More than three decades after the release of his seminal work An Age in Motion: Popular Radicalism in Java, 1912–1926, Takashi Shiraishi finally published the long-awaited sequel, The Phantom World of Digul. Initially conceived with the self-explanatory title An Age of Normalcy, the monograph draws a sharp contrast with its prequel by investigating the interplay of the colonial regime’s political policing and the concurrent nationalist movement in the final years of the Dutch East Indies. While scholars commonly see the late 1920s and 1930s as a period of “peace and order” under the relatively stable rule of the Dutch Beambtenstaat—an “apolitical, administrative polity par excellence,” Shiraishi demonstrates that the colonial authority achieved such “normalcy” by “reducing the problem of nationalism to the question of police” (p. 16). Boven Digul, a remote penal colony established to intern recalcitrant communists and radical nationalists, stood out as a jarring antithesis to such “normalcy.” The mass internment camp served as both a metaphor and ground for the colonial regime’s policing and surveillance practices, epitomizing Dutch repressive colonial strategies that aimed to confine Indonesians’ political life within an extremely narrow space.

In 1623, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) beheaded twenty-one men on charges of conspiracy and treason in a public execution. Ten of the condemned were employees of the English East India Company (EIC) who had been trading in the Moluccas, better known as the Spice Islands, alongside their Dutch counterparts since the beginning of the century. The incident was hardly the most outrageous mass violence in the region’s tumultuous past. Nevertheless, the EIC dubbed the episode the “Amboyna Massacre,” which gained remarkable significance in various historical writings and unexpected longevity in the British culture in the following centuries. Alison Games’s monograph Inventing the English Massacre is the latest scholarly inquiry into the ambiguous conspiracy and the episode’s long afterlife, spanning British imperial history.

荷兰殖民帝国的日常运作和印尼各种反殖民势力的活动都大大超越了“荷属东印度”这一地理范畴，而印度洋则是两者进行政治角力的重要场域。本文从海洋视角切入，对二十世纪上半叶的印尼反殖民运动进行反思。本文旨在跳出把陆地空间作为基本框架的传统叙事模式，思考反殖民运动中的去地域化因素。本文指出，高速发展的全球航运网络促进了人员、思想、商品的跨洋流动，对各地民族主义的产生及反殖民运动的发展产生了巨大的推动作用，但对这种影响的探讨却长期淹没于把殖民地或民族国家陆地疆域作为分析单位、且带有强烈的目的论倾向的历史书写之中。对跨洋网络等去地域化因素加以研究，有助于突破殖民地与民族国家的“束身衣”，重新审视二十世纪民族主义在殖民世界兴起与发展的历史进程。

A panel discussion on "Empire and Regional Order", in which I discussed two related issues: 1. how to do research on the history of regional politics? 2. how to make sense of the unwritten by following what Ann Laura Stoler called “archival grains”.

China's resistance to Japanese aggression escalated into a full-scale war in 1937. The continuously deteriorating situation stimulated the rise of Chinese nationalism in the diaspora communities worldwide. The Japanese invasion of China, accompanied by the emergence of the National Salvation Movement (NSM) in Southeast Asia, provided the overseas Chinese with a rare opportunity to re-examine their ‘Chineseness’, as well as their relationships with the colonial states and the increasingly self-aware indigenous populations. This research problematises traditional approaches that tend to regard the NSM as primarily driven by Chinese patriotism. Juxtaposing Malaya and Java at the same historical moment, the article argues that the emergence of the NSM was more than just a natural result of the rising Chinese nationalism. Local politics and the shifting political orientations of overseas Chinese communities also profoundly shaped how the NSM played out in different colonial states.

Southeast Asian Studies (SEAS) in China has experienced significant changes in the past twenty years. China's rising political and economic power has stimulated growing demands for better understanding of the wider world, resulting in the rapid development of area studies in recent years. Although SEAS in China predated the relatively recent notion of ‘area studies’ by at least half a century, the boom in area studies has profoundly transformed the field, most notably by attracting a large number of scholars to conduct policy-relevant research. Not only does the ‘policy turn’ reflect shifts of research paradigms in the field of SEAS, but it is also consistent with some larger trends prevailing in China's higher education sector and rapidly changing society in general. This article shows that SEAS in China has grown even more imbalanced, as indicated by the rapid growth of language programmes, absolute domination of short-term policy research, and further marginalisation of humanistic subjects. To respond, Chinese universities have adopted new approaches to SEAS depending on their distinct disciplinary foundations, language coverage, faculty interests, and local governments’ policy preferences.

1937年中国与日本的军事冲突升级为全面战争。随着中国国内战局的发展,海外华人的民族主义情绪空前高涨,抗日救亡运动在东南亚各地迅速兴起。在此背景下,许多华人重新审视自己的"中国性"与"华人性",思考自身与当地殖民政府及当地社群间的关系。传统观点认为,东南亚的抗日救亡运动主要受海外华人的爱国情怀驱动,其成效取决于华人领袖及社团对整个移民群体的动员能力。本研究将英属马来亚和荷属东印度的抗日救亡运动进行对比,指出这种观点存在一定的片面性。本文认为,虽然海外华人的爱国情绪引发了抗日救亡运动,但东南亚各殖民地不同的社会政治环境却影响了救亡运动的效果,华人群体内部的分歧也对救亡运动的发展产生了重要的形塑作用。 

本尼迪克特·安德森著作等身,其代表作《想象的共同体》更是过去数十年间全球人文与社科领域最重要的学术成果之一。此外,安德森的作品涉及文学、政治学、社会学、历史学,以及区域与国别研究等领域,其本人是一个无法被单一学科标签定义的学者。本文以其回忆录《椰壳碗外的人生》为线索,探讨安德森在其学术生涯中试图跳出的六大"椰壳碗",即身份束缚、西方中心主义、书本迷信、狭隘地方主义、学科边界、学术象牙塔,并结合对西方东南亚研究的反思指出打破上述壁垒的必要性。 

Kris Alexanderson’s Subversive Sea is the newest addition to the growing scholarship on the twentieth-century Dutch empire. Adopting a fresh approach, this groundbreaking work examines the transoceanic aspects of Indonesian anticolonialism by examining the shipping networks stretching beyond the geographic boundaries of the metropole and colony. Based on her solid archival work, careful reading of existing literature, and well-structured analysis, Alexanderson demonstrates how the “oceans’ permeable boundaries created a simultaneous liberating and threatening maritime spatiality” and that “the maritime world is not a liminal space but an active political arena” (p. 27). Specifically, she points out Dutch shipping companies “connected disparate bodies of water into intertwined transoceanic networks” and played a “unique role in navigating interwar power struggles between imperial hegemony and anticolonialism” (p. 25). By “repositioning colonial Indonesia to a sub-imperial center,” Subversive Sea reveals that the interconnected maritime networks were not only critical in defining colonial structure within the colonial state but also reflected “fundamental differences between terrestrial and oceanic characteristics particular to the interwar Dutch empire” (p. 2).

The past few years have seen a growing number of scholarly works on British operations in Southeast Asia and their relationships with local resistance in World War II. Particularly intriguing is the mysterious last-minute deal struck between the British in Malaya and the Chinese-dominated Malayan Communist Party, or MCP, before the Japanese takeover...

提起印尼政治，学者们谈的都是雅加达的腥风血雨，大城市的世事变迁。即便一些不安于谈论政治中心的学者，讨论的也是宗教冲突、族群政治，再不然就是讲巴布亚、亚齐等地的分离运动。感喟于先辈及同僚们对印尼有如此多维的研究和认识，同时总觉得缺了些什么。究竟什么是印尼“外岛政治”的常态?在笔者看来，苏拉威西是研究印尼“外岛政治”的理想实验室:离中心不远不近，民族宗教构成足够多元，对中央政府大多言听计从......总结起来，苏拉威西的政治没有鲜明特点，基本上不对中央政治产生重要影响。纵然，印尼政治的藏经阁在爪哇，但经文在各地的念法却形形色色。几次访谈后，笔者发现印尼人自己对本国的行政区划和地方政府架构也不是特别清楚，对近年发生的一些变化更是知其然而不知其所以然。本文仅做纯技术性的现象描述，不进行任何学术思辨与创新。

Scholars commonly regard the Comintern as having played a critical role in the emergence of the communist movement in late-colonial Malaya. When discussing the Comintern’s early influence, existing scholarships often use the arrest of Joseph Ducroux — alias Serge Lefranc, a French agent of the Comintern — in Singapore in June 1931 to illustrate the Comintern-China-Malaya connection. Additionally, historians have attached special meanings to the Ducroux Case, primarily because of the more significant repercussions it caused internationally. Laurent Metzger has conducted detailed research on Ducroux’s arrest in and eventual exile from Singapore between 1931 and 1932. While such an account is useful in demonstrating the incident’s international significance, little is known as to what immediate impression it created in the cosmopolitan port city. Moreover, it is also unclear how Singapore’s general public perceived communism when communist organizations had yet firmly established themselves in the British colony. This article seeks to make sense of such issues by investigating how the Singapore press reported on the Ducroux Case.

一些研究者常常把东南亚共产主义运动的起源与中国及华人群体对该地区的影响联系在一起,但"中国向东南亚输出早期共产主义"的简单论断是存在严重谬误的。在有关东南亚早期共运的讨论中,种族问题极具争议,突出表现为海外华人在共产主义革命中扮演了多样且矛盾的角色。本文以多层次的"中国性"为切入口,探讨早期东南亚共运的复杂性,其中既包括中国革命对东南亚革命者的思想启发,也包括华人在其中所扮演的马克思主义传播者的角色。本研究将共产主义运动在中国的兴起作为基本的参考坐标,就荷属东印度群岛、法属印度支那、英属马来亚,以及从未被欧洲殖民的泰国进行对比。本文不遵循严格的时间顺序行文,也无意对上述地区逐个展开分析,而是着重探讨以下三个相互关联的主题:（1）东方殖民地与半殖民地相似的反帝斗争路线;（2）东南亚对中国革命经验的借鉴与变通;（3）民族主义运动与"中国性"及"华人性"之间的矛盾。 

Britain’s loss of its Southeast Asian colonies during World War Two (WWII), especially the fall of Malaya and Singapore, is a relatively well-studied topic. While existing scholarship has covered the military failure in great detail, researchers have not paid equal attention to the disorganization of the colonial administration, which played a no less important role in the years leading up to the defeat. Based on his meticulous research in British archives, Ronald McCrum has filled the gap by scrutinizing the ‘irresponsible and incompetent’ behaviors of the civilian authorities. He argues that by pursuing different priorities, the colonial government failed to take necessary measures to counter the growing threat of the Japanese. Besides the fact that the British civilian administration was in disarray within itself, their poor relationship with the military also greatly hindered joint efforts to augment the defense against the imminent invasion, which ultimately led to astonishing casualties when the war broke out.

China’s engagement with Indonesia from 1955 to 1959 was neither ideologically oriented nor realpolitik, but somewhere in between. It happened not only because of the changing domestic political situations or completely subject to the shifting international environment, but was also closely associated with intrinsic social and historical issues that transcended geographical, ideological and ethnic boundaries within and across the two nation-states. To some extent, this effective engagement was not a result of Indonesia’s leaning towards the left, but a reason for it—not in the sense of direct political intervention, but through the pursuit of common identity and interest, which significantly shaped the making of Indonesia’s Guided Democracy.