In order to survive, books in the Philippines have had to contend with multiple forces: the humid tropical climate, typhoons, floods, fires, earthquakes, termites, wars throughout the nation’s colonial history. This fact is often raised in studies on the history of the book in the Philippines, but how and why the book survives in spite of such conditions has hardly been given attention. Such a lacuna in Philippine book history is what this study seeks to fill. It explores the survival of Philippine incunabula (books printed from 1593 to 1640), with a focus on the transformation from material object to cultural artifact that the book undergoes in the course of enduring through the centuries. This study examines the case of the Vocabulario de Iapon (Japanese vocabulary), with a particular interest in the copy in the Bernardo Mendel Collection at the Lilly Library of Indiana University. The Vocabulario de Iapon, which was printed in Manila in 1630, is both typical and unique among Philippine incunabula for the circumstances it saw from its publication to its survival. It has much to tell about publishing in the Philippines in the seventeenth century, the reception of books through the ages, and the culture of collecting in modern times.

The disintegration of the British Empire in Asia and the emergence of new nation-states marked a period of significant upheaval for communities whose identities and mobilities were fundamentally reconstituted by a new system of borders, citizenships, and nationalities. In this article, I seek to explore a social history of early citizenship in Singapore by examining how citizenship was understood and conceived by varied segments of society during its final years as a colony. Focusing on ethnic groups considered non-indigenous, I examine the decisions made by communities and individuals with regard to Singapore citizenship, studying the period between 1957 and 1963. During this time the meaning and significance of Singapore citizenship underwent dramatic shifts, and various forms of dual citizenship were phased out in the context of political plans for Singapore’s future. I argue that individuals’ decisions about citizenship reveal how they understood their own futures after colonialism, within the region, commonwealth, and nation. The citizen-subjectivities of individuals and communities often did not align with what emerged as an official discourse of exclusive loyalty and belonging. Early experiences of citizenship were instead shaped by intersections of race, class, and complex transnational identities, as well as pragmatic assessments and emotional decision making. These did not simply mirror state-driven processes but instead represented important aspects of the complex social history of decolonization in Singapore and the early transition of its inhabitants from a colonial society to a national citizenry.

Mindanao, a large tract of fertile, unexplored land with abundant natural resources in the southern Philippines, attracted much attention from American capitalists and entrepreneurs as well as Filipino policymakers and settlers beginning in 1898. However, little is known about how it attracted Christian Filipino settlers in the early twentieth century. It remains unclear how the government-led national settlement project of 1939 evolved and was implemented following the Cotabato agricultural colony project. This paper, focusing on the vital role of Filipino technocrats, aims to explore their contribution to the planning of Mindanao’s settlement and the motives behind their drafting of related bills in the Philippine legislature. The technocrats, taking their inspiration from California’s State Settlement Land Act of 1917, drafted bills to promote a similar project—yet their plans had little chance of being enacted, as they were enormously expensive. The settlement plan materialized as the Quirino-Recto Colonization Act of 1934, in response to American concerns that the growing Japanese community in Mindanao threatened the Philippines’ national security. Depicted as a national security issue, the plan became increasingly divorced from its original aims of increasing food production and promoting population redistribution. Further, American intervention both altered Mindanao’s development plans and overlooked indigenous people’s rights.

This article aims to review the evolution of the Republic of Vietnam (RVN)’s involvement in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which was founded in 1967 by Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, and Indonesia. South Vietnamese leaders and diplomats designed a new foreign policy under the administration of Nguyen Van Thieu (1967–75) that shifted focus to Southeast Asia alongside the RVN’s long-standing camaraderie with the United States. This demonstrated Thieu’s keenness to engage with regional states for the purpose of nation-building and an anti-Communist future. The RVN’s engagement with ASEAN reflected its efforts to foster a regionalization process along with peace, stability, and development in Southeast Asia, particularly after the withdrawal of the US and its allies. This study uses a qualitative approach, employing a wide range of archival collections housed at the National Archives Center II, Ho Chi Minh City and a handful of desk-research papers. The relationship is periodized into two phases. During the first phase (1967–72), the RVN embraced ASEAN’s values and, despite its observer status, expected help in achieving its security and economic goals. After the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, ASEAN increasingly distanced itself from the RVN as members changed their stances, particularly as attacks by the Democratic Republic of Vietnam escalated in RVN territories. This paper aims to bridge a gap in scholarship by examining the positioning of the RVN in international and regional relations during the Cold War.

Outsiders have long remarked on a relative tolerance of nonnormative gender and sexuality in lowland Southeast Asian societies. Appreciating the way hierarchical assumptions inflect all social relations in the region helps make sense both of Southeast Asia’s long-standing gender binarism and of the ability of people of nonnormative gender and sexuality to find, at least at times, specialized roles for themselves. Those roles are based on enjoying not equal rights with their fellow citizens but rather distinctive obligations and privileges. Outside observers must be willing to suspend their egalitarian commitments long enough to recognize the significance of hierarchical assumptions for queer as well as other Southeast Asians if they are to understand common patterns in the behavior of, and responses to, the nonnormatively gendered in the region. Reports from several Southeast Asian societies are adduced to support this claim, complementing the author’s own research in Burma and Indonesia.