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Abstract

Excerpt: The late 1960s and early 1970s engendered deep changes to the study of history the world over, which continue to affect and guide the discipline today. Peasantry studies gained vigor and traction in this period, on the heels of at least three decades of anti-colonial rebellion and the rise of certain radical Third World states, particularly in Southeast Asia. The political history of Vietnam, in particular, and the Vietnam War’s globally politicizing effect alerted Western scholars and activists to the possibilities of peasant political action and widened their range of political actors as legitimate subjects of scholarly analysis. It is in this context that social history emerged as a new mode of academic inquiry and that Southeast Asia emerged as a primed site for analysis—and a wide site indeed, becoming a live testing ground for modernization and development theories in the political realm, as well as a heuristic testing ground for the evaluation of Western post-structural theories in application beyond their origin. Half a century later, the lack of studies treating the social history of women in Southeast Asian nationalist movements, which Susan Blackburn and Helen Ting’s edited volume seeks to address, is thus striking.

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