Islands and Oceans

Southeast Asia is often described as comprising a continental portion called mainland Southeast Asia (or the Indochina Peninsula), and island or archipelagic Southeast Asia (sometimes termed insular or maritime). The former includes Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam and Peninsula Malaysia, while the latter includes Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and East Timor. If one takes a closer focus on island bodies, one also realises how while Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam may be considered peninsular, they also have their own island formations. In addition, some larger island bodies are ‘shared’ across different countries. For example, Borneo is split among Indonesia (Kalimantan), Malaysia (Sarawak and Sabah) and Brunei, while the western part of the New Guinea island is the Indonesian province called West Papua (or the former Irian Jaya), and its larger eastern part is Papua New Guinea, but considered to belong to the Pacific Realm associated with western world’s regions. 

With our eyes and minds often trained to see familiar continents on a typical world map, taking a shift to look at the oceans and seas that act as reference points to guide our eyes onto islands and archipelagos may seem relatively more disorienting. After all, while continents are almost by default marked in various colours, oceans and seas on a world map share a uniform colour of blue. Facing this immense blue body then, where does the Indian Ocean start and end? Or how could one discern seas from the ocean body? How is the South China Sea seemingly so much more prominent in its associations with Southeast Asia, even if the Celebes, Philippine, Sulu, Banda, Timor and Andaman Seas likewise bathe and lap many Southeast Asian countries’ shores? 

Thinkers crucial to archipelagic thinking and studies include Tongan-Fijian scholar, Epeli Hau’ofa, who argued against a mere economist view of Pacific Islands as condemned due to their remoteness and small size, and instead proffered viewing the Pacific as ‘a sea of islands’, rather than ‘islands in a far sea’, and Barbadian writer, Kamau Brathwaite’s concept of ‘tidelectics’, as taking on an epistemology that is a continuous ‘never settled, and never-repeating’ ebb and flow of the sea and history, to connect broken islands, cracked, broken words, friendships, and antestories. Edouard Glissant’s work on thinking about the Caribbeans and its colonial histories saw him cautioning against an ideal notion of a ‘continental return’ and its obsession with a single origin, which would negate histories of contact with its surroundings. Rather, he defined and imagined a Caribbeanness with capacity for a ‘multiple series of relationships with ‘submarine roots’, where islands or nations could embody oppress and cross-cultural imaginations. 

These scholars’ writings often sought to mitigate against imaginations of a ‘nation’ as associated with a land-bound entity, as well as what Brian Bernards calls a ‘monolingual imperialism’ of the west, led by an ideology of ‘one people, one language’. He further described the potentiality of ‘archipelagic imagination’ as being conceptually different from ‘continental imagination’, as the former gives priority for contact, exchange, heterogeneity and creolisation, instead of the latter, where a ‘continental projection’ as a ‘fortress and landmass’ safeguards internal homogeneity and national ‘oneness’. 


As one’s eyes on the map flit, settle and move between archipelagos, or seas and groups of islands and land masses on a map, it is perhaps such a movement that suggests these very cross-cultural porosities, fluidity, contacts, exchanges and heterogeneities, as well as imaginaries of places, barriers and borders that demarcate such bodies, even if they face territorial contestations between countries.

Closer to Southeast Asia, thinking and assembling the archipelago would also entail thinking about the ‘Malay world’, or Nusantara (meaning the islands between in Javanese), or Suvarnadvipa (meaning ‘island’ or ‘peninsula of gold’ in Sanskrit). Attention is also brought to the Orang Lauts, where ‘Southeast Asia’ is a meaningless term, since their collective imagination and social experience of the region is guided by the notion of a borderless space, defined according to their ideas of mobility, unbound spaces, and group identification with multiple places. Or the marginalised transient sea-dwelling Bajau (or Badjao) Muslim fishermen, who have lived as outsiders. With a livelihood dependent on waters, and houses built on high platforms in coastal shallows spread across Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia, their lives have increasingly been made precarious to ever-expanding land cultures. 

Thinking about islands and water bodies (including seas and rivers) would also mean attending not only to marine histories, but its cosmologies such as spirits and coastal shrines that have long protected the waters and their communities or else the phenomena of tourism, and environmental conservation/conflicts on islands in Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand, or the real threat of rising water levels’ to water communities and how they make sense of such realities. Elsewhere, artists and popular culture also ruminate on archipelagic futurisms, those lost to the seas, mobilities aided by or impeded by race and gender, as well as how songs and stories revolving around islands and the seas propel resistance, survival and solidarities in Indonesia and the Philippines.