"Disrupted" Historical Trajectories and Indigenous Agency: Rethinking Imperial Impact in Southeast Asian History‪.‬

Reconciling Southeast Asia's imperial past and colonial legacy with the reality of indigenous agency is perhaps the most challenging issue currently facing the field. When writing colonial and post-colonial histories of the region scholars are often faced with a particularly uncomfortable dilemma. In choosing to analyse the region through a prism of deterministic imperial impact and corresponding indigenous response, one is required to, at least tacitly, accept notions of indomitable Western hegemony and native passivity, thus sacrificing prospects of self-conscious and self-determining aboriginal agency. Conversely, by rejecting broad analytical models of imperial impact in favor of more discursive and qualitative examinations, one presumably risks relativizing the injurious effects of imperialism on a collective or systemic level. It is certainly inappropriate to regard the region and its peoples simply as a construction, and, therefore, as an intellectual and historical possession of the West. Yet, considering the apparent disparities shaping our contemporary world, it does not seem realistic or honest to deny imperialism's indelible imprint on Southeast Asian history either. The answer to this quandary is as critical as it is elusive. If historians are to move towards at a genuinely authentic narrative and analysis of Southeast Asian history, we must overcome this predicament. I am not merely suggesting that we strike some kind of tenuous balance or compromise between the positions cited above. Rather, I am suggesting a thoughtful reassessment of certain aspects of Southeast Asian history. Many long-held, but ultimately mistaken, assumptions have created an analytical matrix supporting a limited number of viable conclusions. To be sure, these conclusions have been deconstructed, contested, and often reordered, but ultimately they all consist of the same derivative parts. This state of intellectual burden is due in large part to a compelling need for a teleological understanding of history.