracy appeared unequal to postcolonial and Cold War challenges. Uniquely within the region, Laos maintained a stable democracy until 1975, surviving wars, coups, and revolutions. But Lao history during this period has often been flattened, subsumed within the tug-of-war between the global superpowers and their puppets.