January 23, 2025

Escaping Kakania: Eastern European Travels in Colonial Southeast Asia (CEU Press, 2024), edited by Associate Professor Jan Mrazek (NUS Southeast Asian Studies), features a diverse range of encounters narrated by Eastern Europeans during their stays and travels across Southeast Asia. Some chapters delve into post-colonial studies, critically re-evaluating eastern Europe’s “semi-peripheral” involvement in colonialism. Others unveil the plurality of the travellers’ experiences, drawing parallels between the two regions as they navigate through diverse peoples, races, and empires to establish distinct identities and ideologies.

“Kakania” is a term coined by Austrian philosophical writer Robert Musil to refer to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. According to A/P Mrazek, “escaping” Kakania figuratively alludes to an ongoing unsettled movement out of one’s self and homeland toward other forms of settlements. This journey leads to unexpected encounters and transformations that evoke a strange, mirror-like reflection of their familiar homeland, connecting and reflecting across borders.

In the first chapter of the book, “Introductory (Dis)orientation”, Singapore is contextualised as a melting pot of cultures and ethnicities. It is depicted not just as a futuristic and technologically advanced country, but as a place envisioned to inspire conversations between Eastern European and Southeast Asian scholars due to its plural nature. Although the workshop had to be moved online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, something of Singapore’s essence as a port city seeped through. Participants were able to converse freely across multiple foreign accents and even engage in side conversations in different European languages, reminding the author that amidst this “Global City”, the ancient entrepot of diverse country specialisations, disciplines, and histories still stood. The author hopes that this book fosters an awareness of the limits of our vision and the transregional mirroring and interpenetration of cultures.

Read the book here.