Vernacular Imaginaries of the Southern Seas

Few people native to the contemporary nation-states that make up the region known in English today as “Southeast Asia” would call themselves “Southeast Asians.” The process by which “Southeast Asia” became a distinct region in the international system, separate from the broader East Asian region of which it is a part, as well as a separate disciplinary specialization in academia, has long been understood to be one rooted in external strategic interests dating roughly from the 1940s. Through the upheavals of mid-twentieth-century wars, the region was ascribed a common political and economic character exogenously and militarily. The establishment of the Allied South East Asia Command in 1943 defined it negatively, as a space from which Japan should be expelled: a regionalizing salvo against Japan’s positive identification of a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere over which Japan should preside. After the defeat of Japan and the creation of an Anglo-American hegemonic compact over the wider East Asian region, it came to be understood variously as a space of concentrated political revolt against Western rule, of underdevelopment, of political instability, and of susceptibility to communism.