The Weirdness of White Strangers: Imaginations of Westerners in Southeast Asian Lore and Tradition

As is well known, Western writers since the Middle Ages have frequently created mythologizing and exotic imaginations of Asian cultural elements. However, the opposite is true as well. The present study discusses how Europeans could be inserted into Southeast Asian mythologizing and fantastic accounts where elements of the supernatural and essential strangeness are dominant tropes. Examples are taken from a range of legendary and literary texts from pre-colonial and early-colonial Southeast Asia which use the foreignness of the Europeans to emphasize proper values among the creators’ own ethnic group—in other words, employing the Other as a negative mirror, thus enhancing certain narrative and moralistic tropes. All this provides new insights into premodern Southeast Asian perceptions of ethnic and cultural borders.