Beyond Colonial and National Frameworks: Some Thoughts on the Writing of Southeast Asian Architecture

摘要

Southeast Asia as a region was conscribed in Area Studies after World War II, when the necessity to delineate geopolitical areas in Cold War research hastened its naming and "formation" as a distinctive arena from East or South Asia. Like South America and Africa, most of its constituent lands had been colonized by Western states (some for over four centuries and/or by multiple colonizers), and were subjected to Japanese occupation before it was ended in 1945. Post-war, indigenous groups called for national sovereignty under the shadow of the Cold War, each developing a "nation-state" under the auspices of the United Nations, as well as corraling and imagining its peoples for semblances of "society" and "culture" within newly defined boundaries.