by Anna Leonowens
Oxford University Press, USA; 1st edition (March 17, 1989), Originally published in 1870

The English Governess at the Siamese Court: Being Recollections of Six Years in the Royal Palace at Bangkok (1870) vividly recounts the experiences of one Anna Harriette Leonowens as governess for the sixty-plus children of King Mongkut of Siam, English teacher for his entire royal family, and translator and scribe for the King himself. Bright, young, and energetic, Leonowens was well-suited to these roles, and her writings convey a heartfelt interest in the lives, legends, and languages of Siam’s rich and poor. She also tells of how she and the King often disagreed on matters domestic. After all, this was the first time King Mongkut had met a woman who dared to contradict him, and the governess found the very idea of male domination intolerable. Overworked and underpaid, Leonowens would eventually resign, but her exchanges with His Majesty–heated and otherwise–on topics like grammar, charity, slavery, politics, and religion add much to her diary’s rich, cross-cultural spirit, its East-meets-West appeal.

Over the years, that appeal has only increased. Eighty years after it first appeared, this memoir inspired the popular book and film, Anna and the King of Siam, and a few years later the hit musical, The King and I. Now comes yet another version, Anna and the King, the new film starring Jodie Foster and Chow Yun Fat. Here, then, is the original tale, presented with many reproductions of the fine drawings that the King had offered as gifts to Leonowens. The English Governess at the Siamese Court remains engaging as a story of adventure, fascinating as a picture of nineteenth-century Bangkok, and intriguing as an account of life inside King Mongkut’s palace.

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by Margaret Landon
Harper Paperbacks, 1999; Originally published in 1944

Anna Leonowens, a proper Englishwoman, was an unlikley candidate to change the course of Siamese (Thai) history. A young widow and mother, her services were engaged in the 1860′s by King Mongkut of Siam to help him communicate with foreign governments and be the tutor to his children and favored concubines. Stepping off the steamer from London, Anna found herself in an exotic land she could have only dreamed of lush landscape of mystic faiths and curious people, and king’s palace bustling with royal pageantry, ancient custom, and harems. One of her pupils, the young prince Chulalongkorn, was particularly influenced by Leonowens and her Western ideals. He learned about Abraham Lincoln and the tenets of democracy from her, and years later he would become Siam’s most progressive king. He guided the country’s transformation from a feudal state to a modern society, abolshing slavery and making many other radical reforms.

Weaving meticulously researched facts with beautifully imagined scenes, Margret Landon recreates an unforgettable portrait of life in a forgotten extotic land. Written more than fifty years ago, and translated into dozens of languages, ” Anna and the King of Siam “(the inspiration for the magical play and film “The King and I”)continues to delight and enchant readers around the world.

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by Anna Leonowens
University of Virginia Press, 1991; Originally published in 1873

The author is Anna Leonowens, the lovely English governess to the children of the King of Siam whose story is immortalized, highly romanticized in the Rogers & Hammerstein musical “The King and I” (1951). “Truth is often stranger than fiction,” writes Leonowens. Fiction based on fact, embellished to fascinate the reader and get the point across, is perhaps a more precise description of all the gruesome torture and persecutions of the ladies of the harem by the King who was a Buddhist monk and abbot for 26 years before ascending to the throne.

King Mongkut’s harem was so immense it encompassed an enormous complex within the Grand Palace in Bangkok called the Nang Harm (“Veiled Women”), surrounded by a high wall, housing the royal princesses, wives, and concubines of the king. It was a world of its own, complete with Amazon-women guards, prisons, judges and executioners, but also schools and theaters. Here the women carried out their connubial duty to produce the king’s heirs. When King Mongkut died he left behind 66 royal children.

After five years, Anna Leonowens left, traveling to England and Ireland before settling in the United States and eventually Canada, where she once again supported herself by teaching.

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by Susan Morgan
University of California Press, 2008

If you thought you knew the story of Anna in The King and I, think again. As this riveting biography shows, the real life of Anna Leonowens was far more fascinating than the beloved story of the Victorian governess who went to work for the King of Siam. To write this definitive account, Susan Morgan traveled around the globe and discovered new information that has eluded researchers for years. Anna was born a poor, mixed-race army brat in India, and what followed is an extraordinary nineteenth-century story of savvy self-invention, wild adventure, and far-reaching influence. At a time when most women stayed at home, Anna Leonowens traveled all over the world, witnessed some of the most fascinating events of the Age of Empire, and became a well-known travel writer, journalist, teacher, and lecturer. She remains the one and only foreigner to have spent significant time inside the royal harem of Siam. She emigrated to the United States, crossed all of Russia on her own just before the revolution, and moved to Canada, where she publicly defended the rights of women and the working class. The book also gives an engrossing account of how and why Anna became an icon of American culture in The King and I and its many adaptations.

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by Abbot Low Moffat
Cornell University Press; 1st Cornell Printing edition (1968)

In this fascinating biography, Moffat considers Mongkut to be one of the great men of Siam, and seeks to recover him from the well-loved fictions. Includes a number of black-and-white illustrations. He is skeptical of the reliability of Anna Leonowns accounts and analyzes some of them.

Must reading for the fans of Margaret Landon and the stage play / movies and people with an interest in Asian history.

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by Sylva Frisk
University of Washington Press, 2009

In recent decades, Malaysia has been profoundly changed both by forces of globalization, modernization, and industrialization and by a strong Islamization process. Some would argue that the situation of Malay women has worsened, but such a conclusion is challenged by this study of the everyday religious practice of pious women within Kuala Lumpur’s affluent Malay middle class. Here, women play an active part in the Islamization process, not only by heightened personal religiosity but also by organizing and participating in public programs of religious education.

By organizing new forms of collective ritual and assuming new public roles as religious teachers, these religiously educated women are transforming the traditionally male-dominated gendered space of the mosque and breaking men’s monopoly over positions of religious authority. Exploring this situation, Submitting to God challenges preconceptions of the nature of Islamization as well as current theories of female agency and power.

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by Kamaludeen Mohamed Nasir, Alexius Pereira, & Bryan S. Turner
Routledge, 2009

This book examines Muslims in Singapore, analysing their habits, practices and dispositions towards everyday life, and also their role within the broader framework of the secularist Singapore state and the cultural dominance of its Chinese elite, who are predominantly Buddhist and Christian. Singapore has a highly unusual approach to issues of religious diversity and multiculturalism, adopting a policy of deliberately ‘managing religions’ – including Islam – in an attempt to achieve orderly and harmonious relations between different racial and religious groups. This has encompassed implicit and explicit policies of containment and ‘enclavement’ of Muslims, and also the more positive policy of ‘upgrading’ Muslims through paternalist strategies of education, training and improvement, including the modernisation of madrassah education in both content and orientation. This book examines how this system has operated in practice, and evaluates its successes and failures. In particular, it explores the attitudes and reactions of Muslims themselves across all spheres of everyday life, including dining and maintaining halal-vigilance; education and dress code; and practices of courtship, sex and marriage. It also considers the impact of wider international developments, including 9/11, fear of terrorism and the associated stigmatization of Muslims; and developments within Southeast Asia such as the Jemaah Islamiah terrorist attacks and the Islamization of Malaysia and Indonesia. This study has more general implications for political strategies and public policies in multicultural societies that are deeply divided along ethno-religious lines.

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by Shwe Lu Maung
DewDrop Arts & Technology, 2005

Shwe Lu Maung, the author of the well-known book Burma Nationalism and Ideology (1989), describes a silent religious war of the Muslims and Buddhists in Bangladesh and Myanmar. He asserts that the religious war is a key factor which undermines advancement of democracy in these countries. More importantly, he gives a vivid illustration how the global warming would reinforce poverty and population explosion, leading to a full fledged Muslim-Buddhist war and destabilizing the entire region. He suggests that Rohingya-Rakhaing tension in the Rakhine State of Myanmar would ignite the war. He supports his reasoning with 31 tables, 21 figures, 15 maps, 8 charts, 112 illustrations, and 280 references.

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by Peter Gowring
Cellar Book Shop, 1989

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by Duncan McCargo
Cornell University Press, 2008

Since January 2004, a violent separatist insurgency has raged in southern Thailand, resulting in more than three thousand deaths. Though largely unnoticed outside Southeast Asia, the rebellion in Pattani and neighboring provinces and the Thai government’s harsh crackdown have resulted in a full-scale crisis. Tearing Apart the Land by Duncan McCargo, one of the world’s leading scholars of contemporary Thai politics, is the first fieldwork-based book about this conflict. Drawing on his extensive knowledge of the region, hundreds of interviews conducted during a year’s research in the troubled area, and unpublished Thai-language sources that range from anonymous leaflets to confessions extracted by Thai security forces, McCargo locates the roots of the conflict in the context of the troubled power relations between Bangkok and the Muslim-majority “deep South.”

McCargo describes how Bangkok tried to establish legitimacy by co-opting local religious and political elites. This successful strategy was upset when Thaksin Shinawatra became prime minister in 2001 and set out to reorganize power in the region. Before Thaksin was overthrown in a 2006 military coup, his repressive policies had exposed the precariousness of the Bangkok government’s influence. A rejuvenated militant movement had emerged, invoking Islamic rhetoric to challenge the authority of local leaders obedient to Bangkok.

For readers interested in contemporary Southeast Asia, insurgency and counterinsurgency, Islam, politics, and questions of political violence, Tearing Apart the Land is a powerful account of the changing nature of Islam on the Malay peninsula, the legitimacy of the central Thai government and the failures of its security policy, the composition of the militant movement, and the conflict’s disastrous impact on daily life in the deep South. Carefully distinguishing the uprising in southern Thailand from other Muslim rebellions, McCargo suggests that the conflict can be ended only if a more participatory mode of governance is adopted in the region.

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Edited by Itty Abraham, Edward Newman and Meredith L. Weiss
United Nations University Press, 2010

This volume explores the sources and manifestations of political violence in South and Southeast Asia and the myriad roles that it plays in everyday life and as part of historical narrative. It considers and critiques the manner in which political violence is understood and constructed, and the common assumptions that prevail regarding the causes, victims and perpetrators of this violence. By focusing on the social and political context of these regions the volume presents a critical understanding of the nature of political violence and provides an alternative narrative to that found in mainstream analysis of ‘terrorism’.

Political Violence in South and Southeast Asia brings together political scientists and anthropologists with intimate knowledge of the politics and society of these regions, from different academic backgrounds, who present unique perspectives on topics including assassinations, riots, state violence, the significance of geographic borders, external influences and intervention, and patterns of recruitment and rebellion.

Itty Abraham is an Associate Professor and Director of the South Asia Institute, University of Texas at Austin. Edward Newman is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Political Science and International Studies, University of Birmingham, UK. Meredith L. Weiss is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science, University at Albany, State University of New York.

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by David Shambaugh & Michael Yahuda
Rowman & Littlefield, 2008

This text offers a clear and comprehensive introduction to the international relations of contemporary Southeast Asia. Organized thematically around the central foreign policy questions facing regional decision makers, the book explores the struggle to overcome their subordination to global political, economic, and social forces. The international agenda continually tests Southeast Asia’s policy elites as they are buffeted by the security demands of the war on terrorism; the economic demands of globalism; and social and political demands centered around such contentious issues as democracy, human rights, environment, and gender. One reaction is to give new urgency to regionalist initiatives, especially the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Yet, the author argues, regionalism continues to be frustrated by national interests and ASEAN states’ insistence on sovereignty and noninterference. Overarching the inter-regional relationships is the shifting power structure between the United States and China. Throughout the book run the key questions defining Southeast Asia’s future: Will waning American influence be balanced by the growth of Chinese power in the region? And if so, does Southeast Asia face a new subordination rather than genuine autonomy? An invaluable guide to the region, this balanced and lucid work will be an essential text for courses on Southeast Asia and on the international relations of the Asia-Pacific.

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by David Savage
Monash Asia Institute, 2002

Dancing with the devil is a UN police officer’s memoir of the independence ballot in East Timor. With compassion and humour, David Savage tells the simple truth about the horrific events he witnessed, and the triumph of a quiet, resilient people.

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ed. by Eva-Lotta E. Hedman
Cornell University Press, 2008

This volume foregrounds the dynamics of displacement and the experiences of internal refugees uprooted by conflict and violence in Indonesia. Contributors examine internal displacement in the context of militarized conflict and violence in East Timor, Aceh, and Papua, and in other parts of Outer Island Indonesia during the transition from authoritarian rule. The volume also explores official and humanitarian discourses on displacement and their significance for the politics of representation.

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by Syed Muhd Khair Aljunied
Taylor & Francis Inc, 2009

This book deals with the genesis, outbreak and far-reaching effects of a legal controversy and the resulting outbreak of mass violence, which determined the course of British colonial rule after post World War Two in Singapore and Malaya. Based on extensive archival sources, it examines the custody hearing of Maria Hertogh, a case which exposed tensions between Malay and Singaporean Muslims and British colonial society. Investigating the wide-ranging effects and crises faced in the aftermath of the riots, the analysis focuses in particular on the restoration of peace and rebuilding of society.

The author provides a nuanced and sophisticated understanding of British management of riots and mass violence in Southeast Asia. By exploring the responses by non-British communities in Singapore, Malaya and the wider Muslim world to the Maria Hertogh controversy, he shows that British strategies and policies can be better understood through the themes of resistance and collaboration. Furthermore, the book argues that British enactment of laws pertaining to the management of religions in the post-war period had dispossessed religious minorities of their perceived religious rights. As a result, outbreaks of mass violence and continual grievances ensued in the final years of British colonial rule in Southeast Asia – and these tensions still pertain in the present.

This book will be of interest to scholars and students of law and society, history, Imperial History and Asian Studies, and to anyone studying minorities, and violence and recovery.

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