Imagined Racial Laboratories: Colonial and National Racialisations in Southeast Asia, edited by Ricardo Roque (ICS, University of Lisbon) and Warwick Anderson (University of Sydney), has just been published by Brill as part of the Brill’s Southeast Asian Library Series.
Imagined Racial Laboratories reveals the watermarks of science in the dynamics of racialisation in Southeast Asia, during and after the colonial period. Bringing together a set of critical histories of race sciences, it illuminates the racialised dimensions of colony and nation in the region. It demonstrates that racialisation took — and continues to take — mutable and multiple forms that often connect, perhaps more than differentiate, colonial and national periods across a variety of Southeast Asian settings. Thus, imagined races have contributed as much to the invention of modern Southeast Asia as have other fabled imagined communities.