Mea Culpa: Re-reading 19th Century Colonial-Era Works on South East Asia as Confessional Texts

Mea Culpa: Re-reading 19th Century Colonial-Era Works on South East Asia as Confessional Texts

Author: Farish A. Noor
Publisher: The Biblio Press
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 9789297919515
Pages: 75
Weight:
Year: 2026
Price: RM18

The 19th century was a time when a number of books were written about Southeast Asia, mainly by Westerners who were themselves directly involved in the enterprise of colonial-capitalism. How can these works be read today, and do they contain truths about the region and the Asians who lived there? In this work, Farish A. Noor argues for a critical re-reading of these works, seeing them as confessional texts that reveal the hopes, ambitions, fears and anxieties of the writers themselves. Read as such, these works tell us as much about the West as they do about the East.