This edited volume highlights the importance of contextualizing the circulation, adoption, and use of things, objects, skills, and practices in their wider social and political-economic milieus. The editor, H. Hazel Hahn, argues in the introduction against a simple assumption of influence in considering the cultural impact of colonialism, and against a focus on transmission or singular one-way trajectories in cultural exchanges. Cross-cultural exchange is defined by an insistence on accounting for interconnections, interdependencies, multiple lines of exchanges, and the contested nature of colonial domination, eschewing binary assumptions regarding center/metropole and periphery, colonizer and colonized, precolonial and colonial, as well as colonial and postcolonial. “Southeast Asia” is taken not as a fixed entity but as a site for examining routes of exchange and connections not just to the former colonizers in Western Europe, but to other regions and involving cosmopolitan actors, further cultural exchanges, and mobility.
What is meant by the...
