Results by title

Chronicle of a Genocide Foretold is a powerful account of one of the most devastating human crises of the 21st century. Drawing on firsthand research conducted in Burma (Myanmar) and neighboring countries, the book uncovers how the Rohingya Muslims have been systematically isolated, impoverished, and targeted in a state-led genocidal campaign. Through more than 150 interviews with survivors, local officials, religious leaders, and international actors, the authors reveal how discrimination, mass displacement, and organized brutality have created conditions that meet the legal, criminological, and moral definition of genocide. The book also challenges the silence and complicity of the international community. Accessible and grounded in rigorous research, this book speaks to scholars, activists, policymakers, and anyone concerned with justice, human rights, and the global failure to prevent genocide.

Cold War and Sinophone Culture at the Borders examines Sinophone literary and cultural production in relation to the politics of the global Cold War and decolonization in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Malaysia. As we reckon with the historical and contemporary geopolitical standoffs in the Cold War–divided territories, Shuang Shen draws attention to the diasporic communities outside Chinese sovereign territories and shows that these supposedly peripheral locations were in fact significant cultural and political hot spots. 

Shen demonstrates how Cold War borders exerted geo-power over strategic hot spots, organized global flows of populations and cultures, hardened the boundaries of aesthetic debates, and managed interracial relationships and plurilingual exchange. The multifold bordering effect in turn complicates the common perception of the border as a mechanism of territorial division. Cold War and Sinophone Culture at the Borders proposes that a critical examination of borders—not just territorial divisions, but also social, political, and aesthetic boundaries––can tap into different structures of power without needing to incorporate them into a single binary framework of the metropole versus colony.

Explores the circumstances and elements that make for a successful Southeast Asian entrepôt.

What made modern Singapore and fifteenth-century Malacca so exceptional in their success in trade, and why did so many other attempts fail to coalesce? Coming Together recasts the founding of modern Singapore as the culmination of a long tradition of alliance-building within the “straits and peninsula,” that sliver of maritime Southeast Asia that connects the Indian Ocean with the China Seas. From abortive Franco-Siamese projects in the 1680s, through lonely failure at Poulo Condor and stubborn frustration on the Burmese “Eastern Coast,” to the persistent enterprise of Bugis and Malay rulers during the 1770s and 1780s, Coming Together follows an evolving cast of princes, captains, merchants, and missionaries drawn together by a powerful idea: that the trade of Asia could be concentrated at a single and wildly prosperous place.

Long-neglected French archival materials illuminate events long distorted by colonial historiography, revealing the entrepôt as a transcultural project sustained by tributary diplomacy, treaty-making, and the pragmatic exchange of protection for commercial privilege. The result is a fundamental reinterpretation of the origins of Penang and Singapore—and of the alliance-building that lies at the core of modern Singapore.

Examines the cultural consequences of slave-gathering warfare.

Long-distance slave-gathering warfare reshuffled the populations of mainland Southeast Asia between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this lightly populated region, people were power, and warfare between kingdoms was dedicated to the enslavement and forced relocation of defeated peoples. In the Southeast Asian context, war slaves were often valued and exploited for native talents and knowledge. In Upper Burma, for example, captured artisans, performers, pundits, weavers, and elephant trainers were made the king’s property and incorporated into a vast and tightly organized force of coerced laborers.

The enslaved became critical agents in the transmission of artistic practices, knowledge, religious beliefs, and exotic skills and talents. Using the concept of creolization as a conceptual anchor, Creole Kingdoms offers new insights into the many ways that war slaves and their descendants creatively built, popularized, and consolidated cultural practices across the cosmopolitan kingdoms of mainland Southeast Asia.

Creole Kingdoms opens up new terrain for both future generations of Southeast Asian scholars and general readers from the mainland who want to explore the cultural history of their home.