Nationalism in Southeast Asia: revisiting Kahin, Roff, and Anderson.(Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia / The Origins of Malay Nationalism / Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism)(Book review)

Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia. By George McTurnan Kahin. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1952.

The Origins of Malay Nationalism. By William R. Roff. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994 (1967).

Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. By Benedict R.O'G. Anderson. London; New York: Verso, 1991 (1983).

Keywords: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, indigenous religions, "western education", social radicals and communists.

Introduction

Area studies and research into nationalism in Southeast Asia have always mutually reaffirmed each other. Their shared premises like clear territorial boundaries, the centrality of language and culture, and the notion that both must be studied 'from within', have shaped the development of Southeast Asian scholarship since Second World War (WWII). The result of which has been a very unproblematized understanding 'place' where the sites of nationalist sentiments or cultures have clean perimeters for fieldwork. Another consequence of this mutual affirmation is the search for patterns and common characteristics for generalization. As such, the Southeast Asian literature identifies three general historical sources of nationalism.

The first is through the vehicle of indigenous religions. From Burma's Young Man's Buddhist Association in 1906 to the Indonesian mass political movement, Sarekat Islam, in 1912 that brought all Indonesian Muslims together under its banner of reformist Muslim ideas, religion has been a fertile ground for the animation of nationalist sentiments. Religion's indigeneity as a cultural system and its hermeneutical isolation from colonial influence has long provided a conducive space for anti-colonialist and nationalist awareness to nurture. The second is through "western education". Examples include Burma's new "western educated" elite who worked with Buddhist monks and other Burmese, while in the Philippines the "western educated" leaders first fought against Spain, but later worked with the United State, and most effectively, Singapore's People's Action Party comprising middle class English-educated Chinese who went on to form a single party state. The narrative of the "western educated" is the post-colonial tale of the native who is educated in the ways of the west only to find that he is not equal to the Westerner. The anticolonial struggle, even though it enlists the arguments of local culture, is thus primarily fought with the vocabulary of the Enlightenment whereby the concepts of 'freedom', 'equality' and 'dignity' are harnessed to reject the projection of the colony or dependency as a possession of the metropolis. The third is contact with social radicals and communists. The Malayan Communist Party, the Indonesian Communist Party, and the Vietnamese communists who took control of the nationalist movement in the 1930s are cases in point.