Coming Soon – New Essays on Southeast Asia

A new collection of essays, tentively entitled, Searching for Penguins in Southeast Asia: Critical Perspectives on Modernity, is coming soon. The collection will feature new scholarship by a talented group of emerging voices. The tentative contents follows:

Part 1: The Modern Capitalist Horror Show

Zev Mayer : Haunted Modernity: The Supernatural in Dunia Melayu

Kat Zhang : Barren Lands: Analyzing the Decrease in Female Fertility Due to Mechanization in Indonesia’s Palm Oil Plantations

Elizabeth Van Ha : Jaded High Lands: Landscapes of Dissent and Distortion of the Myanmar Drug and Jade trade

Part 2: Spatial and Aesthetic Contradictions in Urban Southeast Asia

Andrea Lee : Encounter(mapp)ing the Next Frontier: New Clark City, Indigenous Resistance, and Narrative Control of Space

Lexi Berlin : Green Cities and Plastic Models: Aesthetics of Modernity in Malaysian Green Energy and Development

Kayley Estoesta : [something pithy/clever] : The Politics and Aesthetics of Traffic in Metro Manila

John Besche : sweeping the capital under the rug

Part 3: Precarious Mobility

Peter Tran : Invisible but not Forgotten: Thailand’s Vietnamese Migrant Precariat

Camille Pham : Missing Men: The Invisibilization of Forced Laborers in the Thai Fishing Industry

Ryan Huynh : False Liberation: (Re)produced Gender Dynamics Emerge from Feminized Mobility in SEA

Part 4: Identities of Inclusion and Exclusion

Raisha Waller : Incompatible Identities: Ethnicity, Belonging, and Exclusion in Making Myanmar’s Democracy

Cam Do : Beyond Fish Sauce Labeling: Vietnamese Authenticity Crisis and (De)construction of Food Identity

Dylan Carlson Sirvent León : “Only Filipinos Will Understand”: Social Poetics of TikTok nationalism

Part 5: Challenging Hierarchies and Gender Binaries  

Emily Brown : Hazing and Hierarchy in Thailand: SOTUS and Societal Change

Orven Mallari : From the Iskwater to the Pink Throne: The Modern Bakla Icon in a “Post”-Colonial Context

Jarron Long : Precarious (in)visibility : Re-envisioning LGBTQ activism in Contemporary Indonesia