Laurie Sears

The essays in Knowing Southeast Asian Subjects ask how the rising preponderance of scholarship fr... more The essays in Knowing Southeast Asian Subjects ask how the rising preponderance of scholarship from Southeast Asia is decentering Southeast Asian area studies in the United States. The contributions address recent transformations within the eld and new directions for research, pedagogy, and institutional cooperation. Contributions from the perspectives of history, anthropology, cultural studies, political theory, and libraries pose questions ranging from how a concern with postcolonial and feminist questions of identity might reorient the eld to how anthropological work on civil society and Islam in Southeast Asia provides an opportunity for comparative political theorists to develop more sophisticated analytic approaches. A vision common to all the contributors is the potential of area studies to produce knowledge outside a global academic framework that presumes the privilege and even hegemony of Euro-American academic trends and scholars.

Download

Introduction: Thinking Comparison with the Politics of Storytelling

positions: asia critique

This article highlights the overall aims of the special issue, which reconceptualizes island worl... more This article highlights the overall aims of the special issue, which reconceptualizes island worlds as situated historical places, that is, islands and their networks as spaces that come to life through the multiple and contested meanings constantly attached to them, formed in the milieu of overlapping and competing European, US, and Southeast Asian empires and diasporas. By investigating the forms and politics of storytelling in the island South and Southeast Asia, along with parallel and intersecting formations in the Caribbean and diasporic Asian America, this article underlines the two scholarly interventions of the special issue in the study of world making: (1) it refashions the notion of comparison to move away from the project of “knowing”—habitually constituted through a top-down gaze aimed at assessment and measuring, which consequently leads to the formation of hierarchies, categories of containment, and reductionism—and to unearth forms of comparison emerging from local ...

Download

Autonomous Histories: Essays in Honor of John Smail

Pacific Affairs, 1994

Text and performance in Javanese shadow theatre: changing authorities in an oral tradition

Text and performance in Javanese shadow theatre : changing authorities in an oral tradition

Autonomous Histories, Particular Truths. Essays in Honor of John R. W. Smail. Edited by Laurie Sears. Madison: University of Wisconsin Center for Southeast Asian Studies, 1993. 39.95 (cloth); 1995 (paper)

The Journal of Asian Studies, Nov 1, 1996

Download

Heroes as Killers or Killers as Heroes?

Critical Asian Studies, Jan 2, 2014

Racial Slurs and Whispers in Situated Testimonies of Dutch Imperial Fiction

Positions, Feb 1, 2021

Storytelling brings into vivid focus the emotions and affects that different classes and races of... more Storytelling brings into vivid focus the emotions and affects that different classes and races of people experienced in the imperial Dutch Indies island worlds. The storyteller explored in this article is Maria Dermoût (1888–1962), a mixed-race Dutch woman (Indo) who was born and raised on Java in the Dutch East Indies and who spent more than thirty years there. This article argues that Dermoût is a key writer for understanding affective economies, because she devotes significant time and effort in her fiction to fleshing out Native characters, something that few writers of her time did. The novella Toetie, one of Dermoût’s last works, uncovers Indies and Dutch attitudes toward race and color, moving her work from the genre of Indies Letters, or Dutch colonial literature, to that of postcolonial critique, with an exploration of forms of servitude, affect, and the social relations of her time.

Boundaries of the Text

The editors have chosen not to italicize the terms Ramayana and Mahabharata in order to emphasize... more The editors have chosen not to italicize the terms Ramayana and Mahabharata in order to emphasize that they are flexible traditions rather than simply printed texts. The names of printed texts are italicized. Regional performance genres of these traditions are italicized as non-English words, but not capitalized unless they contain the name of an epic character. In the essays on South Asian epic traditions, the names of the epics and their characters are spelled in English, approximating their pronunciation without diacritical marks (thus, Lakshmana, rather than Laksmana). For consistency among essays, the two essays discussing Hindi traditions spell the names of the epics and characters according to their pan-Indian forms (Ramayana rather than Ramayan; Rama rather than Ram). Following Indonesian and Malaysian governmental practice, diacritical marks are not used for Malay, Indonesian, and Javanese

Download

Authoritative Voices and the Vietnam Experience: Teaching about Vietnam during the Gulf War