Abstract
This chapter reviews the literature on the history of Southeast Asia focusing on the realm of people’s movement and flow. Following Lefebvre’s the production of space this chapter assembles historical information to argue that the Malay world is nothing but a newly created political space – a political space that is formed and constituted by myriads of crisscrossing people’s flows and movements. Southeast Asia is the home of diverse cultures, indigenous or settlers, hybrid culture endlessly in the making. The chapter argues that two cultural identities, however, standout, the Malays and the Javanese. In the making of the Malay world, the contest and consensus of these two major cultural identities traversed in their flows and movements and constituted the unraveling politics of space in Southeast Asia.
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Notes
- 1.
Jan Aart Scholte’s (1997) chapter titled ‘Identifying “Indonesia”, in Images of Malay-Indonesian Identity’, eds. Michael Hitchcock and Victor T King: 21–44.
- 2.
Ananda Rajah ‘Southeast Asia : Comparatist Errors and the Construction of a Region’, Southeast
Asian Journal of Social Science, Vol. 27, No. 1 (1999): 41–53.
- 3.
Eric Tagliacozzo ‘Smugggling in Southeast Asia : History and Its Contemporary Vectors in an Unbound Region’, Critical Asian Studies, 34: 2 (2002), 193–220.
- 4.
According to Bastin and Benda (1968: v), the collective concept of ‘Southeast Asia ’ was long familiar in Chinese and Japanese usage as Nanyang and Nampo—or the region of the Southern Seas.
- 5.
How will we translate ‘Malayness’ into Malay? As’ke-Melayu-an’?
- 6.
Collins (1989: 235).
- 7.
ibid .
- 8.
Leonrad Andaya (2002: 60).
- 9.
Anthony Reid (2004: 13–14).
- 10.
A’s Decolonising Ceylon: Colonialism, Nationalism and the Politics of Space in Sri Lanka.
- 11.
Elmhirst (1999) ‘Space, identity politics and resource control in Indonesia’s transmigration programme’
- 12.
It is interesting to note that Malayness was recently revived as cultural identification in parts of Indonesia’s border provinces with Malaysia. See observations by Faucher (2005); Ford (2003); Sakai (2004); Tomizawa (2004); and Fau (2004). In connection with the emerging interest in Malayness in recent studies on Borneo by Thung Ju, Lan et al. (2004) noticed the mobilising of the Dayak ethnic group under the loose Pan-Dayak movement.
- 13.
- 14.
Ibrahim 1688: 174–177, as quoted by Reid (1988: 1)
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Tirtosudarmo, R. (2018). The Malay World and the Politics of Space. In: The Politics of Migration in Indonesia and Beyond. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-9032-5_7
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