(Re)making History: Two Recent Books Recast Southeast Asia’s Postcolonial Modernism

Just ten years ago, if you had asked whether Southeast Asia possessed its own modern art history, you would have encountered little critical consensus. After all, the area is enormous and highly diverse, comprising Cambodia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, various individual islands, and even parts of India. Yet today many Global South critics and scholars insist on the cultural specificity of artistic change in these countries, contending that