Escaping Kakania is about fascinating characterssoldiers doctors scientists writers painterswho traveled from their eastern European homelands to colonial Southeast Asia. Their stories are told by experts on different countries in the two regions who bring diverse approaches into a conversation that crosses disciplinary and national borders. The 14 chapters deal with the diverse encounters of eastern Europeans with the many faces of colonial southeast Asia. Some essays directly engage with postcolonial studies contributing to an ongoing critical reevaluation of eastern European semiperipheral noninvolvement in colonialism. Other chapters disclose a range of perspectives and narratives that illuminate the plurality of the travelers positions while reflecting on the specificity of the eastern European experience. The travellers movedas do the chapter authorsbetween two regions that are offcentre inbetween shiftingly Eastern and disorientingly heterogeneous thus complicating colonial and postcolonial notions of Europe East and EastWest distinctions. Both at home and overseas they navigated among a multiplicity of peoples races and empires Occidents and Orients fantasies of the Self and the Other adoptingadaptingmimickingrejecting colonialist identities and ideologies. They saw both eastern Europe and southeast Asia in a distinctive light as if through each otherand so will the readers of Escaping Kakania.