Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- A Note on the Language, Spelling and Pagination of Quotations
- 1 Introduction: Booking Southeast Asia: The History of an Idea
- 2 Booking Southeast Asia: And So It Begins, with a Nightmare
- 3 The New Language-Game of Modern Colonial Capitalism
- 4 Raffles’ Java as Museum
- 5 Dressing the Cannibal: John Anderson’s Sumatra as Market
- 6 Brooke, Keppel, Mundy and Marryat’s Borneo as ‘The Den of Pirates’
- 7 Crawfurd’s Burma as the Torpid ‘Land of Tyranny’
- 8 Bricolage, Power and How a Region Was Discursively Constructed
- Appendix A The full Transcript of the Article by William Cobbett on the Subject of the British Invasion of Java
- Appendix B Keeping an eye on the Javanese: Raffles’ ‘Regulations of 1814 for the More Effectual Administration of Justice in the Provincial Courts of Java'
- Appendix C James Brooke’s Detractors in the British Parliament and the Aborigines’ Protection Society
- Appendix D The clash between the HMS Dido and the Ships of the Rajah of Riao: A Case of Mistaken Identity and Misappropriation of the Signifier ‘Pirate’
- Appendix E The Construction of the Native other in the Writings of Hugh Clifford, British Colonial Resident to Pahang
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - The New Language-Game of Modern Colonial Capitalism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 February 2021
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- A Note on the Language, Spelling and Pagination of Quotations
- 1 Introduction: Booking Southeast Asia: The History of an Idea
- 2 Booking Southeast Asia: And So It Begins, with a Nightmare
- 3 The New Language-Game of Modern Colonial Capitalism
- 4 Raffles’ Java as Museum
- 5 Dressing the Cannibal: John Anderson’s Sumatra as Market
- 6 Brooke, Keppel, Mundy and Marryat’s Borneo as ‘The Den of Pirates’
- 7 Crawfurd’s Burma as the Torpid ‘Land of Tyranny’
- 8 Bricolage, Power and How a Region Was Discursively Constructed
- Appendix A The full Transcript of the Article by William Cobbett on the Subject of the British Invasion of Java
- Appendix B Keeping an eye on the Javanese: Raffles’ ‘Regulations of 1814 for the More Effectual Administration of Justice in the Provincial Courts of Java'
- Appendix C James Brooke’s Detractors in the British Parliament and the Aborigines’ Protection Society
- Appendix D The clash between the HMS Dido and the Ships of the Rajah of Riao: A Case of Mistaken Identity and Misappropriation of the Signifier ‘Pirate’
- Appendix E The Construction of the Native other in the Writings of Hugh Clifford, British Colonial Resident to Pahang
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Gentlemen, that's the future. What a fascinating modern age we live in.
– Captain Jack Aubrey, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003, dir. Peter Weir)Racialised Colonial-Capitalism as the New Language- Game of the Nineteenth Century
Proposition 23. New types of language, new language-games, as we may say, come into existence and others become obsolete and forgotten.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1945)In the beginning of languages, it was necessary to have the idea before one gave it a name; and so it is still, where, making a new complex idea, one also, by giving it a new name, makes a new word. (3.5.xv)
– John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)Today's reader may recoil at the language used by some of the writers of the colonial era. In the course of my work as a lecturer who teaches the history, society and politics of Southeast Asia, there have been occasions when I have had to remind my students that the books on their reading list contain language that may seem somewhat alien to them – though that is not an excuse not to read such works. That some may balk at the idea of reading such writers is understandable, considering the sensibilities we share today – though I, for one, do not share the sentiments of those who argue for ‘trigger warnings’ to be pasted on book covers. Yet one is seldom prepared to read of how the Malays, Javanese and Filipinos were summarily written off as lazy natives, of how the Chinese in Java were referred to as bloedzuigers (‘bloodsuckers’) by Dutch colonial administrators, and of how some of these colonial writers were convinced of the biological inferiority of Asians, whom they thought were on the verge of degeneration and extinction thanks to their own inherited genetic deficiencies. By today's standards of political correctness, any social scientist with the temerity to pen such ideas would probably be hounded out of academia.
But the point is that such books were not written today, and that they were works that emerged in the age of empire; and we should not forget that what constituted academic and scientific writing in the nineteenth century was very different from our own understanding of it now.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Discursive Construction of Southeast Asia in 19th Century Colonial-Capitalist Discourse , pp. 53 - 64Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2016