Think of Cold War communist insurgency and guerilla warfare might well spring to mind. Sometimes it worked, building from the hinterlands to capture the capital: see Cuba. Sometimes it failed: see Che in Bolivia. And sometimes the revolutionaries remained stuck in the wild, undefeated but unable to seize the state.
Southeast Asia
Malay folklore is peopled—if that’s the right word—with a variety of supernatural beings, ghosts, and spirits, which reflect cultural anxieties, historical beliefs, and the blending of animistic traditions with Islamic, Indian and Chinese influences. Given this tradition has been a fundamental part of local storytelling for centuries, it’s unsurprising that horror is a staple of the Malaysian film and publishing industries. Malay-language horror movies often outperform Hollywood blockbusters in the domestic market, and locally published horror fiction is popular, in both English, and Malay.
Genevieve Yang, the protagonist of Jemimah Wei’s debut novel The Original Daughter works a dead-end job in Singapore, living in the shadow of her adopted younger sister, Arin, a rising movie star. Genevieve’s dying mother asks her to call Arin; Genevieve refuses.
The recent documentary, The Sea is Our Home immerses viewers in the vibrant yet precarious world of the Bajau Laut, whose stilt houses rise above the turquoise waters of Sabah’s east coast. While this film is centered on the sea nomads of Malaysia, the Bajau Laut can also be found in aquatic settlements across coastal Philippines and Indonesia.
Although no longer as true as it was, East Asian trade in the early-modern period is often presented from the perspective of one more Western nation or another: the Spain’s Manila Galleon trade, the Portuguese spice trade and unique base in Macau, the Dutch East India Company, and latterly, the British via Canton and Hong Kong.
On a recent warm evening in August, I settled into the lush gardens of the Agung Rai Museum of Art in Ubud, in Bali’s hill country, for screenings of two remarkable films: “Island of Demons” from 1933 and “Headhunters of Borneo” from 1936. Directed by Friedrich Dalsheim with Victor Baron von Plessen and, for the first, Walter Spies, these works capture Bali and Borneo under Dutch colonial rule, a decade before Indonesia’s independence in 1945.
This book tells the inside story of how Singapore defied considerable odds to develop a dynamic economy and cohesive society in the 60 years since the city-state’s independence.
Through in-depth interviews with some of the nation’s most influential leaders—Abdullah Tarmugi, Chan Sek Keong, Cheong Koon Hean, Halimah Yacob, Peter Ho, Khaw Boon Wan, Lim Siong Guan, Ravi Menon, Seah Jiak Choo, Tan Yong Soon, Eddie Teo, Teo Ming Kian—How Singapore Beat the Odds explores various facets of public policy that shaped Singapore’s remarkable transformation.
Bornean-Australian novelist, playwright, poet, rapper and visual artist Omar Musa comes with a bit of a pedigree. His debut novel Here Come the Dogs was long-listed for the International Dublin Literary Award and for the Miles Franklin Award. He was named one of the Sydney Morning Herald’s Young Novelists of the Year in 2015.
Nine years in the making, Jemimah Wei’s debut novel is a complicated story of two sisters who found and lost each other amidst the busy, urban, competitive island of Singapore. It provides a glimpse of Singapore without the glitz and glamour, a Singapore in which the expectation of excellence drives a wedge through even the strongest bonds of sisterhood.
The marketing blurb for Amitav Acharya’s most recent book From Southeast Asia to Indo-Pacific begins, rather portentiously, “Southeast Asia was created by geopolitics, and it might die with it.” The book itself, thank goodness, is a considerably more measured (and clearly-written) overview of how Southeast Asia and ASEAN came to be more or less synonymous and how the region, as a region, might fare in the newly-turbulent world of the second quarter of the 21st century.
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