With dozens of beautiful photographs and extensive text, this Malaysian art book is a testament to the skill and spirituality of Malaysia's traditional woodcarvers.Wood has always played a significant role in the Malay world, including the Malay Peninsula, as a means of shelter, livelihood, comfort and convenience. Among the living arts of Malaysia, woodcarving is one of the oldest, and for centuries woodcarvers enjoyed a prestige that few others did. A master wood...

The nations of Southeast Asia today are rapidly integrating economically and politically, but that integration is also counterbalanced by forces ranging from hyper-nationalism to disputes over cultural ownership throughout the region. Those forces, Farish A. Noor argues in this book, have their roots in the region's failure to come to a critical understanding of how current national and cultural identities in the region came about. To remedy that, Noor offers a close account of the constru...

SHORTLISTED for the ICAS Book Prize 2013 http://www.icassecretariat.org/icas-book-prize-2013-shortlists. Much nuance and variability have been lost in the process of the reductivist analysis of Islam post 9/11 and, as this study amply demonstrates, we are all the poorer as a result. This exhaustive examination of the rise and spread of the Tablighi Jama't, arguably the world's largest Islamic missionary movement, locates it in the larger perspective of global Islam and de...

The Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party PAS is the biggest opposition party in Malaysia today and one of the most prominent Islamist parties in Southeast Asia. This work recounts the historical development of PAS from 1951 to the present, and looks at how it has risen to become a political movement that is both local and transnational, tracking its rise from the Cold War to the age of the War on Terror, and its evolving ideological postures - from anti-colonialism to post-revolutionary Islamism, a...

A century before the Philippines came under American control, Americans were already travelling to Southeast Asia regularly. This book looks at the writings of American diplomats, adventurers, and scientists and chronicles how nineteenth-century Americans viewed and imagined Southeast Asia through their own cultural-political lenses. It argues that as Americans came to visit the region they also brought with them a train of cultural assumptions and biases that contributed to the developmen...

Empire-building did not only involve the use of excessive violence against native communities, but also required the gathering of data about the native Other. This is a book about books, which looks at the writings of Western colonial administrators, company-men and map-makers who wrote about Southeast Asia in the 19th century. In the course of their information-gathering they had also framed the people of Southeast Asia in a manner that gave rise to Orientalist racial stereotypes that wou...

La revue semestrielle Jentayu (ISSN 2426-2536) est dédiée à la traduction de textes courts ou d'extraits de roman. À chaque numéro, entre douze et quinze textes provenant d'une variété de pays et de régions d'Asie sont sélectionnés sur un thème donné et traduits par des traducteurs chevronnés. Pour certains de ces textes, ils sont aussi mis en contexte sur le site internet de Jentayu

The colonisation of Southeast Asia was a long and often violent process where numerous military campaigns were waged by the colonial powers across the region. The notion of racial difference was crucial in many of these wars, as native Southeast Asian societies were often framed in negative terms as 'savage' and 'backward' communities that needed to be subdued and 'civilised'. This collection of critical essays focuses on the colonial construction of race and looks at how the colonial wars...