The Asian Financial Crisis was a tumultuous international event that also resulted in a crisis of faith in the nation and the state in the region, the most dramatic result of which were the anti-Chinese riots in Jakarta and elsewhere in Java in 1998. For the Chinese in Nanyang, or the “South Seas,” who had always occupied an ambivalent space in their adopted homelands, it was only one of the more recent key moments in a long timeline of historical trauma. But just as 危机 (Wei Ji), the Chinese term for “crisis,” consists of two characters that signify ‘danger’ and ‘opportunity’, Nanyang Chinese filmmakers found this crisis as an opportunity to critically re-examine the nation, bending time and expanding space in order to reimagine home, family, belonging and nationhood. After a historical survey of the Chinese in Insular Southeast Asia, this study looks at the ideation of a unique Nanyang Chinese culture through a textual analysis of two contemporary semi-autobiographical melodrama films commemorating the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997 and its after-effects in the years after. Babi Buta Yang Ingin Terbang (Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly, 2008), an Indonesian-language film, revolves around the emotionally disconnected members of a Chinese-Indonesian family making sense of the anti-Chinese riots. Ilo Ilo (爸媽不在家, 2013), an English, Tagalog, and Mandarin-language film, explores the relationship between a Singaporean boy and his Filipina nanny whose maternal nature provokes the jealousy of the child’s real mother. This Intra-Asian study will examine the intersections of nationalism and diaspora, as well as of Southeast Asian Cinema and Sinophone Cinema. Despite the differences in style, treatment, and language, these films seem to have a common goal, not as much countering as transcending the nation’s “empty, homogeneous time (and space)” in order to accommodate the Chinese Diasporic Imaginary.

In addressing the issues of class and gender within the Indonesian modern canon, the comfort found in the postcolonial mythology of the heroic and authentic anti-colonial modern artist is disrupted. In the cracks, a discomforting matrix of relationships between modern painters and the women they painted is revealed.

Page 1. International Journal of Asian Studies, 4, 1 (2007), pp. 113???136 2007 Cambridge University Press doi:10.1017|S147959140700054X Printed in the United Kingdom 113 studying women and gender in southeast asia Barbara Watson Andaya ...

What, if any, is the relationship between ritual transvestism of the early modern period, roughly the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries, and contemporary transgendered identities in island Southeast Asia? In asking this question, I do not assume any necessary connection between past and present practices enacted by gender transgressive females (and males). I am not tracing the “history” of transgendered females, nor am I suggesting the existence of a transgendered identity that transcends time and place, appearing in different guises. Rather, I am examining the cultural discourses and narratives that produce particular gendered practices deemed outside and therefore transgressive of normative gender in various time periods. I argue that these gendered practices are differently produced, understood, and interiorized in relation to the dominant religious, cultural, and social discourses of particular historical eras.

This article situates ethnohistory historically, conceptually, methodologically, and geographically in relation to its intertwined “parent” disciplines of anthropology and history. As a named interdisciplinary inquiry, ethnohistory emerged in the United States in the mid-1950s in the “applied” context of academic involvement in Native American land claims hearings after 1946. However, anthropology (the science of humanity) has overlapped, intersected, or diverged from history (study or knowledge of the past) since becoming a distinct field in Europe in the mid-18th century and gradually professionalized as an academic discipline from the 1830s, initially in Russia. Anthropological approaches oscillated between historicization and its neglect or denial, with recurring tension between event and system, process and structure, diachrony and synchrony. In the late 18th and 19th centuries, ethnology (comparative study of peoples or races, their origins and development) was distinguished from the natural history of man and from anthropology (the science of race), initially in France. From the 1860s to the 1920s, Anglophone anthropological theory was dominated by the opposed doctrines of sociocultural evolution and diffusion—both superficially historical but largely ahistorical processes. For the next half century, prevailing functionalist, structuralist, and culturalist discourses mostly denied knowable history to ethnography’s purportedly vanishing “primitive” subjects. This uneven, agonistic disciplinary history did not encourage a subfield uniting anthropology and history. However, after 1950, in global contexts of anticolonialism, decolonization, and movements for Indigenous or egalitarian rights, anthropologists, historians, and archaeologists developed the hybrid fields of Ethnohistory and Ethnographic History, which flourished for half a century. Practitioners transcended ethnohistory’s spatial and conceptual roots in the United States and Canada to investigate Indigenous or African American pasts in Latin America and the Caribbean, Indigenous or local pasts in Africa, Asia, and Oceania, and non-Indigenous pasts in Europe and elsewhere. The need to incorporate Indigenous or popular histories and viewpoints was increasingly emphasized. From the 1980s, ethnohistory was condemned as Eurocentric, outdated, even racist, by postcolonial and postmodern critiques. The label’s usage declined in the 21st century in favor of the already established terms anthropological history or historical anthropology, or the emergent fields of Anthropology of History, historical consciousness, and historicity.