Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- A Note on the Language, Spelling and Pagination of Quotations
- 1 Introduction: Booking Southeast Asia: The History of an Idea
- 2 Booking Southeast Asia: And So It Begins, with a Nightmare
- 3 The New Language-Game of Modern Colonial Capitalism
- 4 Raffles’ Java as Museum
- 5 Dressing the Cannibal: John Anderson’s Sumatra as Market
- 6 Brooke, Keppel, Mundy and Marryat’s Borneo as ‘The Den of Pirates’
- 7 Crawfurd’s Burma as the Torpid ‘Land of Tyranny’
- 8 Bricolage, Power and How a Region Was Discursively Constructed
- Appendix A The full Transcript of the Article by William Cobbett on the Subject of the British Invasion of Java
- Appendix B Keeping an eye on the Javanese: Raffles’ ‘Regulations of 1814 for the More Effectual Administration of Justice in the Provincial Courts of Java'
- Appendix C James Brooke’s Detractors in the British Parliament and the Aborigines’ Protection Society
- Appendix D The clash between the HMS Dido and the Ships of the Rajah of Riao: A Case of Mistaken Identity and Misappropriation of the Signifier ‘Pirate’
- Appendix E The Construction of the Native other in the Writings of Hugh Clifford, British Colonial Resident to Pahang
- Bibliography
- Index
8 - Bricolage, Power and How a Region Was Discursively Constructed
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 February 2021
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- A Note on the Language, Spelling and Pagination of Quotations
- 1 Introduction: Booking Southeast Asia: The History of an Idea
- 2 Booking Southeast Asia: And So It Begins, with a Nightmare
- 3 The New Language-Game of Modern Colonial Capitalism
- 4 Raffles’ Java as Museum
- 5 Dressing the Cannibal: John Anderson’s Sumatra as Market
- 6 Brooke, Keppel, Mundy and Marryat’s Borneo as ‘The Den of Pirates’
- 7 Crawfurd’s Burma as the Torpid ‘Land of Tyranny’
- 8 Bricolage, Power and How a Region Was Discursively Constructed
- Appendix A The full Transcript of the Article by William Cobbett on the Subject of the British Invasion of Java
- Appendix B Keeping an eye on the Javanese: Raffles’ ‘Regulations of 1814 for the More Effectual Administration of Justice in the Provincial Courts of Java'
- Appendix C James Brooke’s Detractors in the British Parliament and the Aborigines’ Protection Society
- Appendix D The clash between the HMS Dido and the Ships of the Rajah of Riao: A Case of Mistaken Identity and Misappropriation of the Signifier ‘Pirate’
- Appendix E The Construction of the Native other in the Writings of Hugh Clifford, British Colonial Resident to Pahang
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The historian observes, that Empires are won by portions.
– The Times (London), 12 September 1818Books in the Era of Gunboat Epistemology
Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person.
– Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, ‘The Danger of a Single Story’ (2009)Today we live in a globalised world that has been brought together via the communicative architecture that connects every part of the world and which has collapsed time and space. Astounding though these advances may seem to some, they have also been accompanied by the less pleasant phenomenon of the bad tourist who really does not know how to travel; and who perhaps should never have left home in the first place. We see the likes of them everywhere these days, from spoilt children who complain that there are no french fries on the menu in Java to middle-aged travellers who eat, love and pray their way across Asia in search of its exotic essence – which they read about in their bathtubs back home.
This book has been about another sort of traveller, one who perhaps never really travelled at all. It has been a book about the imagining, configuring, mapping and defining of this thing and place called Southeast Asia by a generation of men who lived in, and were the products of, the nineteenth century. None of them were tourists, though for some of them their jaunt across Southeast Asia would prove adventurous, sometimes even violent. We have looked closely at their writings – the works of Raffles, Crawfurd, Brooke, Anderson, Snodgrass, Keppel, Mundy and Marryat, as well as de Bry, Raleigh and Nieuhof who wrote before them – and argued that in all these cases what we find is not a Southeast Asia that is discovered and represented through accurate mimesis, but rather an imagining of Southeast Asia that took off in the boardrooms of companies thousands of miles away, where the idea of Southeast Asia and its constituent polities was first concocted in that military-commercial laboratory where Southeast Asia – and Asia by extension – was forged by the combined wills of empire, colonialism and racialised capitalism, with all the attendant sciences and pseudo-sciences present.
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- The Discursive Construction of Southeast Asia in 19th Century Colonial-Capitalist Discourse , pp. 187 - 206Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2016