Crossing the Seas of Southeast Asia: Indigenous Diasporic Islam and Performances of Women’s Igal

This chapter rearticulates the study of female citizenship and the transmission of dance among the Islamic communities of the Sama and Bajau of Southeast Asia. The research examines how indigenous people’s aesthetic practices have been shared, distributed, and passed down through internal genealogical alliances, as well as through transmission in public, internationalized space. The traditional, genealogical transmission of these practices has been disrupted and challenged by post-9/11 antiterrorism laws, which affect border crossings. Examining regulation and its consequences for society by examining the body, its geopolitical mapping, and its interconnected cultural policies among the Sama and Bajau, this research also contributes to the mapping and theorization of diaspora, the politics of memory, and “the performance of culture” to understand how the aesthetic of dance is transmitted and protected as cultural knowledge, as well as its mobility across and through the fluid borders formed by the state’s law in Southeast Asia.