Ashley Thompson

Drawing from more than a decade of field and archival research, this monograph concerns Cambodian cultural history and historiography, with an ultimate aim of broadening and deepening bases for understanding the Cambodian Theravadin politico-cultural complex. The book takes the form of an interdisciplinary analysis of performative and representational strategies for constituting social collectivities, largely developed at Angkor. The analysis involves extended close readings of a wide range of cultural artefacts including epigraphic and manuscript texts, sculpture and ritual practices. The author proposes a critical re-evaluation of dominant paradigms of Cambodian historiography in view of engendering new histories, or hybrid histories, which make room for previously absent perspectives and voices, while developing new theoretical tools engaging with and partially derived from "indigenous" narrative practices in the broadest sense. In this history-making process the historical event is shown to never be entirely separable from its aesthetic representation. Particular attention is paid to the roles of sexual difference in such (re)constructions of history.The book presents a theory of power capable of accounting for the historical phenomena by which vernacular cultures appropriate, subvert and submit to cosmopolitan forces. It charts out a novel approach to the study of classical Southeast Asian materials, and is of interest to students and scholars of Asian Art, Religion and Philosophy, Buddhism and Southeast Asian History.

This volume assembles essays by 25 emerging and established scholars, who have turned their minds to the art and the writing of it in Southeast Asia from the 19th century to the present. Supplemented by 200 images, surveys of national modernities and expanded thematic discussions play out alongside monographic projects; inclusions and exclusions from conventional narratives and categories of art are critically reviewed. Together, these essays chart new paths of inquiry in the shifting geographies of art in the region.

Far into the future, two siblings are found alive on Earth a thousand years after it was abandoned. Frozen until now they are on track for a futuristic adventure into space.Sabriel and Nathaniel are twin wereleopards who are put into cryo-sleep during the genocide of all supernatural beings worldwide. A thousand years have passed and the captain and crew of the UNS Grisedale discover the beacon signaling the whereabouts of Sabriel and Nathaniel's cryo-pods. Once rescued, they are taken onto the ship where they meet the charming captain, Marius Orenstein. From there they head out into the far reaches of space, travelling to the planet Nama in the Grand Design Spiral Galaxy we know as BX442. They are bound for love, devastation, hope, and reunions.

Drawing from more than a decade of field and archival research, this monograph concerns Cambodian cultural history and historiography, with an ultimate aim of broadening and deepening bases for understanding the Cambodian Theravadin politico-cultural complex. The book takes the form of an interdisciplinary analysis of performative and representational strategies for constituting social collectivities, largely developed at Angkor. The analysis involves extended close readings of a wide range of cultural artefacts including epigraphic and manuscript texts, sculpture and ritual practices. The author proposes a critical re-evaluation of dominant paradigms of Cambodian historiography in view of engendering new histories, or hybrid histories, which make room for previously absent perspectives and voices, while developing new theoretical tools engaging with and partially derived from "indigenous" narrative practices in the broadest sense. In this history-making process the historical event is shown to never be entirely separable from its aesthetic representation. Particular attention is paid to the roles of sexual difference in such (re)constructions of history.The book presents a theory of power capable of accounting for the historical phenomena by which vernacular cultures appropriate, subvert and submit to cosmopolitan forces. It charts out a novel approach to the study of classical Southeast Asian materials, and is of interest to students and scholars of Asian Art, Religion and Philosophy, Buddhism and Southeast Asian History.