Guest Lecture | SSEALS
Special Guest Lecture: Maps, manuscripts, and the colonial division of the Malay world
- Date
- Friday 14 March 2025
- Time
- Serie
- Research Colloquium: SSEALS (2025)
- Address
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 0.03
Special Guest Lecture
One specific effect of colonialism in maritime Southeast Asia is so naturalised as to be invisible: the partition of the Malay-speaking world into Dutch and British domains through the Treaty of 1824. Since it is the basis for part of the boundary between the modern nation states of Indonesia and Malaysia, this division is more consequential now than when the Treaty was signed. Reflecting on the ongoing research project ‘Mapping Sumatra’s Manuscript Cultures’, I will speak about the effects of this separation—initially imposed from the outside and largely irrelevant to cultural life, and then latterly upheld and defended from within—on manuscript cultures on either side of the Melaka Straits. An emphasis of the project is the geographical location of centres of manuscript production and consumption, and of tracing where manuscripts are now and where they were in the past. Whereas in the 19th century manuscripts moved across the Straits (and beyond) in many different trajectories, in the 21st this appears to have taken place in one direction only. I will also discuss the divergent fates of royal palaces, key sites of manuscript production, on either side of the Straits—as well as controversial cartographic nomenclature (‘Malay world’, ‘Nusantara’) and contestations about cultural ownership.
About the speaker: Dr Mulaika Hijjas is Reader in South East Asian Studies at SOAS University of London, and Principal Investigator of Mapping Sumatra’s Manuscript Cultures, funded by the Leverhulme Trust (naskahsumatra.org). She is from Kuala Lumpur.
Registration
This lecture is open for anyone to attend. Please register via the button below.
Register for this eventFor questions, please contact the organizing committee at SSEALS@hum.leidenuniv.nl