• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.67-90
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• 2024

This article paid attention to three types of children's characters in Vietnamese children's literature in North Vietnam from 1945 to 1975, including children's characters as young soldiers in the frontlines, young citizens in daily life, and role models. The goal of this body of literature was illustrated as educating young generations on patriotism, the revolutionary spirit, and civic consciousness. Our research suggests that politics in children's literature is universal and that the power discourse of adults is an inevitable factor predominating in children's literature. Besides, juxtaposing Vietnamese children's literature with Southeast Asian literature helps us see that the political orientation and moral concepts in children's literature have created a stagnation in the current pace of Vietnamese children's literature. This paper, therefore, contributes to identifying Vietnamese children's literature in the overall picture of Southeast Asian children's literature in the post-colonial context.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.147-184
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• 2024

At the dawn of the 20^th century, Southeast Asian female poets increasingly delved into introspective reflections on gender, giving rise to a heightened self-awareness in their artistic contemplations. This shift in perspective brought forth numerous crucial topics for discussion, such as the historical role of female poets, women's experiences, feminine language, female voices, and female identity. The exploration of language has empowered female poets to discover a "third space" that allows them to exist and eliminate the pervasive gaps of women in Southeast Asia, creating social changes, fostering concepts of feminine culture, and establishing progressive social institutions. Marjorie Evasco (1953-) and Dư Thị Hoàn (1947 - ) are exemplary representatives of contemporary Southeast Asian women's poetry due to their significant artistic contributions and pivotal roles in promoting feminist literature in their respective countries. This study compares their poetic works, focusing on three crucial aspects: self-awareness of femininity and feminism as an identity autonomy, writing between two languages to express their identities, and constructing the image of mother and motherhood from personal and historical perspectives. Hence, the article highlights that Southeast Asian female poets, throughout different historical contexts, persistently forge their identities and strive for equal footing with men in society. Also, their invaluable contributions have significantly enriched the feminist literary tradition in Asia.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.13-38
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• 2024

The present paper intends to explain the probable reasons and practical circumstances for the paucity of local scholars in the region in attaining international recognition as Southeast Asianists. Far from being an apologetic piece, on the contrary, our goal is to first ascertain the causal factors for the lacuna, and in turn, to propose hopeful and realistic panaceas in resolving and overcoming the dire situation. Why? The rationale and advantageous factors in nurturing Southeast Asians as Southeast Asianist follow in the later part of the paper.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.39-65
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• 2024

Education is widely considered an essential tool for national development, particularly in Southeast Asia, in which advancing education ideally means advancing social cohesion, and security, and economic growth. This paper juxtaposes The Rainbow Troops: A Novel (2005, hereafter The Rainbow Troops) by Indonesian writer Andrea Hirata and Cho tôi xin một vé đi tuổi thơ (Ticket to Childhood, 2008) by Vietnamese writer Nguyễn Nhật Ánh, understanding their potentially generated dialogue about idealized education. Reading character constructions and narrative flows against educational policies and realities of Vietnam and Indonesia in particular and Southeast Asia at large reveals criticism about the true goals of education programs pertaining to children. Specifically, they provoke in readers questions about the role of education as a tool for national development appropriate to each political and economic context and the respect for the psychological, intellectual, and physical development of children.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.7-11
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• 2024

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.115-146
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• 2024

Southeast Asian detective stories and their scholarships have shown new understandings of justice and identity in this region. This study on Vietnamese detective stories in the early twenty-first century contributes to post-colonial discourses to reflect how colonial structures were constructed and reconstructed from the past until now. Starting with transnational characters and contexts, we demonstrate the subversion revealed in the way the perpetrator-victim are transposed and their motivations for the crimes. The Vietnamese detective novelists adjust the conventions of detective stories to address these issues of law, ethics, and truth that arise in the post-colonial context. These multidimensional narratives of crime and justice also serve as resistance to the grand narratives of power that have dominated Vietnam for years.

• The Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business
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• v.8 no.9
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• pp.261-272
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• 2021

Rapid economic growth in recent years has caused a surge in energy consumption among Southeast Asian countries and laid a considerable burden on the already inadequate power infrastructure. As a result, frequent blackouts and prolonged outages have become common and weakened firm productive performance in those years. The main objective of this study is to examine the impact of power infrastructure quality on the performance of Southeast Asian manufacturing firms. In this study, the World Bank Enterprise Surveys was employed as the training dataset of 4723 manufacturing firms in the period of 2015-2016. The results of this study reveal that industrial firms that suffered from power outages had consistently lower productivity. As measured by the length of such events, more severe outages tend to be more harmful to the firm. Furthermore, the findings also indicated that most firms relied on self-generated electricity to reduce the negative impact of power outages, but this does not bring many benefits when operating at a small scale in some countries. Consequently, this study contributes to a growing literature that examines the economic impact of public infrastructure and how detrimental the poor state of such services is to a firm's downstream operations, productivity, and growth.

• Asian Journal of Innovation and Policy
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.183-201
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• 2022

The purpose of this article is to provide preliminary findings on the state of digital technology applications of startups in Southeast Asia and to discuss issues related to digital health adoption in the region. This exploratory study is based on an empirical analysis of startups and digital technology applications information from various publicly available website databases. Public and private organizations would benefit from a better understanding of the current state of digital technology applications provided by startups and the challenges faced in digital health adoption. This article contributes to the existing literature by offering an overview of startups and digital technology applications in the digital health space in the fast-growing region of Southeast Asia. It offers advice to organizations intending to pursue healthtech initiatives on the types of health services provided by startups and issues that need to be addressed to increase the adoption rate.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.7-52
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• 2017

This paper analyzes the scholarly approaches to the problem of "local" vs. "cosmopolitan" in the context of the cultural transfers between South and Southeast Asia. Taking the "localization" paradigm advanced by Oliver Wolters as its pivot, it reviews the "externalist" and "autonomous" positions, and questions the hermeneutical validity of the fuzzy and self-explanatory category of "local." Having discussed the geo-environmental metaphors of "Monsoon Asia" and "Maritime Asia" as alternative paradigms to make justice to the complex dynamics of transregional interaction that shaped South and Southeast Asian societies, it briefly presents two case studies highlighting the tensions between the "local" and "cosmopolitan" approaches to the study of Old Javanese literature and Balinese Hinduism.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.6 no.1
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• pp.193-221
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• 2014

Archipeligiality, a concept continuously being developed by the scholar, is one that attempts to articulate the Filipino sense of place as discoursed in/through its literatures. As a country composed of 7,107 islands, the very fragmentation and division of the country, as well as its multiculturality and multilinguality, have become the very means by which Filipino writers have "imagined" so to speak-that is, also, constructed, into a singular, united frame-the "nation." This, the author supposes, is an important aspect to explore when it comes to discoursing the larger Southeast Asian imagination, or poetic, as similar situations (i.e. Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore), may soon compel for a comparative critico-literary perspective. This paper continues this exploratory "geoliterary" discourse by looking at a Filipino canonical work in English by Cirilo F. Bautista, the epic The Trilogy of Saint Lazarus, the title of which already signals a geographic allusion to the first map-name granted by the Spanish colonizer to the Philippines in the region, and consequently the first signification of the country's subjected existence in the colonial imagination. The work, published between 1970 and 1998, is composed of three parts: The Archipelago, Telex Moon, and Sunlight on Broken Stones, which won the 1998 Philippine Independence Centennial Literary Prize. In these epics, notions of Philippine history and situation were discoursed, and Filipino historical figures were engaged in dialogue by the poet/the poet's voice, with the end of locating the place [where history and time had brought it; or its direction or trajectory as a nation, being true to the Filipino maxim of ang di lumingon sa pinanggalingan, di makararating sa paroroonan (the one who does not look back to his origins would not reach his destination)]. of the Philippines not only in the national imagination, but in this paper, in the wider regional consciousness. The paper proposes that the archipelagic concept is an important and unique characteristic of the Southeast Asian situation, and thus, may be a means to explicate the clearly connected landscapes of the region's imagination through literature. This paper focuses on Sunlight on Broken Stones.