Anticolonialism, Pan-Asianism, and Periodical Culture in Southeast Asia, c. 1850-1920

Ziel

Spanning three European empires (French, British, and Dutch) and five interconnected port cities (Singapore, Penang, Rangoon, Batavia, and Saigon), PanAsia is the first systematic analysis of the newspapers, journals, and magazines of nineteenth and early twentieth-century Southeast Asia (c. 1850-1920). Challenging dominant and retrospectively applied nationalist approaches to Southeast Asian decolonisation, the project’s primary objectives are, first, to compare the production of anticolonial periodical media by colonised peoples in multiple languages across the five maritime sites; second, to uncover transimperial and/or transnational print networks of anticolonial resistance between colonised peoples across the region; and third, to investigate how pan-Asian or shared Asian cultural values were used to mobilise anticolonial thinking and praxis. The project’s design thus combines comparative and transnational approaches to examine how periodicals enabled both bonding networks within diasporic communities and bridging networks between the region’s diverse ethnic groups. In both cases, its focus is on how periodicals encouraged anticolonial literary and cultural projects, including questions relating to literacy, vernacular education, cultural revivalism, literary history, and the production of hybrid and/or multilingual literary forms. As such, it primarily considers anticolonialism as a textual phenomenon that grew out of the print cultures of cosmopolitan port cities and involved ideational exchange, reprinting, translation, and other forms of intertextual connection. Focusing on the neglected period before national self-determination, this project will radically transform existing studies of the decolonisation of Southeast Asia by centring previously marginalised vernacular voices, and demonstrating how cooperative, transnational, and multilingual cultural endeavours laid the groundwork for the future decolonisation of the region.