The essays in Knowing Southeast Asian Subjects ask how the rising preponderance of scholarship from Southeast Asia is de-centering Southeast Asian area studies in the United States. The contributions address recent transformations within the field and new directions for research, pedagogy, and institutional cooperation.

Contributions from the perspectives of history, anthropology, cultural studies, political theory, and libraries pose questions ranging from how a concern with postcolonial and feminist questions of identity might reorient the field to how anthropological work...

The Indonesian writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer made a distinction between a "downstream" literary reality and an "upstream" historical reality. Pramoedya suggested that literature has an effect on the upstream flow of history and that it can in fact change history. In Situated Testimonies Laurie Sears illuminates this process by considering a selection of Dutch Indies and Indonesian literary works that span the twentieth century and beyond and by showing how authors like Louis Couperus and Maria Dermout help retell and remodel history.

Sears sees certain literary works as "situated...