166-106 Colonial/Postcolonial S.E.Asian Politics

Usually 25 points of first-year politics or first-year Asian studies, see Prerequisites.

This subject is structured to foster an approach to the study of Southeast Asian politics and history that is comparative, interdisciplinary, and historiographically grounded. It introduces students to the dominant and emergent scholarship on Southeast Asian politics, while at the same time problematising established ways of studying Area Studies and 'politics'. Students who complete this subject should have a more nuanced and rigorous understanding of the resilience of traditional ideas of power, indigenous belief systems and local knowledges; how the nation-state attempts to control and regulate life at the level of the family, identity, ethnicity, religion, and minority groups. Students should be able to engage in historically specific, non-generalising, and comparative frames of reference for understanding 'politics' and 'power' - and the ways in which these are dis/engaged, wielded, organized, resisted, ignored, transformed, subverted, co-opted, and/or transcended in Southeast Asian communities.

Written work totalling 4000 words.