World Making with Malay-Indonesian Manuscripts: Circulation, Contestation and Connection

Just published!

Edited by Sher Banu A.L. Khan & Maznah Mohamad
With contributions from Stephen Druce, Md Effendy, Peter Riddell, Abdullah Maulani, Annabel Teh Gallop, Siti Badriyah Yusof, Elsa Clave, Wahyu Widodo, Mulaika Hijjas, Lilis Shofiyanti, Siti Sarah Muwahidah

What new framings emerge when we revisit the vibrant world of Malay-Indonesian manuscripts, moving beyond the frameworks imposed by colonial and nationalist scholarship? This volume considers texts in new ways, as dynamic instruments of meaning-making and cultural transformation. It uncovers multiple historical and cultural narratives within and between manuscripts, challenging established understandings of power, identity, and authorship. Chapters explore themes ranging from the origins of kingdoms and intellectual traditions to the reinvention of contemporary lives through politicised readings of older texts. Social actors in the manuscript world engaged in a remarkable array of practices: they wrote, illustrated, copied, exchanged, and performed texts; they travelled with manuscripts, wielding them to assert authority, resist domination, or celebrate the sacrality of the written word.

By foregrounding the diversity and versatility of Malay-Indonesian textual traditions, this book recentres manuscripts in shaping Southeast Asian histories. The fluidity of cultural memory across time and place is revealed, and fixed notions of a single Malay worldview are decentred. This study will prove indispensable to scholars and students of Southeast Asian studies, decolonial studies, and anyone interested in the broader dynamics of knowledge production and cultural reinvention in the region.

“The contributors to this volume take up philology in an innovative 21st-century mode, as the manuscript-focused study of world making. Hard work is done to shed the colonial straitjacket of ‘Malay studies’. What comes out is a whole range of exciting new understandings.” – Ben Arps, Leiden University

Sher Banu Khan is a historian of the Malay World in the pre-colonial period focusing on gender and manuscript studies, political culture and Islam

Maznah Mohamad is currently Honorary Fellow and formerly Associate Professor with the Department of Malay Studies at the National University of Singapore.

Publication Year: 2026
360pp / 235 x 187mm
15 b/w images
Paperback
ISBN: 978-981-325-315-5