Southeast Asian American Studies Special Issue: Guest Editors' Introduction

Abstract

We live, according to Rey Chow, in the age of the world target. 1 The United States' ascendancy as supreme world power in the mid-twentieth century, as Chow pointedly observes, rests upon the rise of increasingly devastating technologies of destruction simultaneous with new disciplines of knowledge and information retrieval. 2 In this regard, Southeast Asia names a geographic region rst conceived as a geopolitical concern by the post -Second World War development of the military-intellectual complex, and subsequently reimagined by various Cold War and post -Cold War strategies of foreign policy, including catastrophic campaigns of bombings and regime changes that promised to resonate for decades to come. As an epistemic formation, Southeast Asia currently encompasses over ten different nationstates, including Viet Nam, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Burma/Myanmar, the Philippines, Brunei, and East Timor.positions :. / -