| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Abu Talib Ahmad and Tan Liok Ee, editors. New Terrains in Southeast Asian History. (Ohio University Research in International Studies; Southeast Asia Series, number 107.) Athens: Ohio University Press and Singapore: Singapore University Press. 2003. Pp. xxv, 393. $35.00.
In their very sensible introduction to this collection—drawn from the papers presented at the conference on Southeast Asian historiography held in Penang in 1999—editors Abu Talib Ahmad and Tan Liok Ee compare it with such previous collections as Historians of Southeast Asia (1955), edited by D. G. E. Hall, and Perceptions of the Past in Southeast Asia (1979), edited by Anthony Reid and David Marr. To those volumes, they remark a little too severely, "no more than a handful of Southeast Asians" contributed essays. At the Penang conference, and in the present volume, the majority of the contributions come from "Southeast Asians," the aim being "to capture the dominant currents and emerging countercurrents in Southeast Asian history writing within the region itself" (p. xi).	1
The editors rightly caution against the implication that "the work of Southeast Asian scholars is somehow more authoritative or authentic" (pp. xi-xii). Indeed, Thongchai Winichakul argues that "Western scholarship on Thailand has suffered from following Thai scholars, most of whom are elite intellectuals, too much and for too long" (pp. 21–22). Producing for what has in effect been a protected market has, he says, been harmful. Some Filipino scholars might have offered a different view, as they did at a conference the editors do not mention, "Constructing a National Past," held at the University of Brunei in 1994, the proceedings of which were published in 1996. No essays from Filipino scholars appear in the present volume, however, nor do any from scholars in Indonesia, Vietnam, or Cambodia. That limits any claim it makes to be a survey of the state of history writing in the region.	. . .

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