SOUTHEAST ASIA AND THE PACIFIC ISLANDS
PRE-WORLD WAR II
The Library has some fascinating collections
of South Pacific and Southeast Asian material that predate
World War II. In
1934, the Fahnestock brothers, Bruce and Sheridan, set sail
from New York for China and the South Pacific on their ship,
Director. The three-year voyage, during which they studied
the cultures of the Pacific and uncovered a set of important
Fijian petroglyphs, the Ndakunimba Stones, was documented
in their book, Stars to Windward (1938). During a second sailing
expedition in 1940, the Fahnestocks made extensive recordings
of music from American Samoa, Fiji, French Polynesia, New
Caledonia,
and Australia before their ship hit a reef near Australia
and sank.
A third voyage in 1941, as war loomed in the Pacific, resulted
in rare recordings of music on the islands of Indonesia, including
Bali, Madura, and the Kangean islands. This third expedition
also had a covert side. At the request of President Franklin
D. Roosevelt, the Fahnestocks evaluated Dutch military preparations
on Java and carried out several other missions. With the outbreak
of war, the Fahnestocks joined the U.S. Army's Small Ships Section
in New Guinea, the unit that inspired the 1960s television series
entitled The Wackiest Ship in the Army. In 1986, Margaret Fahnestock
Lewis, the widow of Sheridan Fahnestock, gave the Library much
of the material the brothers had collected on their three expeditions.
The Library's Archive of Folk Culture is the home for the Fahnestock
South Seas collection, including recorded music of the South
Pacific and Indonesia, recordings of Fijian legends, manuscripts,
logs, correspondence, and photographs.
Another important collection of material on the cultures of
the South Pacific and Indonesia may be found in the Manuscript
Division where the papers of the renowned American anthropologist
Margaret Mead are kept. Mead's academic career began with the
field trip to the South Pacific in 1925 that resulted in the
publication of Coming of Age in Samoa, a book that attracted
a readership well beyond the academic community. During a career
that spanned some fifty years, Mead's fieldwork took her from
Fiji to the Admiralty Islands, New Guinea, and Bali. Her fame
and her sometimes-controversial views on subjects, such as the
rearing of children, stimulated public interest in the field
of anthropology. Mead's papers in the Library are a valuable
source for research on her work and life.
The Archive of Folk Culture holds other rare Asian material,
including the Benjamin Ives Gilman collection of wax cylinder
recordings made at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago
and including Javanese and South Pacific music. The Hornbostel
Demonstration collection of 120 pressed cylinder copies from
wax field recordings includes Chinese, Japanese, Southeast Asian,
and Indian music recorded in the early years of the twentieth
century. In addition, the Archive of Folk Culture holds many
more recent recordings of music from Asia and the Pacific.
THE COLLECTIONS EXPAND
World War II was a watershed event for Asia and the Pacific as
well as for the United States. With the end of the War came
a period of anti-colonial revolution in Southeast Asia and
the onset of the Cold War. To meet the expanding need for knowledge
of the area, the Library’s acquisitions from Southeast
Asia and the Pacific increased dramatically in the post-war
period. For example, growing concern about Asian communism
can be seen in the increasing number of titles the Library
received from Southeast Asia during the late 1940s and 1950s,
such as a 1952 report on the Philippine Communist Party published
by the Philippine House of Representatives and publications
from the Saigon-based Asian People's Anti-Communist League
and the Bangkok headquarters of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization
(SEATO).
Since the end of the Vietnam War in 1975 and the following period
of adjustment, the region has taken on a new dynamism and the
Library's collections have kept up with the greater emphasis
on economics, trade, and regional cooperation, as seen in increasingly
active Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Nonetheless,
old issues in new guises still exist, perhaps the foremost being
the rise of political Islam. The Library's Jakarta Field Office,
with its sub-offices in Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur and Manila, is
in the forefront of acquiring material from the countries of
this important and diverse region.
Another important collection of material on the cultures of
the South Pacific and Indonesia may be found in the Manuscript
Division where the papers of the renowned American anthropologist
Margaret Mead are kept. Mead's academic career began with the
field trip to the South Pacific in 1925 that resulted in the
publication of Coming of Age in Samoa, a book that
attracted a readership well beyond the academic community.
During a career
that spanned some fifty years, Mead's field work took her from
Fiji to the Admiralty Islands, New Guinea, and Bali. Her fame
and her sometimes controversial views on subjects, such as
the rearing of children, stimulated public interest in the
field
of anthropology. Mead's papers in the Library are a valuable
source for research on her work and life.
Seni and Kukrit Pramoj, The King of
Siam Speaks. Most Thai were shocked by the portrayal
of their revered nineteenth-century king, Mongkut, in
the musical The King and I. The stage and screen
versions were based on Margaret Landon's 1944 book entitled Anna
and the King of Siam. To correct the record, well-known
Thai intellectuals Seni and Kukrit Pramoj wrote this
account in 1948. The Pramoj brothers sent their manuscript
to the American politician and diplomat Abbot Low Moffat,
who drew on it for his biography entitled Mongkut
the King of Siam (1961). Moffat donated the Pramoj
manuscript to the Library in 1961. (Southeast Asian
Collection, Asian Division)
|
Thailand: During World War II, the United States supported the
anti-Japanese resistance movement in Thailand, the Free Thai
Movement. The American largely responsible for bringing about
this relationship was Dr. Kenneth Landon, a former Presbyterian
minister who had spent ten years in Thailand as a missionary.
After his return to the United States in 1937, Landon worked
on a Ph.D. and wrote a book on Thai politics. With the outbreak
of war, he became Washington's leading expert on Thailand, first
with America's wartime intelligence organization, the Office
of Strategic Services, and then with the Department of State.
Dr. Landon later donated hundreds of pages of transcripts of
Free Thai radio broadcasts to the Library, along with a small
but important collection of post-World War II Thai books on politics
as well as Thai political fiction.
Landon's connection with the Library of Congress, however, began
before his donation of the Free Thai material, going back to
research by his wife, Margaret, for her book entitled Anna and
the King of Siam. Published in 1944, the book was an account
of the English governess Anna Leonowens's experiences in the
court of King Mongkut (Rama IV) and became the inspiration for
the Broadway musical The King and I. In her note at the end of
the book, Margaret Landon thanks Dr. Horace Poleman of the Library
of Congress for making available material for reconstructing
some of the historical background in the book. Specifically,
she cites her use of a Thai-language book in the Library containing
King Mongkut's correspondence.
Thai material has continued to grow apace and with the opening
of a sub-office in Bangkok in the late 1990s, the Library's Thai
collection has become second only to the collections in the major
libraries in Thailand itself. The collection is strong in the
areas of politics, economics, and regional Thai publications.
Acquisitions have recently focused on material documenting the
local cultures of the four Muslim provinces in the south and
the growing Burmese community on the Thai border. The Law Library
holds probably the most comprehensive collection of Thai legal
works outside of Bangkok.
Burma: One of the Asian Division’s unique holdings is
a set of World War II documents and records. The documents, most
dating between 1941 and 1944, offer insight into Burma during
the period of the Japanese occupation. Perhaps the most significant
material concerns the Indian Independence League and its military
wing, the Indian National Army (INA) headed by Shubas Chandra
Bose after 1943. In Burma the INA operated with Japan’s
15th Army and fought British forces during the epic Imphal campaign.
The collection also includes Burmese police records from several
cities, local government reports (including records of conversations
with tribal leaders in the Shan States on self-determination),
economic documents from the Burma Corporation, field notes by
US Army personnel, arrest warrants written by British officers
in early 1945, some Japanese military papers, and newspaper clippings
from The Rangoon Times. The Asian Division has prepared a Finding
Aid describing the material in detail.
Although the Burmese collection was limited initially, it has
now grown considerably larger, with books in English, Burmese
and other minority languages dealing with a wide range of subjects,
including literatures, history, religion, politics, administration,
art and architecture, social life and customs.
Vietnam: The Library stepped up its acquisition
of French-language publications from Indochina in the late 1940s
and by the early
1950s was receiving four Vietnamese-language newspapers: two
from Hanoi and two from Saigon. Signs of growing interest in
Vietnamese internal politics were in evidence, such as the Library's
acquisition of an intriguing book on Vietnam's Cao Ðài
religion, published in 1950 under the auspices of the Commander-in-Chief
of the Cao Ðài Army and Saigon's then-Minister of Armed
Forces, Maj. Gen. Tran Quang Vinh. The Library holds copies of
reports on government and administrative reform in South Vietnam
from Michigan State University's "Vietnam Advisory Group."
Despite this increasing attention, Vietnamese-language material
continued to grow more slowly than other Southeast Asian-language
publications in the 1950s, ranking well behind material published
in Indonesia, Thailand, and Burma. Even in the mid-1960s, with
American involvement escalating, the Library complained of the
irregular flow of published material from South Vietnam and the
difficulty of getting publications from North Vietnam. Nonetheless,
in spite of the hostilities between North Vietnam and the United
States, by the late 1960s the Library had begun to develop a
close working relationship with selected institutions in Hanoi.
As a result of these exchanges, the Library's collection of works
from the northern provinces of Vietnam is stronger than that
from the former Saigon government. A recent major acquisition
from Dr. Nguyen Van Trung, a former professor now living in Canada,
has helped fill the gap in Vietnamese publications. The majority
of the more than 200 serials and monographs in the Trung collection
were published in the 1950s and 1960s.
America's war in Vietnam is often said to be the first televised
war. An extensive record of this coverage can be found in the
Library's Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division.
Included are special reports that appeared on ABC, CBS, and NBC;
historic footage from Nippon News covering the Japanese occupation
during World War II; travelogues on French Indochina produced
in the late 1940s; and a French film collection on the colonial
period with perspectives from the Viet Minh and Ho Chi Minh,
and some scenes from 1901.
Van Hoa DakLak - Vietnamese Provincial Publication.
(Southeast Asian Collection, Asian Division)
|
Another interesting source of material on the war is found in
the Documents Division, which holds the notes and records of
Neil Sheehan, author of A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann
and America in Vietnam.
The Library also holds a complete set of Great Britain’s
diplomatic reporting on the Vietnam War. Consisting of twenty-nine
microfilm reels, the Foreign Office Files: Series Two: Vietnam,
1959-1975 provides a useful non-American perspective on the conflict.
Following the end of the war in 1975 and the arrival of hundreds
of thousands of refugees from Indochina, the Library began to
see a large increase in demand for publications in the languages
of the region. Today the Asian Division's holdings in Vietnamese
include some 200 periodicals, about half published in Vietnam
and the rest published by the overseas Vietnamese community.
In recent years, the Library has tapped into the growing number
of local Vietnamese publications to develop its collection of
provincial periodicals, covering subjects such as local politics,
socioeconomic issues and cultural development. The Library maintains
an excellent exchange relationship with the National Library
of Vietnam and has a special project with the Institute of Southeast
Asian Studies (ISEAS) in Hanoi, collecting unique law and other
publications that could not be obtained in the past.
Cambodia: Beginning in the 1970s, the Library began to develop
its Khmer collection, including a unique set of publications
in Cambodian from refugee camps on the Thai-Cambodian border.
More recently the Library has acquired legal and general reference
works, government documents and publications by international
agencies and donors assisting the post-Khmer Rouge government.
The Library also has reprints of hundreds of earlier works of
literature and popular fiction that are now available to the
significant Cambodian population in the United States.
Laos: Earlier holdings from Laos are not extensive but include
an interesting collection of novels published after 1970 that
reflect the development of Lao socialist realism. The Library
also holds a small but growing retrospective collection of publications
from the Lao Patriotic Front (Neo Lao Hak Sat), which provided
the leadership for the post-1975 Lao government. The works of
Kaysone Phomvihane (1920-1992), former President and Prime Minister
of the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, are to be found
in the collection. Since the 1990s, the Library has obtained
a large collection of serials and government publications, as
well as reports from international and non-governmental organizations
working on development projects in Laos. Several other divisions
of the Library also have Lao material. The Motion Picture, Broadcasting,
and Recorded Sound Division has materials on several Lao minority
groups, such as the Khammu and Hmong, as part of the Indochina
Archives Project of the Social Science Research Council. The
diaries of Souvanna Phouma, former Prime Minister of Laos, can
be found in the Manuscript Division.
Malaysia and Brunei: Publications from Brunei and Malaysia
include literary works and critical studies from Brunei’s
Language and Literature Bureau and the Ministry of Religious
Affairs as well as Malaysia’s Language and Literature
Bureau. Of particular interest is difficult-to-obtain material
from Malaysia’s Islamic opposition party, Parti Islam
Se-Malaysia (PAS), in the form of audio and videotapes of leaders’ speeches,
usually the best source for understanding the party's policies.
The Library also has a collection of classic Malay movies and
songs from P. Ramlee, who was instrumental in developing Malaysia’s
music and film movement in the 1950s.
Jajak MD, Biografi. Presiden dan Vakil,
Presiden Republik Indonesia: 1945-Sekarang. Containing
the biographies of the presidents and vice-presidents
of Indonesia since independence, this book is an example
of a recent publication in modern Indonesian. During
the colonial period, the Dutch helped popularize the
use of the Malay language throughout Indonesia's over
three thousand islands. This language later evolved into "Bahasa
Indonesia," and the roman script became the official
writing system. Indonesia's first two presidents, Sukarno
and Suharto, appear on the cover. (Southeast Asian
Collection, Asian Division)
|
Indonesia: Since the end of the Suharto era in 1998, the Library
has concentrated on acquiring material on terrorism, local and
ethnic conflicts, radical Islamic and Christian groups, interfaith
relations, civil society and election materials. Another focus
of collection is the transitional role of the Indonesian military
and police, as they have moved away from the old dwifunsi system
(dual military/civil role) to a more modern defense and security
system. An important part of the Indonesian holdings is the serial
collection, consisting of over 900 titles, the second largest
in the world. Of particular interest is a project being carried
out by the Library’s Jakarta Office to microformat the
writings and papers of Pramoedya Ananta Toer, probably Indonesia’s
foremost novelist and winner of numerous literary prizes including
the Magsaysay Award.
East Timor: Southeast Asia’s newest nation is represented
in the Asian collections by material on the debate over independence
from the late Suharto era. Nine active serial titles are available,
including the newspaper Suara Timor (The Voice of Timor), which
documented the road to independence.
The Philippines: Through the Jakarta Field Office and its sub-office
in Manila, the Library has continued to expand its Philippine
collection. Currently the Library has over 200 active serial
titles, including unique government and non-governmental organization
reports as well as small university press titles. Of the 171
living languages of the Philippines, the Library has acquired
material in about 80 and is continuing to acquire publications
in new languages.
A recent addition to the Philippines collection reflects the
Library’s increasing emphasis on material concerning Asian-Americans.
The Carlos Bulosan Archive, acquired in 2006, documents the experiences
of Filipino immigrants in the United States through poems, short
stories and books. Included in the Archive are documents dealing
with Bulosan’s attempts to organize Filipino workers in
the Pacific Northwest, serial clippings about the author, a facsimile
of one of Bulosan’s original manuscripts, and various ephemera.
Singapore: As an important center for international publishing
and research, Singapore is fertile ground for the Library's acquisition
efforts in Southeast Asia. The Library has a large collection
of Singapore government documents, works on the economy, and
regional social science publications. Recent collection efforts
have included works in Malay and Tamil, reflecting the importance
of these communities and adding to the large number of English-language
publications. .
Southeast Asia’s Overseas Chinese Community: Chinese immigrants
in Southeast Asia have played a vital role in the region, especially
in its economy. The Library has a growing collection of Chinese-language
publications from many countries in the region. In Indonesia,
where the use of Chinese had been banned, the end of the Suharto
era resulted in an explosion of Chinese-language monographs,
newspapers and journals. The Library has a large collection of
these works. In Malaysia, the Library has worked with local cultural,
self-help and clan organizations to acquire hundreds of non-commercial
titles as well as Chinese-language newspapers. In the Philippines,
the Jakarta Field Office is microfilming the Kaisa Library collection
of Chinese-Filipino genealogies.
South Pacific: The Library has a strong collection of contemporary
government publications from the nations of the Pacific. Another
strength in the Library's holdings is its collection of 19th
century missionary publications from the Pacific.
Electronic Resources: The Jakarta Field Office has digitized
a number of its Balinese palm leaf manuscripts.
|