This edited volume highlights the importance of contextualizing the circulation, adoption, and use of things, objects, skills, and practices in their wider social and political-economic milieus. The editor, H. Hazel Hahn, argues in the introduction against a simple assumption of influence in considering the cultural impact of colonialism, and against a focus on transmission or singular one-way trajectories in cultural exchanges. Cross-cultural exchange is defined by an insistence on accounting for interconnections, interdependencies, multiple lines of exchanges, and the contested nature of colonial domination, eschewing binary assumptions regarding center/metropole and periphery, colonizer and colonized, precolonial and colonial, as well as colonial and postcolonial. “Southeast Asia” is taken not as a fixed entity but as a site for examining routes of exchange and connections not just to the former colonizers in Western Europe, but to other regions and involving cosmopolitan actors, further cultural exchanges, and mobility.
What is meant by the colonial imaginary in this volume is multifaceted, with evolving modalities across time and varying across different empires, local contexts, communities, and social groups. The actors involved in the circulation of aspects of culture that developed during the colonial encounter included not just colonial officials but also different members of the colonized and amateurs as intermediaries.
The first three chapters on knowledge exchange provide insights into knowledge produced, recorded, or articulated in the encounter between Europe and Southeast Asia. George Dutton inverts expectations by introducing us to an account of Lisbon by a Vietnamese Jesuit priest, Philiphe Binh, who traveled to Lisbon in 1796, stayed there for nearly four decades until his untimely death, and left behind a written account of his observations. Matthew Schauer turns to the knowledge regime of colonial scholarly societies and their relationship to imperial networks and policy, looking at civil servants/colonial administrators/amateur scholars and the cooperation and exchanges that existed among them across the Netherlands East Indies and British Malaya. Arnout H. C. van der Meer looks into the entanglements of Javanese deference protocols and etiquette and Dutch colonial civil servants, contextualized within the latter's reliance on the Indigenous elites and the co-optation of already existing cultural hierarchies and power symbols as constitutive of Dutch colonial and Javanese elite interactions.
The section on material and architectural exchange comprises four chapters. Dawn Odell discusses an example of a Batavian screen, comparing it with the South African Cape screen and the Chinese screen walls and painted screens, arguing that the Batavian screen does not conform to the Chinese model and speculating whether then-prevailing anxieties over the detrimental nature of the hot climate had something to do with its design. Hahn examines the history and ornaments of three Hindu temples in Ho Chi Minh City and the enigmatic set of hybridized/Europeanized figures on one of the temple's vimanas, before turning to the misinformation spread by one account that sought to erase the colonial contexts and connections of the Chettiar Tamil Hindu community there. Caroline Herbelin considers the role of local elites, colonial institutions, and the colonized more generally as purveyors of translations in the Palace of the Governor-General in Hanoi and in the rural homes in Cochinchina in the 1930s, arguing that the usual critique of the European neoclassical style in French Indochina overlooks the potential for comparisons with the style's adaptations in Beijing, Bangkok, and Tokyo, which bore different motivations. Sarah Moser offers a reading of urban planning and state mega-projects in postcolonial Malaysia, particularly in the late twentieth-century new administrative capital Putrajaya, as embodying the “perpetuation of colonial-era planning strategies” (p. 203) and design, seeing “aesthetic parallels,” for instance, between “the British Raj and the Malaysian ruling elite in Putrajaya” (p. 202).
Three chapters form the final section on leisure exchange. Benita Stambler discusses cross-cultural misrepresentation through nineteenth-century colonial photography of Kandy in Ceylon, arguing that the cultural imagery depicted was exoticized through staged photographs or reframed, decontextualized, or disdained through the mediation of labels and accompanying texts. Susie Protschky draws upon two examples of racially transgressive dress involving European and Indo-European females dressed in the Javanese manner, tracing a change in Dutch attitudes connected with a loss of familiarity with and with the rise of longing for the Javanese setting, and a change in the connotations of women in Javanese dress to the Dutch audience across the twentieth century that, in turn, shifted the significance, shock, and even social capital enhancement potential of cross-dressing. Frederick J. Schenker examines the contexts of the rise of the Asian jazz professional musician, arguing against a straitjacket explanation of colonial reproduction and pointing to how jazz itself as an expressive medium was not exclusive to Europeans, went beyond the perpetuation or reproduction of Anglophone empire and even provided the means to challenge imperial hierarchies.
A number of the contributions to this volume missed the opportunity to engage fully with the material and discursive contexts of the places or periods being studied by not considering the diverse connections behind the contexts of production, or by not firmly grounding the analysis of reception and criticism. For instance, who might have been the carvers of the Batavian screens, based on comparisons with the larger oeuvre of carved wooden furniture in Batavia by different workshops? What was the critical reception of Putrajaya's designs by local scholars, commentators, architects, and the public? And what insights might comparisons with, say, contemporaneous state projects in the Muslim World yield, instead of drawing a singular line to the British Raj? Such questions turn our attention to different agents and multiple trajectories in the historical processes of exchanges and lend voice to local appraisals and contestations of their outcomes. These criticisms aside, this excellent volume is overall a rich collection of essays on the complexity of exchanges in different contexts within and adjacent to the colonial.
