Monsoon Asia: A Reader on South and Southeast Asia (The Critical, Connected Histories, 4) - Softcover

Inhaltsangabe

Monsoon Asia was the first venue of global trade, a zone of encounters, exchanges, and cultural diffusion. This book demonstrates the continuing fertility of the Monsoon Asia perspective as an aid to understanding what South/Southeast Asia, as a connected space, has been in the past and is today. Sixteen tightly knit chapters, written by experts from perspectives ranging from Indology and philology to postcolonial and transnational studies, offer a captivating view of the region, with its rich and variegated history shaped by commonalities in human ecology, cultural forms, and religious practices. The contributions draw upon extensive research and a thorough command of the most recent scholarship. This volume will be an invaluable text for anyone interested in South and Southeast Asia, and for more specialized students in the fields of global and Indian Ocean history, transcultural studies, archaeology, linguistics, and politics. The maritime southern rim of Asia, from the Arabian Sea in the west to the South China Sea in the east, has been the most important axis of long-distance travel, trade, and cultural exchange in human history. As a result, the countries of South and Southeast Asia, from Pakistan to Indonesia, have important aspects of historical experience in common. Twentieth-century geopolitics, however, have led South Asia and Southeast Asia to be treated in scholarship and education as two distinct fields of study. The purpose of the present reader is to contest this conventional metageographic divide by bringing together scholars of South or/and Southeast Asia from diverse disciplines to reflect, through their own work, on the possibility and utility of conceiving the two areas as a single overarching region, referred to here as Monsoon Asia.

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