Maritime ideologies and ethnic anomalies:Sea space and the structure of subalternityin the southeast Asian littoral

Conceptions of sea space have been integral to political imaginaries in Southeast Asia. While in other parts of the world, national ideologies were often expressed in relation to a homeland, for Indonesia and the Dutch East Indies before it, geopolitical notions of place included the seas in increasingly explicit and more territorialized ways. Touching on imperial, colonial, national, and postnational settings, this piece concentrates on how the space of the seas was articulated in maritime ideologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.In addition to examining maritime ideologies from diff erent historical moments, I also explore how they may inform our understanding of changes in the confi guration of social diff erence, especially in the region's littoral. Maritime ideologies off er a privileged view into political imaginaries, yet they also suggest how structures of governance underwent changes during the late-colonial and post-independence periods. Linked to increasingly territorialized notions of space and belonging, these structures continue to play an important role in shaping Indonesian ideas of "ethnic" diff erence and the anomalous position of "sea people." The piece begins with a look at the "free seas," Hugo Grotius's Mare Liberum written in the early seventeenth century. Despite its mercantile underpinning, the Mare Liberum was composed in an anti-imperial setting, opposed to Iberian domination in both hemispheres. A similar conception of sea space as the common inheritance of all mankind appears in the remarks of a contemporaneous Southeast Asian ruler who protested Dutch attempts to monopolize trade. In contrast with these anti-imperial views, the late-colonial seas of the region appear along with their island chains in a grand image of archipelagic empire, "Insulinde." Another notion of archipelagic space, "Nusantara," came to represent the nation. Reinvented in the nineteenth century, this Javanese word from fourteenth-century texts was originally a term of reference for others, outside of Java. Only later didit signify an archipelagic expanse, and then a unitary national territory. The Malay expression tanah air prefi gured this nation-centered usage. Meaning "land (and) water" or "land of water," early twentieth-century anticolonial nationalists used "Tanah Air" to refer to the space of national belonging, much as people elsewhere might use the term "homeland." Finally, I draw attention to the most recent incarnation of Nusantara in emergent visions of the archipelago as an Islamic political space. Like earlier maritime ideologies, this rendition of sea space in a postnational Southeast Asia proff ers an alternative political imaginary.