Through a study of Malaysia, Taming Babel examines how empires and postcolonial nation-states struggle to govern multilingual and polyglot subjects.

In 1931 a book appeared in London with the title A Yellow Sleuth: Being the Autobiography of "e;Nor Nalla"e; (Detective-Sergeant Federated Malay States Police). It was met with puzzled enthusiasm, The Straits Times commenting that the book "e;presents an interesting problem of distinguishing fact from fiction"e;. The author claimed to be of mixed Malay and Sakai descent, fluent in many of the languages spoken in Southeast Asia, and able to pass as Malay, Sakai, Chinese, Javanese or Burmese. He began by stating that "e;this story will honestly recount the part I have played in the detection of crime"e;, but added that he had changed personal and place names, and used a pseudonym because it would "e;be foolish of me to advertise my identity"e;. He concluded, engagingly enough, "e;So there you have it! A true history! And, for a start you learn that it is largely untrue."e; The name Nor Nalla is an anagram, and the author has been identified as Ronald (Ron) Allan, who worked on a rubber plantation in Malaya shortly before World War I. But many questions about his authorship remain. Nor Nalla is an "e;impossible fantasy of hybridity"e; in the words of Philip Holden's introduction. Like Kipling's famous colonial spy, Kim, the yellow sleuth is a master of the undercover operation, from the forests of Malaya, to the ports of Java, in London's Chinatown and with Chinese labourers in WWI Flanders. Contemporary readers will enjoy the book's stories of detection and adventure, but they can also savour the way the author and his narrator navigate and reveal the contradictions of late colonial society.

In The Mana of Translation: Translational Flow in Hawaiian History from the Baibala to the Mauna, Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada makes visible the often unseen workings of translation in Hawaiʻi from the advent of Hawaiian alphabetic literacy to contemporary struggles over language and land. Translation has had a massive impact on Hawaiian history, both as it unfolded and how it came to be understood, yet it remains understudied in Hawaiian and Indigenous scholarship. In an engaging and wide-ranging analysis, Kuwada examines illuminative instances of translation across the last two centuries through the analytic of mana unuhi: the mana (power/authority/branch/version) attained or given through translation. Translation has long been seen as a tool of colonialism, but examining history through mana unuhi demonstrates how Hawaiians used translation as a powerful tool to assert their own literary, cultural, and political sovereignty, something Hawaiians think of in terms of ea (life/breath/sovereignty/rising). Translation also gave mana to particular stories about Hawaiians—some empowering, others harmful—creating a clash of narratives that continue to this day. Drawing on sources in Hawaiian and English that span newspapers, letters and journals, religious and legal documents, missionary records, court transcripts, traditional stories, and more, this book makes legible the utility and importance of paying attention to mana unuhi in Hawaiʻi and beyond. Through chapters on translating the Hawaiian Bible, the role of translation in the Hawaiian Kingdom’s bilingual legal system, Hawaiians’ powerful deployment of translation in nineteenth-century nūpepa (newspapers), the early twentieth-century era of extractive scholarly translation, and the possibilities that come from refusing translation as demonstrated in legal proceedings related to the protection of Maunakea, Kuwada questions narratives about the inevitability of colonial victory and the idea that things can only be “lost in translation.” Writing in an accessible yet rigorous style, Kuwada follows the flows of translation and its material practices to bring forth the power dynamics of languages and how these differential forces play out on ideological and political battlefields. Specifically rooted in Hawaiʻi yet broadly applicable to other colonial situations, The Mana of Translation provides us with a transformative new way of looking at Hawaiian history.

This book surveys the growth and development of Islam in Malaysia from the eleventh to the twenty-first century, investigating how Islam has shaped the social lives, languages, cultures and politics of both Muslims and non-Muslims in one of the most populous Muslim regions in the world. Khairudin Aljunied shows how Muslims in Malaysia built upon the legacy of their pre-Islamic past while benefiting from Islamic ideas, values, and networks to found flourishing states and societies that have played an influential role in a globalizing world. He examines the movement of ideas, peoples, goods, technologies, arts, and cultures across into and out of Malaysia over the centuries. Interactions between Muslims and the local Malay population began as early as the eighth century, sustained by trade and the agency of Sufi as well as Arab, Indian, Persian, and Chinese scholars and missionaries. Aljunied looks at how Malay states and societies survived under colonial regimes that heightened racial and religious divisions, and how Muslims responded through violence as well as reformist movements. Although there have been tensions and skirmishes between Muslims and non-Muslims in Malaysia, they have learned in the main to co-exist harmoniously, creating a society comprising of a variety of distinct populations. This is the first book to provide a seamless account of the millennium-old venture of Islam in Malaysia.

Professor Wang Gungwu is the Institute of Policy Studies' 12th S R Nathan Fellow for the Study of Singapore. This book is an edited collection of his four IPS-Nathan Lectures, delivered from November 2022 to March 2023, and includes highlights of his question-and-answer segments with our audience.The Southeast Asian region is home to a set of diverse local cultures and distinct local identities. In this lecture series, Professor Wang looks at how great civilisations came into contact with our region and shaped its local identities and cultures. Being at the centre of Southeast Asia, Singapore's national identity and development have also been moulded by great ancient civilisations, namely the Indic, Sinic and Islamic. Later on, the idea of modernity brought about by Christian European civilisation greatly impacted our region. Understanding the history of Singapore from this perspective will give us insight to how the country's modern identity is being shaped and enable us to better understand our region's place in the modern world order.The IPS-Nathan Lecture series was launched in 2014 as part of the S R Nathan Fellowship for the Study of Singapore, named after Singapore's sixth and longest-serving president. It seeks to advance public understanding and discussion of issues of critical national interest for Singapore.

Robert Ferrell Book Prize Honorable Mention 2021, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Book Award for Outstanding Achievement in History Honorable Mention 2022, Association for Asian American Studies After the US war in Vietnam, close to 800,000 Vietnamese left the country by boat, survived, and sought refuge throughout Southeast Asia and the Pacific. This is the story of what happened in the camps. In Camps raises key questions that remain all too relevant today: Who is a refugee? Who determines this status? And how does it change over time? From Guam to Malaysia and the Philippines to Hong Kong, In Camps is the first major work on Vietnamese refugee policy to pay close attention to host territories and to explore Vietnamese activism in the camps and the diaspora. This book explains how Vietnamese were transformed from de facto refugees to individual asylum seekers to repatriates. Ambitiously covering people on the ground—local governments, teachers, and corrections officers—as well as powerful players such as the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and the US government, Jana Lipman shows that the local politics of first asylum sites often drove international refugee policy. Unsettling most accounts of Southeast Asian migration to the US, In Camps instead emphasizes the contingencies inherent in refugee policy and experiences.

What challenges face jurisdictions that attempt to conduct law in two or more languages? How does choosing a legal language affect the way in which justice is delivered? Answers to these questions are vital for the 75 officially bilingual and multilingual states of the world, as well as for other states contemplating a move towards multilingualism. Arguably such questions have implications for all countries in a world characterized by the pressures of globalization, economic integration, population mobility, decolonization, and linguistic re-colonization. For lawyers, addressing such challenges is made essential by the increased frequency and scale of transnational legal dealings and proceedings, as well as by the lengthening reach of international law. But it is not only policy makers, legislators, and other legal practitioners who must think about such questions. The relationship between societal multilingualism and law also raises questions for the burgeoning field of language and law, which posits--among other tenets--the centrality of language in legal processes. In this book, Janny H.C. Leung examines key aspects of legal multilingualism. Drawing extensively on case studies, she describes the implications of the legal, practical, and ideological dilemmas encountered in a given country when it becomes bilingual or multilingual, discussing such issues as: how legal certainty and the linguistic ideology of authenticity may be challenged in a multilingual jurisdiction; how courts balance the language preferences of different courtroom participants; and what historical, socio-political and economic factors may influence the decision to cement a given language as a jurisdiction's official language. Throughout, Leung elaborates a theory of "symbolic jurisprudence" to explore common dilemmas found across countries, despite their varied political and cultural settings, and argues that linguistic equality as proclaimed and practiced today is a shallow kind of equality. Although officially multilingual jurisdictions appear to be more inclusive than their monolingual counterparts, they run the risk of disguising substantive inequalities and displacing real efforts for more progressive social change. This is the first book to offer overarching discussion of how such issues relate to each other, and the first systematic study of legal multilingualism as a global phenomenon.

How Arabic influenced the evolution of vernacular literatures and anticolonial thought in Egypt, Indonesia, and Senegal Sacred Language, Vernacular Difference offers a new understanding of Arabic’s global position as the basis for comparing cultural and literary histories in countries separated by vast distances. By tracing controversies over the use of Arabic in three countries with distinct colonial legacies, Egypt, Indonesia, and Senegal, the book presents a new approach to the study of postcolonial literatures, anticolonial nationalisms, and the global circulation of pluralist ideas. Annette Damayanti Lienau presents the largely untold story of how Arabic, often understood in Africa and Asia as a language of Islamic ritual and precolonial commerce, assumed a transregional role as an anticolonial literary medium in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By examining how major writers and intellectuals across several generations grappled with the cultural asymmetries imposed by imperial Europe, Lienau shows that Arabic—as a cosmopolitan, interethnic, and interreligious language—complicated debates over questions of indigeneity, religious pluralism, counter-imperial nationalisms, and emerging nation-states. Unearthing parallels from West Africa to Southeast Asia, Sacred Language, Vernacular Difference argues that debates comparing the status of Arabic to other languages challenged not only Eurocentric but Arabocentric forms of ethnolinguistic and racial prejudice in both local and global terms.

The long tradition of Western political thought included kinship in models of public order, but the social sciences excised it from theories of the state, public sphere, and democratic order. Kinship has, however, neither completely disappeared from the political cultures of the West nor played the determining social and political role ascribed to it elsewhere. Exploring the issues that arise once the divide between kinship and politics is no longer taken for granted, The Politics of Making Kinship demonstrates how political processes have shaped concepts of kinship over time and, conversely, how political projects have been shaped by specific understandings, idioms and uses of kinship. Taking vantage points from the post-Roman era to early modernity, and from colonial imperialism to the fall of the Berlin Wall and beyond this international set of scholars place kinship centerstage and reintegrate it with political theory.

This volume explores the diverse linguistic landscape of Southeast Asia’s Chinese communities. Based on archival research and previously unpublished linguistic fieldwork, it unearths a wide variety of language histories, linguistic practices, and trajectories of words. The localized and often marginalized voices we bring to the spotlight are quickly disappearing in the wake of standardization and homogenization, yet they tell a story that is uniquely Southeast Asian in its rich hybridity. Our comparative scope and focus on language, analysed in tandem with history and culture, adds a refreshing dimension to the broader field of Sino-Southeast Asian Studies.