Global Insurrectional Politics by Nevzat Soguk

Author:Nevzat Soguk [Soguk, Nevzat]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138208490
Google: wTmSDAEACAAJ
Goodreads: 30153414
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-10-06T00:00:00+00:00

Colonial Modernity in Southeast Asia

Naeem Inayatullah and David Blaney state that, for the Western researcher, ‘modernity is more than just a model; it foretells the future of all cultural spaces’ (2011, p. 29). Their statement indicates that the template of modernity functions in our research imagination as a kind of natural endpoint into which all social science analysis must culminate. I highlight here the idea that the modern is not simply the product of Western influences intruding upon various self-contained non-Western societies (see Watson Andaya, 1997, p. 396). Several scholars of colonial societies argue that the ‘modern’ should be more aptly understood as the product of both the colonial encounter with non-Western societies, but also of the multifaceted interactions and contestations that emerged prior to the establishment of colonial rule. In the case of the Indonesian archipelago, the adoption of new perspectives and worldviews, of new habits and beliefs came from established trade circuits that went back several centuries (see Laffan, 2003; Vickers, 2005; Watson Andaya, 1997), and not least from religious travel networks. The latter involved the circulation of scholarly Islamic knowledge within Southeast Asia, and between Southeast Asia and the Middle East (especially the Hijaz region in Saudi Arabia) or South Asia, as well as the undertaking of the hajj to Mecca (see Laffan, 2003, pp. 18–27). In his study of the emergence of an Islamic vision of Indonesian nationhood during colonialism, Michael Laffan suggests that these scholarly Islamic networks were crucial in shaping ‘a united vision of a Jawiecumene’ outside the archipelago, an ecumene that perceived itself also as part of a worldwide Muslim community (2003, p. 20).3

I am not interested here in attempting to establish agency for the colonized (i.e. they were capable of developing their own modernity), or to project ‘modernity’ as a ‘singular’ and ‘global’ process that was not inherent to Europe but rather ‘always instantiated locally’ within wider socio-political configurations (Soares & Osella, 2009, p. S5). I find neither approach satisfying because they both gesture towards ‘modernity’ as an ineluctable and all-encompassing global/local process that excludes any possibility of thinking and engaging the ‘exteriorities’ and alternatives to modernity. Furthermore both approaches assume that we all know and agree upon the meaning of ‘modernity’; or, to put it differently, there is an unspoken assumption that whatever its local instantiations, modernity’s meaning remains constant. But, as pointed out in her analysis of modernity in Southeast Asia, historian Barbara Watson Andaya notes how ‘being modern’ in Southeast Asia has historically meant ‘that what comes from the outside can be adapted to their own environment’ (1997, p. 406). In that sense, Europeans were seen as one of the many other modernizers available such as the Turkish and the Persian courts from which significant influences were drawn (Watson Andaya, 1997, p. 401). So there was no perceived contradiction for young Indonesians caught in anti-colonial movements at the beginning of the twentieth century to wear Western-style dress while engaging in fervent anti-Dutch rhetoric, since their style of dressing was

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