Lying in the very centre of a great chain of trade routes stretching from Basra and Zanzibar to Canton and Nagasaki, the area of the Southern Seas has always been one of exceptional mobility: a cauldron of diasporas. For centuries, Chinese migrants have crossed these waters. We know them chiefly as protagonists of trade and commerce – merchants, labourers, mandarin-capitalists, businessmen – and as a people defined by their ties to a distant homeland. In Southern Seas, historian Rachel Leow recasts this vibrant region as an incubator of ideas, cultures, and alternative politics. At its heart lies a cast of Chinese intellectuals, feminists, poets and exiles who lived interwoven lives, and wrote and thought not only in Chinese but across the many tongues of the Malay world. In the age of global empire, they produced diasporic imaginations that envisioned world-spanning futures shackled neither to the fantasy of the modern nation-state, nor to a politics of blood and ancestry.
Today, as the rise of China reconfigures what it means to be Chinese, Southern Seas recovers a history of peoples and places across many horizons: a multilingual world of inter-Asian encounters far more fluid than rigid borders would suggest, where destinies were unbound and freedom of movement offered a new world of possibilities.
