“A Life Beyond Boundaries” by Benedict Anderson

Anderson was a multi-disciplinary academic, who spent most of his time in the field studying Southeast Asia. His specialities were Indonesia, Siam, and the Philippines. The title of the book refers to the fact that he considered himself a cosmopolitan, a citizen of the world. He was born in China to a British woman and an Irishman. After spending WWII stuck in California, he grew up in Ireland, before earning scholarships to Eton and Cambridge. He then began his lifelong passion with Southeast Asia at Cornell. This memoir is witty and expansive in breath. He writes about being banned from Indonesia by Suharto, how he stumbled onto the idea of nationalism’s genesis in his book, “Imagined Boundaries”, while thinking about the role of historical fiction, like “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, in shaping narratives, and how he got to meet and translate for the foremost Thai filmmaker, Apichatpong "Joe" Weerasethakul, and Indonesian novelist, Eka Kurniawan, of today. Along the way, he learned Indonesian, Dutch, Javanese, Thai, Spanish, and Tagalog well enough to write in scholarly journals. His life, he confessed, was one shaped by luck and circumstance, but one where he also took advantage and leapt at unique opportunities to push the academic disciplinary boundaries to new directions in which he willed them.