Transregional interaction, dynamic relationality and local variation are consistent themes that bridge the research articles in this extended double issue. In many respects, the authors’ shared interest in mobilities, fluidities and pluralities represents the intellectual currency of our times, establishing a premium on research that draws attention to historical and contemporary experiences of tension, difference and contestation. For nearly four decades, efforts to transcend the epistemological borders, heuristics, and categories associated with an earlier imagining of Southeast Asia (that sought to delineate it as a distinctive, coherent and legitimate unit of analysis) continues to exemplify emergent research. Reconfiguring Southeast Asia by problematising and disaggregating resilient tropes has both thickened and reconstituted how we delineate ‘region’.
As the articles demonstrate, our parameters for defining the communities, cultures, languages, ecologies, lifeways, worldviews, histories and practices of the region—a legacy of the broader intellectual construction of Southeast Asia—provide opportunities for reevaluating the promise of area as a unit of analysis. While earlier institutional renderings of these ambiguously defined areas were transformed into bordered regions (arguably for administrative/bureaucratic reasons), this has not prevented scholars from recognising the role of trans-Asian dynamics in the study of Southeast Asia over the generations. Who we include as Southeast Asian, what we identify as indigenous experiences, or what we designate as local are arguably legacy issues that have always motivated the field. At the same time and as several of the articles on overseas Chinese experiences will demonstrate, we have become more spatially accommodating, theoretically nuanced, and methodologically tolerant to promote a more elastic notion of area. Read together, the articles by Goh, Soh, and Yan draw attention to the myriad ways diasporic communities both reify and challenge conventional understandings of what constitutes Southeast Asian Studies.
The question of how we define Southeast Asian Studies today is consequential as the field’s infrastructure endures significant changes. Legacy area-studies programmes around the world are being forced to reposition or redefine themselves in the wake of increasingly shrinking institutional, financial and political support. One pathway recently discussed amongst area-studies leadership at the recent Association for Asian Studies (AAS) conference (Vancouver 2026) was to reconceptualise area-studies as Global Asian Studies, both as an attempt to prescribe greater relevance to stakeholders but also to highlight the way Asian studies research was increasingly becoming multi-sited, multi-lingual and multi-scalar in orientation. Another pathway, promoted by this Journal as an AAS panel in 2024, was to think about the possibility of a Public Southeast Asian Studies as a way of recognising the range of practitioners, processes and settings that produce knowledge on the region, issues that intersect with the contribution by Pattajit Tansinmunkong and Jin Sato who discuss the state of Southeast Asian Studies in Japan for our (ongoing) Diamond Jubilee Series.
The Diamond Jubilee Series, developed to draw attention to the way Southeast Asian Studies has developed across the globe, was also designed to draw awareness to the variation on what the field means and is practiced in the region and elsewhere. New initiatives to develop and define Southeast Asia are gaining traction across the globe most notably in Asia. In a recent 2025 mapping exercise funded by the Henry Luce Foundation and conducted by the SEASREP Foundation (Manila), over 100 new research institutes, degree programmes and centres in the region self-identify with Southeast Asian Studies. Geo-political and economic priorities in East and Northeast Asia have spawned state-backed funding and developmental initiatives to build new Southeast Asian Studies programmes, bucking the trend that we see in North America, Australia and Europe. What is evidently clear from the mapping findings is that Southeast Asian Studies is usefully being understood as a plurality of practices, co-constituted, each with its own scholarly traditions, key doyens, core texts, definitions and practices that reflect a mixture of local traits and references to other epistemological traditions. We welcome future contributions to this article series and are especially interested in contributions for South, Central and West Asia.
Research Articles
If Southeast Asian Studies can be imagined as a product of multi-sited interrelations and generative intellectual innovations emerging from different locales, this perspective of the field(s) can also be considered in dialogue with the following articles. Bryan Goh’s article critically examines Teochew Catholic experiences in Singapore and questions the coherence of overseas Chinese as an analytical category by revealing how differing migratory pathways, Church-based dynamics and faith-based principles produced different notions of identity. His study shows that within ‘the’ Teochew catholic community, different forms, practices, and discourses of belonging emerged within a single national space, inviting readers to reconsider how we understand migration, space, and legacy issues like localisation.
Bryan Goh’s zooming in on three parish spaces in Singapore is juxtaposed with Esmond Chuah Meng Soh’s study of an overseas Chinese sectarian movement (Cijiao) that originated in Cold War Malaya but became global in its dissemination through local overseas Chinese, who adapted their doctrinal and ritual practices to absorb foreign preferences and tastes. Soh’s research expands our understanding of Southeast Asia by jumping scale and showing how religious actors (themselves members of a Chinese diaspora) extended their networks outward to North America while simultaneously producing a retroactive sacred geography through the establishment of an ancestral origin site in China. Taken together, the two articles complicate conventional distinctions between centre and periphery, origin and destination, local and foreign as a way of highlighting multiple, entangled and simultaneous sites of attachment.
This issue of multiple attachments over a range of spaces is mirrored in Xing Hang’s expansive study of the early modern coastal polity of Hà Thiên, a pivotal port city in the Gulf of Siam that was co-constituted by overlapping claims of authority, legal jurisdiction, patronage networks and commercial circuits involving Qing China, Cochin China, Thai, Dutch, Cambodian and Malay-Islamic interests. Soh presents Hà Thiên as a densely connected polity that negotiates its own position amongst competing centres of authority within the polycentric Gulf of Siam, providing a spatial rendering of Southeast Asia as a transregional field of power relations. Hà Thiên’s pivot towards Dutch jurisdiction to settle a piracy case is cast as a deliberate example of strategic attachment during a time of uncertainty.
S.J. Miske’s reinterpretation of the early Dutch period in the Banda Islands, known for their production of clove and nutmeg, engages the story of interaction from the opposite end as Soh’s study on Hà Thiên, suggesting that local agrarian and ecological practices persisted and shaped the process through which Southeast Asian labour and agricultural production was incorporated into early modern systems of extraction. Intervening in previous scholarship that equated Dutch agricultural production in the Banda Islands with later Atlantic plantation systems, Miske suggests the European ‘garden’ was the more likely conceptual model.
Where Miske presents Southeast Asia as a commodity frontier, Fiona Williamson suggests a view of the region as a dense landscape of cultivated spaces, reframing gardens as critical food-producing infrastructure and sites of resilience, where households and communities responded to food insecurity and various crises through small-scale vegetable cultivation. Just as localised knowledge persisted in the Banda Islands in the transition to a colonial economy, so too did older and parallel practices continue in colonial Singapore and Malaya under promotion of the colonial state, often to respond to different circumstances brought about by shifting colonial regulations. Analysing different forms of gardens across urban, peri-urban and rural locales, Williamson presents a layered food ecology that complicates the image of Southeast Asia as a frontier made solely for export.
If colonial agriculture policies reconstituted approaches to local food production and consumption, so too did colonial print capitalism affect the manner in which indigenous Hikayat were preserved, disseminated, read and interpreted. Nicole Yow shows how Hikayat came to be read as fixed stories rather than living histories, as contents and narrative elements in the texts did not conform to reading practices brought forth by print technologies. Her work highlights how the shift from oral performance to print reshaped reading, interpretation and referencing; obfuscating the processes of knowledge transfer brought about by recitation. Yow offers a method of unreading to access the Hikayat Anggun Cik Tunggal within its oral, performative and shifting contexts.
Shifting from textual to visual materials, Yu Yan’s contribution traces Xu Beihong’s wartime sojourn across South and Southeast Asia, showing how the artist’s shifting networks, linguistic environments and patronage systems generated different artistic forms and visual meanings. In dialogue with the contributions by Goh, Soh and Hang, Yan stretches the boundaries of Southeast Asia from a fixed territorial frame to reveal it instead as a transnational field constituted through movement, comparison and trans-Asian connections.
Our SEABEAT contribution, by David Henley, David Gaveau and Erik Meijaard offers a contemporary history and analysis of environmental change in Borneo since 1970, highlighting both domestic and international dynamics underlying the ecological shifts that emerged through the convergence of global commodity markets, state policies and oligarchic interests. Reading in dialogue with the earlier contributions from Williamson and Miske, the authors show that environmental transformation in historical and contemporary Southeast Asia has been shaped by densely entangled interactions amongst a range of stakeholders and interests that transcend local, national and regional borders.
Taken together, the collection of research articles in this double issue reflects a broader shift in the (re)imagining of Southeast Asian Studies from a fixed, territorially bounded entity to understanding it as a dynamic, relational field where places, identities, and histories are co-constituted through movement exchange, and interaction across multiple locales and scales. The Journal looks ahead to featuring research articles that continues to broaden and reconfigure both the spatial reach and interpretive horizons of the field from multiple vantage locales worldwide.
Our double issue features a review essay by Karl Hack on David Lockwood’s The Politics of the Communist Party from 1930 to 1948 and a selection of book reviews. Our continued thanks and appreciation to all of our authors, reviewers and referees who have continued to make the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies the preferred platform for sharing the very best research on the region.
