On June 10, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York returned two pieces of artwork to Cambodia: an Angkor statue and a sandstone lintel. It’s the latest repatriation effort by the U.S.’s premier art museum, and the third time the Met has had to give up Cambodian artifacts specifically.

Matthew Campbell’s The Man Who Stole The Gods: A True Story of War, Obsession, and a Global Art Conspiracy (Penguin, 2026) dives into the story of the Cambodian antiquities trade, from looted temples in the Cambodian forests, through dealers in Bangkok like Douglas Latchford, and then into museums and billionaire homes in the West. And he also digs into how this trade fell apart: How the U.S. Department of Justice and activists in Cambodia pressured dealers and museums like the Met to give this art back.

Matthew is an award-winning reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek. His previous book, Dead in the Water—co-authored with Kit Chellel—was selected as a Book of the Year by The Economist, the Financial Times, and The Times. Matt has reported from more than twenty-five countries on crime, corruption, terrorism, economics, and the environment. His work has earned some of journalism’s highest honors, including awards from the Gerald Loeb Foundation, the Overseas Press Club, the National Press Club, SOPA, and SABEW for both feature and investigative reporting

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Man Who Stole the Gods. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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In her most recent publication, Domestic Nationalism: Muslim Women, Health, and Modernity in Indonesia (Stanford UP, 2025), Chiara Formichi argues that Muslim women in Java and Sumatra, from the late 1910s to the 1950s, were central to Indonesia's progress as guardians and promoters of health and piety through gendered activities of care work. While sidelined in the Dutch colonial project of hygienic modernity, women's labor of social reproduction became increasingly visible during the Japanese Occupation and early years of independence. Women from all walks of life were called upon to fulfill domestic and motherly roles for the production and socialization of laborers, soldiers, and citizens. The medicalization of cleanliness, intersecting with multiple patriarchal orders, marginalized women's traditional influence and knowledge. However, leveraging the critical importance of infant care, cleanliness, and nutrition, women pushed against the boundaries imposed on them by the colonial and postcolonial state. Largely absent from government archives, their words and acts are evident in vernacular magazines and visual sources drawn from official outreach, news and lifestyle media, and advertisements. Women writers rearticulated scientific mothering, nationalist maternalism, and Islamic ideals of motherhood to create a public voice through gendered care work. The framework of Domestic Nationalism proposes that as the modern Indonesian nation-state took shape capitalizing on the public function of mothering, so did homemaking become a crossroads of national and international approaches to development, blurring nonaligned self-reliance and global capitalist interests.

In this episode Dr. Chiara Formichi (Cornell University) and Leah Cargin (University of Oklahoma and Journal of Women’s History) discuss Domestic Nationalism. We converse about feminist theory and tensions between Indonesian women and colonial establishments. We talk about food, food choices, food preparation and nutrition to reveal an intersection of hygiene, nutrition, and imperialism. And last, we discuss how imperial and colonial invocation of novel hygiene practices was a global phenomenon in the mid-twentieth century.

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Indonesia is often framed as a key arena of China-Japan-US competition in the Second Cold War. In this episode, we talk with Trissia Wijaya about her book on the political economy of Chinese and Japanese infrastructure financing in Indonesia. She challenges the view that it is simply an instrument of competition and instead situates infrastructure finance within Indonesia’s own development strategies. She shows how development assistance, commercial loans, export credits, and public-private partnerships are shaped by contestation among Chinese and Japanese capital, as well as Indonesian civil society, state actors, and labor. We also link these dynamics to the country’s changing industrial policy, from energy infrastructure to Nickel processing to the planned capital of Nusantara, asking how Indonesia uses strategies of polyalignment and foreign finance to pursue its own developmental ambitions.

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Trissia Wijaya is a McKenzie Research Fellow at the Asia Institute at the University of Melbourne. Prior to this role, she worked as a Senior Research Fellow at Asia-Japan Research Organization, Ritsumeikan University, and taught at the College of Global Liberal Arts. She received her PhD in Politics from Murdoch University, Australia, and remains affiliated as an Honorary Research Fellow at the Indo-Pacific Research Centre there. She has also worked at the Asian Development Bank and UNDP Indonesia, cultivating an interest in the political economy of development and evidence-informed policymaking. Her research spans green infrastructure financing, industrial policy, and critical mineral development. She has conducted intensive fieldwork across Indonesia, Japan, and China.

The Political Economy of Japanese and Chinese Infrastructure Financing Governance: Organizing Alliances, Institutions, and Ideology (Bristol University Press 2025)

Indonesia, nickel, and the political economy of polyalignment in the Second Cold War in Third World Quarterly

An EV-fix for Indonesia: the green development-resource nationalist nexus in Environmental Policy

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Exploring the work of established and emerging artists in Indonesia’s vibrant art world, Artists and the People: Ideologies of Art in Indonesia (NUS Press, 2022) examines why so many artists in the world’s largest archipelagic nation choose to work directly with people and in the studio. While the social dimension of Indonesian art makes it distinctive in the globalised world of contemporary art, Elly Kent is the first to explore this engagement in Indonesian terms. What are the historical, political and social conditions that lie beneath these polyvalent practices? How do formal and informal institutions, communities and artist-run-initiatives contribute to the practices and discourses behind socially-engaged art in Indonesia? What do artists do when they locate their practice in a broader social milieu, and what tensions arise when artists integrate communities, governments, politics, history and people into their practice?

Drawing on interviews with artists, translations of archival material, visual analyses and participation in artists’ projects, this book presents a unique, interdisciplinary examination of ideologies of art in Indonesia. It portrays the ways art practice and theory are understood within Indonesia and inside Indonesian-language discourse. Indonesia's artists have continued to explore, resist and draw on the methodologies and discourses of social responsibility and artistic autonomy generated by Indonesian arts practitioners through their early 20th-century encounters with modernity and the founding of the nation state. This book brings contemporary practice into conversation with art history in Indonesia.

Dr Elly Kent is a visual artist, translator, researcher and educator with 20 years of experience working in academia and the arts in Indonesia and Australia. Elly is Deputy Director of the ANU Indonesia Institute and Sub-dean of Languages in the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University. She convenes the Year in Asia program and is Treasurer of the Indonesia Council, Australia’s peak body for Indonesian studies.

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In 1898, on the eve of the Spanish-American War, the US Army seemed minuscule and ill-equipped for global conflict. Yet over the next fifteen years, its soldiers defeated Spain and pacified nationalist insurgencies in both Cuba and the Philippines. Despite their lack of experience in colonial administration, American troops also ruled and transformed the daily lives of the 8 million people who inhabited these tropical islands.
How was this relatively small and inexperienced army able to wage wars in Cuba and the Philippines and occupy them? American soldiers depended on tens of thousands of Cubans and Filipinos, both for military operations and civil government. Whether compelled to labor for free or voluntarily working for wages, Cubans and Filipinos, suspended between civilian and soldier status, enabled the making of a new US overseas empire by interpreting, guiding, building, selling sex, and many other kinds of work for American troops. In The Work of Empire: War, Occupation, and the Making of American Colonialism in Cuba and the Philippines (UNC Press, 2025), Justin Jackson reveals how their labor forged the politics, economics, and culture of American colonialism in Cuba and the Philippines and left an enduring imprint on these islands and the US Army itself. Jackson offers new ways to understand the rise of American military might and how it influenced a globalizing imperial world.

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In Singapore, the financial center of Southeast Asia, hyperurbanization and commercial development exist alongside enduring belief in the economic power of ghosts: in their ability to control the flows of money and value and to determine the outcome of investments and wagers. Spectropolis: The Enchantment of Capital in Singapore (U Minnesota Press, 2025) explores the unlikely collusion of these two systems, demonstrating both the productive role of popular beliefs in the modern world and the surprising correlations between “late” capitalism and the workings of the spirit realm. Detailing the logic and practices of Singapore’s ghost economy—from performing exorcisms on real estate development sites to offering money and commodities to the dead as a hedge against precarious real-world transactions—Joshua Comaroff shows how speculative finance, largely governed by chance and volatility, is understood via its inherently spectral qualities. Based on detailed case studies and years of extensive fieldwork, Spectropolis argues for the power of popular belief systems to theorize contemporary socioeconomic conditions and to give form to collective affect as well as shared aspirations and anxieties, often in deeply hopeful, horizontal and empowering ways.

Joshua Comaroff is the assistant professor of architecture at the National University of Singapore. He is coauthor of Horror in Architecture: The Reanimated Edition (Minnesota, 2024).

Alyssa Kee recently finished graduate studies at the University of Vienna. Her research interests lie in urban geography, multispecies ecologies, and urban food assemblages. She is currently in the field of Geographical Education.

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From about the middle of the first millennium of the Common Era through to the fifteenth century, Southeast Asian societies underwent a political transformation that produced the first, early states that were the forerunners of the countries we know today as Myanmar, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam. Dougald O’Reilly’s Empires of the Southern Ocean: Early Civilizations of Mainland and Insular Southeast Asia (Bloomsbury Academic, 2026), tells the complicated story of the development of these earlier polities from ‘chiefdoms’ to more complex states. The book highlights the role of local factors in the rise of these states, as well as the influence of early Southeast Asia’s participation in long-distance trade networks in the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea.

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In the first half of the twentieth century, the United States attempted to build a colony in the Philippines in its own image—one fraught with racist notions of what it means to be civilized, developed, and worthy of self-rule. These imported notions of race and modernity left a profound imprint on the nation. More recently, we have seen a menacing rise of Islamic "terrorism," political polarization, populism, xenophobia, and isolationism. Conventional wisdom has attributed this rise to a "failed state" or economic insecurity and cultural backlash.

In ⁠Emotional Filipinos: The American Myth of the "Lazy Native" and Islamic Separatism in the Philippines⁠ (University of Georgia Press, 2026), however, Dr. George Baylon Radics explains this forgotten part of U.S. history with emotions as a driving force behind social action. The Philippines is currently experiencing the longest-running Muslim-Christian conflict in the modern world and an increasingly anti-Western populist government. By unpacking the role of emotions from the American colonial period to the present, Emotional Filipinos blurs the line between American colonizer and Muslim-Filipino "terrorist," highlighting the lasting effects of America's footprint in Southeast Asia. Radics humanizes this fraught history and reveals unexplored connections between past and present.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose ⁠book⁠ focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on ⁠New Books with Miranda Melcher⁠, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Despite the implications of its subtitle, this is not a travel guide to Singapore, although readers run the risk of becoming tempted to venture there. Author Lim Tse Wei begins this collection of essays with the candid admission, “I am a somewhat unusual cook. My main qualification for the profession is that I was born and raised in Singapore, where food is both secular obsession and national religion. I didn’t learn to cook at my mother’s side, or my grandmother’s, and although my grandfather had been a cook for some years, we didn’t speak of it in the family. In Singapore, good sons do not learn to cook.”

Lim’s dry commentary and insight introduces us to a world of striking juxtapositions, from expatriate French chefs preparing food for diners in Chippendale chairs to street hawkers who struggle to make a living wage, let alone one that would allow them to feel like full-fledged members of Singaporean society. He makes his grandmother’s recipe for lou arh, braised duck, in suburban Massachussets and questions why anyone would export Tabasco sauce to Southeast Asia, “home of the most nuanced and varied chilli-eating culture on the planet.” There are a few recipes, some traditional, some not at all, included to illustrate ideas rather than to command us to act. And although Lim makes no attempt to be systematic in his coverage, he still paints a vivid picture of the city-state’s culinary culture.

Little Perfections: Eating in Singapore (Kitchen Arts and Letters, 2026) is available to purchase exclusively at Kitchen Arts & Letters. 

This interview was conducted by Ernest Lee, PhD student at the University of Chicago. He researches the history of postcolonial energy through the lens of development, infrastructure and environment, with a focus on West Africa and Southeast Asia.

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“What might it mean to take the dead seriously as political actors?” asks Lia Kent in this exciting new contribution to critical human rights scholarship The Unruly Dead: Spirits, Memory, and State Formation in Timor-Leste (U Wisconsin Press, 2024). In Timor-Leste, a new nation-state that experienced centuries of European colonialism before a violent occupation by Indonesia from 1975 to 1999, the dead are active participants in social and political life who continue to operate within familial structures of obligation and commitment. On individual, local, and national levels, Timor-Leste is invested in various forms of memory work, including memorialization, exhumation, reburial, and commemoration of the occupation’s victims. Such practices enliven the dead, allowing them to forge new relationships with the living and unsettling the state-building logics that seek to contain and control them.

With generous, careful ethnography and incisive analysis, Kent challenges comfortable, linear narratives of transitional justice and argues that this memory work is reshaping the East Timorese social and political order—a process in which the dead are active, and sometimes disruptive, participants. Community ties and even the landscape itself are imbued with their presence and demands, and the horrific scale of mass death in recent times—up to a third of the population perished during the Indonesian occupation—means Timor-Leste’s dead have real, significant power in the country’s efforts to remember, recover, and reestablish itself.

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