‘Self’ and ‘Subject’ in Southeast Asian Literature in the Global Age

Abstract

The topic of this chapter reflects several interests and projects. In working on my book on state formation in Southeast Asia (2002) I became interested in the question of human agency in the making of both states and history, and I am still considering it. What do we mean when we talk about a human ‘agent’ and in what sense is he/she ‘free’ to act? In that book I also questioned the way historians and others structure Southeast Asian history chronologically. Is the ‘global age’ a recent or ancient temporal unit in the case of this region of the world? Does it help us to understand the long duration of social and cultural change in globalized and globalizing Southeast Asia today if we confine ourselves within the parameters of very recent technological change discussed in Manuel Castells’s study of the ‘information age’ (2004), for example? As far as literature is concerned, I am a freelance writer about Southeast Asian literature and history who is continually looking for ways of generating interest in the importance of literature as a form of cultural expression where historical realities are represented and social problems are debated. Also in the background is my work with Keith Foulcher, which we are pursuing in a long-term, long-distance collaboration, on the question of postcoloniality and interpretive strategies for reading modern Indonesian and Southeast Asian literatures (Foulcher and Day 2002).