Aquaculture is the fastest-growing protein production industry globally, with Vietnam one of the top producers and exporters of seafood products. In Vietnam, aquaculture is seen as a means of protecting rural livelihoods threatened by the consequences of climate change on agriculture. But climate change also drives the emergence of marine bacterial pathogens, causing considerable losses to aquaculture production. Traditionally, pathogen blooms have been treated with antimicrobials – but this has resulted in the emergence and spread of antimicrobial resistance in aquaculture settings. So how can we combat these bacterial pathogens without fostering antimicrobial resistance whilst also continuing to produce the seafood needed to meet the world’s protein needs? Dr Carola Venturini is an expert research microbiologist and lecturer at the Sydney School of Veterinary Sciences at the University of Sydney. Her work investigates solutions to the crisis posed by the global rise in antimicrobial resistance in bacteria causing severe infections, with a particular focus on One Health/One World approaches. Her primary research areas are anti-microbial resistance transmission routes and mechanisms, impact of antibiotic use on gut health, and the design of bacteriophage-based applications against multidrug resistant pathogens, including in aquaculture settings in Australia and Vietnam. Dr Natali Pearson is Curriculum Coordinator at the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, a university-wide multidisciplinary center at the University of Sydney, Australia. Her research focuses on the protection, management and interpretation of underwater cultural heritage in Southeast Asia. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

What does nation-branding mean to you? For many listeners, the term probably conjures up ideas of catchy slogans and international tourism or trade promotion campaigns. Think again. In her new book Branding Authoritarian Nations: Political Legitimation and Strategic National Myths in Military-Ruled Thailand (Routledge, 2023), Petra Alderman examines how a military junta deployed nation-branding in the wake of the May 2014 Thai coup d'état, as means of promoting domestic political legitimacy for a regime that had seized power by force. The junta's methods might have appeared 'soft' - avuncular ranging from prime ministerial broadcasts to catchy rap songs - but the goals were deeply authoritarian, and primary audience for the campaigns were not global investors, but ordinary Thai citizens. Thailand has been by no means unique in deploying the rhetoric of nation-branding in service of suppressing human rights and quashing domestic dissent. Petra Alderman is Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Leadership for Inclusive and Democratic Politics and a Research Fellow with the Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation (CEDAR), International Development Department, University of Birmingham, UK. She works in the areas of democracy, authoritarianism, elections, environmental leadership, and promotional politics, has a geographical focus on Southeast Asia, and is fluent in Thai.  Petra was previously a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies in Copenhagen, and her articles have appeared in Asian Studies Review, Contemporary Southeast Asia, Geopolitics, Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs, and Politics. She can be contacted at p.alderman@bham.ac.uk Duncan McCargo is Professor of Global Affairs at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, and is best known for his work on the politics of Thailand. Duncan can be reached at duncan.mccargo@ntu.edu.sg. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Cosmetic surgery was once associated with a one-size-fits-all approach, modifying patients to conform to a single standard of beauty. As this surgery has become more accessible worldwide, changing beauty trends have led to a proliferation of beauty standards for members of different racial groups. In Refashioning Race: How Global Cosmetic Surgery Crafts New Beauty Standards (University of California Press, 2023) Dr. Alka V. Menon enters the world of cosmetic surgeons, journeying from a sprawling convention centre in Kyoto to boutique clinics in the multicultural countries of the United States and Malaysia. She shows how surgeons generate and apply knowledge using racial categories and how this process is affected by transnational clinical and economic exchanges. Surgeons not only measure and organise but also elaborate upon racial differences in a globalised field of medicine. Focusing on the role of cosmetic surgeons as gatekeepers and producers of desired appearances, Refashioning Race argues that cosmetic surgeons literally reshape race—both on patients' bodies and at the broader level of culture. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Beauty is often dismissed as superfluous and frivolous cultural consumption. In her book, Beauty Regimes: A History of Power and Modern Empire in the Philippines, 1898-1941 (Duke UP, 2023), Genevieve Clutario asks the readers, "what can we gain by taking beauty seriously?" (3) What does it tell us about national identity formation and intimate connections between overlapping empires? Bringing together sartorial styles and women's labor by critically engaging with archival documents ranging from colonial government reports to photograph collections, memoirs, and women’s magazines, Clutario shows how “colonial subjects, like Filipinas, were not only impacted by [nation-building] but also actively shaped [these] ventures within and beyond national borders” (14). Furthermore, her work highlights how the embroidery industry, public schools, and colonial prison systems mobilized the racial idea of dexterous fingers and modernization to discipline Filipina women. However, the imperial rule was contested by Flipina women, as the Manila Carnival Queen contests became a site of negotiating US imperialism through national identity formation. Beauty Regimes is an important read for anyone who is interested in gender, continuities between empires, labor, and critical engagement with the archives. Genevieve Clutario is associate professor of American Studies at Wellesley College and the author of Beauty Regimes: A History of Power and Modern Empire in the Philippines, 1898 - 1941 (Duke University Press, 2023). She is a recipient of the Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award and the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University First Book Award. Her other publications include “Pageant Politics: Tensions of Power, Empire, and Nationalism in Manila Carnival Queen Contests,” in Gendering the Trans-Pacific World (Brill Press, 2017) and “World War II and the Promise of Normalcy: Filipina Lives Under Two Empires” in Beyond the Edge of the Nation: Transimperial Histories with a U.S. Angle (Duke University Press, 2020). She is currently pursuing a new project called Power and Allure: Gender, Authoritarianism, and the Promise of Development with interests on topics such as the Cold War, international development, U.S. imperialism, and the making of the Global South. Da In Ann Choi is a PhD student at UCLA in the Gender Studies department. Her research interests include care labor and migration, reproductive justice, social movement, citizenship theory, and critical empire studies. She can be reached at dainachoi@g.ucla.edu. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In The Archival Afterlives of Philippine Cinema (Duke University Press, 2024), Bliss Cua Lim draws on cultural policy, queer and feminist theory, materialist media studies, and postcolonial historiography to analyze the crisis-ridden history of Philippine film archiving—a history of lost films, limited access, and collapsed archives. Rather than denigrate underfunded Philippine audiovisual archives in contrast to institutions in the global North, this book shows how archival practices of making do can inspire alternative theoretical and historical approaches to cinema. Lim examines formal state and corporate archives, analyzing restorations of the last nitrate film and a star-studded lesbian classic as well as archiving under the Marcos dictatorship. She also foregrounds informal archival efforts: a cinephilic video store specializing in vintage Tagalog classics; a microcuratorial initiative for experimental films; and guerilla screenings for rural Visayan audiences. Throughout, Lim centers the improvisational creativity of audiovisual archivists, collectors, advocates, and amateurs who embrace imperfect access in the face of inhospitable conditions. Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

A uniquely powerful marker of ethnic, gender, and class identities, scent can also overwhelm previously constructed boundaries and transform social-sensory realities within contexts of environmental degradation, pathogen outbreaks, and racial politics. Hannah Gould and Gwyn McClelland's edited volume Aromas of Asia: Exchanges, Histories, Threats (Penn State University Press, 2023) critically examines olfaction in Asian societies with the goal of unlocking its full potential as an analytical frame and lived phenomenon. Featuring contributions from international scholars with deep knowledge of the region, this volume conceptualizes Asia and its borders as a dynamic, transnationally connected space of olfactory exchange. Using examples such as trade along the Silk Road; the diffusion of dharmic religious traditions out of South Asia; the waves of invasion, colonization, and forced relocation that shaped the history of the continent; and other “sensory highways” of contact, the contributors break down essentializing olfactory tropes and reveal how scent functions as a category of social and moral boundary-marking and boundary-breaching within, between, and beyond Asian societies. Smell shapes individual, collective, and state-based memory, as well as discourses about heritage and power. As such, it suggests a pervasive and powerful intimacy that contributes to our understanding of the human condition, mobility, and interconnection. In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume include Khoo Gaik Cheng, Jean Duruz, Qian Jia, Shivani Kapoor, Adam Liebman, Lorenzo Marinucci, Peter Romaskiewicz, Saki Tanada, Aubrey Tang, and Ruth E. Toulson. Rituparna Patgiri has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Thomas Baudinette's Boys Love Media in Thailand: Celebrity, Fans, and Transnational Asian Queer Popular Culture (Bloomsbury, 2023) explores the contours of fandom, and in particular the mainstreaming of queer romance, not only in Thailand but in the Philippines and also Japan. Topics include the Japanese origins of the Boys Love trope, the Thai Boys Love series, the audiences the series has found in Thailand and elsewhere. This podcast is also hosted by the New Books Network, and will focus on the significance of this genre for our understanding of Thailand. Over the past several years, the Thai popular culture landscape has radically transformed due to the emergence of “Boys Love” (BL) soap operas which celebrate the love between handsome young men. Boys Love Media in Thailand is the first book length study of this increasingly significant transnational pop culture phenomenon. Drawing upon six years of ethnographic research, the book reveals BL's impacts on depictions of same-sex desire in Thai media culture and the resultant mainstreaming of queer romance through new forms of celebrity and participatory fandom. The author explores how the rise of BL has transformed contemporary Thai consumer culture, leading to heterosexual female fans of male celebrities who perform homoeroticism becoming the main audience to whom Thai pop culture is geared. Through the case study of BL, this book thus also investigates how Thai media is responding to broader regional trends across Asia where the economic potentials of female and queer fans are becoming increasingly important. Baudinette ultimately argues that the center of queer cultural production in Asia has shifted from Japan to Thailand, investigating both the growing international fandom of Thailand's BL series as well as the influence of international investment into the development of these media. The book particularly focuses on specific case studies of the fandom for Thai BL celebrity couples in Thailand, China, the Philippines, and Japan to explore how BL series have transformed each of these national contexts' queer consumer cultures. Professor Michele Ford is the Director of the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, a university-wide multidisciplinary center at the University of Sydney, Australia. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Jeremy Yellen’s The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: When Total Empire Met Total War (Cornell University Press, 2019) is a challenging transnational exploration of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, Japan’s ambitious, confused, and much maligned attempt to create a new bloc order in East and Southeast Asia during World War II. Yellen’s book is welcome both as the first book-length treatment of the Sphere in English and for also being innovative in both approach and analysis. The book is divided into two parts, each addressing one of the “two Pacific Wars,” as Yellen puts it: a “war of empires” and “an anticolonial war… for independence.” The first half of the book treats the Japanese “high policy” of the Sphere. Here, Yellen not only provides—through the Coprosperity Sphere—a provocative new reading of the Tripartite Pact and the imbrication of Japan’s regional and global geopolitical strategies, but also outlines an important timeline of how Japanese conceptualizations of the Sphere evolved with the changing economic, political, and military expediencies of the Pacific War. Though ideas about the Sphere as a regional order of hierarchical solidarity with Japan at its apex, a “grand strategy of opportunism” rooted in the “sphere-of-influence diplomacy” and “cooperative imperialism” of Japan’s bombastic and enigmatic foreign minister, Matsuoka Yōsuke, Yellen shows that plans for the Sphere only became specific and concrete when Japan’s war situation descended into increasing desperation from 1942 on. The second half of the book shifts gears to examine responses to the Sphere in the Philippines and Burma. Yellen shows that for local nationalist elites like Burma’s first prime minister Ba Maw, whether Japanese rhetoric about the creation of more-or-less liberal international order within the Sphere for the top-echelon nations like Burma and the Philippines was genuine or self-serving, “even sham independence brought opportunity.” By focusing on these pragmatic nationalists (“patriotic collaborators”) Yellen contributes to a growing body of literature on empire that refuses to be pigeonholed by binaries of virtuous resistance and traitorous collaboration. This podcast was recorded as a lecture/dialogue for a live audience at Nagoya University. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

What does astrology, palm-reading and fortune telling have to do with politics in Thailand, and how can we make sense of these divination practices and their use in Thai politics? Listen to Edoardo Siani and Petra Alderman in this episode of the Nordic Asia Podcast to learn more about divination and the way it was used during the recent student-led protests in Thailand. Edoardo Siani is an Assistant Professor of Southeast Asian Studies at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. Edoardo’s research concerns the relationship between Buddhist cosmology and politics in Thailand, focusing on divination, kingship, and spirit mediumship. To learn more about his research, read his article ‘Co-opting the stars: Divination and the politics of resistance in Buddhist Thailand.’ The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, the University of Helsinki, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

The notions of labour, mobility and piety have a complex and intertwined relationship. Using ethnographic methods and a historical perspective, Vineeta Sinha's Temple Tracks: Labour, Piety and Railway Construction in Asia (Berghahn Books, 2023) critically outlines the interlink of railway construction in colonial and post-colonial Asia, as well as the anthropology of infrastructure and transnational mobilities with religion. In Malaysia and Singapore, evidence of religion-making and railway-building from a colonial past is visible in multiple modes and media as memories, recollections and 'traces'. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Have you ever heard of Kawi? Much of what is considered “classical” in Indonesian history, such as the Borobudur temple complex or the kingdom of Majapahit, is a product of Kawi Culture. In fact, Indonesian society emerged from the ancient traditions of Kawi Culture, which stretch back over a thousand years. The symbols and ideas of Kawi Culture continue to define Indonesian identity, such as in Javanese wayang, Balinese temples, and even the national motto Bhinneka Tunggal Ika, which is quoted from a Kawi poem. So what is Kawi, and why is it the classical civilisation no one has heard of? To answer these questions, Dr Wayan Jarrah Sastrawan, joins Dr Natali Pearson. Jarrah is a historian who specialises in the premodern history of Indonesia. He has written and spoken widely on the history of Indonesia and Malaysia. His current research focusses on the development of social institutions and state formation in eighth- to tenth-century Java. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In 1863 the French established a protectorate over the kingdom of Cambodia. The protectorate, along with Vietnam and Laos, later became part of the colonial state of French Indochina. Part of the French ‘civilizing mission’ in Cambodia involved reforming Cambodian law and legal processes.  Sally Low’s pioneering study, Colonial Law Making: Cambodia under the French (NUS Press, 2023), tells the story of the encounter between what she calls two different legal and social ‘cosmologies’: Cambodia’s indigenous legal tradition and modern French legal thinking. While the French claimed they were modernizing Cambodian law, in fact they imposed many elements of French law. Initially, they dispossessed the king of much of his judicial authority. But ironically, the French reform of Cambodian law retained the monarchy as the semi-divine source of law, and royal power was subsequently legally embedded into new national institutions, the law, and the constitutions. At independence in 1953, 90 years after the French began their protectorate, Cambodia’s King Sihanouk inherited this legal apparatus which had done so much to enhance the power of the executive over the judiciary. Patrick Jory teaches Southeast Asian History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. He can be reached at: p.jory@uq.edu.au. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

The Starving Empire: A History of Famine in France's Colonies (Cornell University Press, 2023) by Dr. Yan Slobodkin traces the history of famine in the modern French Empire, showing that hunger is intensely local and sweepingly global, shaped by regional contexts and the transnational interplay of ideas and policies all at once. By integrating food crises in Algeria, West and Equatorial Africa, and Vietnam into a broader story of imperial and transnational care, Dr. Slobodkin reveals how the French colonial state and an emerging international community took increasing responsibility for subsistence, but ultimately failed to fulfill this responsibility. Europeans once dismissed colonial famines as acts of god, misfortunes of nature, and the inevitable consequences of backward races living in harsh environments. But as Dr. Slobodkin recounts, drawing on archival research from four continents, the twentieth century saw transformations in nutrition, scientific racism, and international humanitarianism that profoundly altered ideas of what colonialism could accomplish. A new confidence in the ability to mitigate hunger, coupled with new norms of moral responsibility, marked a turning point in the French Empire's relationship to colonial subjects—and to nature itself. Increasingly sophisticated understandings of famine as a technical problem subject to state control saddled France with untenable obligations. The Starving Empire not only illustrates how the painful history of colonial famine remains with us in our current understandings of public health, state sovereignty, and international aid, but also seeks to return food—this most basic of human needs—to its central place in the formation of modern political obligation and humanitarian ethics. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Scholarly discussions on Islam in print have focused predominantly on the role of Urdu in the development of North Indian Muslim publics (Dubrow, 2018; Robb, 2020), ʿulama and Islamic jurisprudence (Tareen, 2020) and relations between Islam and colonial modernity (Robinson, 2008; Osella & Osella, 2008). This special issue of International Journal of Islam in Asia (Sept, 2023) instead offers fine-grained investigations on technology and labour; print landscapes, networks and actors; subaltern languages; and popular Islam. We critique the idea of an “epistemic rupture” brought about by colonial modernity, providing a more systematic analysis of continuities and changes in Islamic knowledge economy. Examining two centuries of print authored by South Asian Muslims, the articles in the issue provide new ways of thinking about questions of knowledge production, distribution, circulation and reception. The issue broadens the scope of earlier scholarship, examining genres such as cosmology, divination, devotional poems, salacious songs, romances and tales of war in Urdu, Persian, Arabic, dobhāṣī do Bangla, Arabic Malayalam, Sindhi, Balochi and Brahui. The articles show the different ways that pre-colonial practices and cultures of writing and reading persisted in the print landscape, in terms of copying, adaptation, translation and circulation of texts. They inquire into new technologies, labour and networks that evolved, and how it provided fertile ground for both new and traditional forms of religious activities and authorities. The articles present new Muslim publics, geographies, and imaginaries forged through the vernacularisation of Islam, and their relationship to the transnational or global community. Nur Sobers-Khan is a researcher and curator of Islamic manuscripts, art and archival collections. She served as director of the Aga Khan Documentation Center, a research centre and archive for the study of visual culture, architecture and urbanism in Muslim societies (2021-22). Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. His research focuses on the intersection of law, the occult sciences, and the environment across the Western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In the last of our five special podcasts about from the recent SSEAC field schools to Southeast Asia, we will be hearing from students and staff from the field school to Cambodia, which looked anti-microbial resistance (AMR). This field school was offered to students from medical sciences, pharmacy, arts, international relations, media and communications, science, public health, vet science, and social work. Leaders Justin Beardsley and Leanne Howie are joined by two University of Sydney students – Sam and Alannah. The students consider many of the important aspects of their experience including: the value of transdisciplinary research, challenges, learnings, cultural differences and navigating these with sensitivity, and gaining insights into their own educational experience by moving outside their usual environment. Dr Natali Pearson is Curriculum Coordinator at the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, a university-wide multidisciplinary center at the University of Sydney, Australia. Her research focuses on the protection, management and interpretation of underwater cultural heritage in Southeast Asia. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Historians have tended to view the Cold War as a global ideological confrontation between an expansionist communist Soviet Union and a capitalist United States which sought to contain communism. And this confrontation was fought out by their proxies in the Third World. But in recent years, a new generation of scholars, many of them from Asian countries that were “hot” battlegrounds for the Cold War, have rethought this paradigm. They give much more agency to local political actors, pursuing local political agendas.  In her provocative new book, Indigenizing the Cold War: The Border Patrol Police and Nation-Building in Thailand (U Hawaii Press, 2023), Sinae Hyun argues that in the case of Thailand, local political elites skillfully used the Cold War to achieve their own political ends. The book is a case study of Thailand’s Border Patrol Police, a unit which was initially set up with the assistance of the CIA, and which later developed a close relationship with the Thai monarchy. Besides promoting anti-communism, the Border Patrol Police played a key role in nation-building in the rural regions of the country. The Border Patrol Police is also notorious for its involvement in the massacre of leftist students at Thammasat University on October 6, 1976. Patrick Jory teaches Southeast Asian History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. He can be reached at: p.jory@uq.edu.au. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In the fourth of five special podcasts about from the recent SSEAC field schools to Southeast Asia, we will be hearing from students and staff from the field school to Timor Leste, which looked at disability and work. This field school was offered to students from health sciences, psychology, and social work. Leader Natali Pearson is joined by co-leader, Kim Bulkeley, and two University of Sydney students – Rosie and Alana. The students consider many of the important aspects of their experience including: what it’s like to meet a head of state, the value of learning transdisciplinary research methods, managing cultural differences, and gaining insights into their own educational experience and culture by moving outside their usual environment. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In A Synthesis of Time: Zakat, Islamic Micro-finance and the Question of the Future in 21st-Century Indonesia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), Konstantinos Retsikas has anthropological investigation into the different forms the economy assumes, and the different purposes it serves, when conceived from the perspective of Islamic micro-finance as a field of everyday practice. The book is based on long-term ethnographic research in Java, Indonesia, with Islamic foundations active in managing zakat and other charitable funds, for purposes of poverty alleviation. Specifically, the book explores the social foundations of contemporary Islamic practices that strive to encompass the economic within an expanded domain of divine worship and elucidates the effects such encompassment has on time, its fissure and synthesis.  In order to elaborate on the question of time, the book looks beyond anthropology and Islamic studies, engaging attentively, critically and productively with the post-structuralist work of G. Deleuze, M. Foucault and J. Derrida, three of the most important figures of the temporal turn in contemporary continental philosophy. Through doing so, the book impressively untangles the complex relationship between Islamic economics, divine worship, and time. Konstantinos Retsikas is Reader in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at SOAS, University of London, UK. His work focuses on temporality and personhood, and he has written extensively on issues of embodiment, place making, violence, and religion. He is also the author of Becoming: An Anthropological Approach to Understandings of the Person in Java (2012). Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. He conducts ethnography among ufologists in China. His research interests lie at the intersection of the anthropology of the paranormal, hope studies, and post-structural philosophy. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

The northeast Indian state of Assam has had a complex history. As independence loomed, Assam was a large British province, bordering the fellow British colony of Burma and covering a large segment of India’s northeast. Today’s Assam is much smaller: First partition cut Assam off from the rest of India, with just a tiny “chicken neck” of land connecting the state with India proper. Then decades of tension between the Assamese and minority groups led to new states being created from within its borders: Nagaland, Meghalaya and Mizoram, to name a few. Arupjyoti Saikia takes on the task of explaining six decades of Assam history in his latest book, The Quest for Modern Assam: A History, 1942-2000 (India Allen Lane, 2023) In this interview, Arupjyoti and I talk about Assam’s history from the Second World War and the decades since independence, including some of the wild schemes the British tried to apply to the Indian northeast, and why it’s important to understand Indian history through its federal states. Arupjyoti Saikia is a professor of history at the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati. He held the Agrarian Studies Programme Fellowship at Yale University and visiting fellow positions at Cambridge University and the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. He is also the author of Forests and Ecological History of Assam, 1826-2000 (Oxford University Press: 2011), A Century of Protests: Peasant Politics in Assam since 1900 (Routledge: 2014), and The Unquiet River: A Biography of the Brahmaputra (Oxford University Press: 2019). You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Quest for Modern Assam. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In Resource Nationalism in Indonesia: Booms, Big Business, and the State (Cornell UP, 2023), Eve Warburton traces nationalist policy trajectories in Indonesia back to the preferences of big local business interests. Commodity booms often prompt more nationalist policy styles in resource-rich countries. Usually, this nationalist push weakens once a boom is over. But in Indonesia, a major global exporter of coal, palm oil, nickel, and other minerals, the intensity of nationalist policy interventions increased after the early twenty-first century commodity boom came to an end. Equally puzzling, the state applied nationalist policies unevenly across the land and resource sectors. Resource Nationalism in Indonesia explains these trends by examining the economic and political benefits that accrue to domestic business actors when commodity prices soar. Warburton shows how the centrality of patronage to Indonesia's democratic political economy, and the growing importance of mining and palm oil as a drivers of export earnings, enhanced both the instrumental and structural power of major domestic companies, giving them new influence over the direction of nationalist change. Eve Warburton is Director of the ANU Indonesia Institute and a Research Fellow in the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs at the Australian National University. Professor Michele Ford is the Director of the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, a university-wide multidisciplinary center at the University of Sydney, Australia. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

The Cambodian Civil War and genocide of the late 1960s and ’70s left the country and its diaspora with long-lasting trauma that continues to reverberate through the community. In Cambodian Evangelicalism: Cosmological Hope and Diasporic Resilience (Pennsylvania State UP, 2023), Briana L. Wong explores the compelling stories of Cambodian evangelicals, their process of conversion, and how their testimonials to the Christian faith helped them to make sense of and find purpose in their trauma. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with Cambodian communities in the metropolitan areas of Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Paris, and Phnom Penh, Wong examines questions of religious identity and the search for meaning within the context of transnational Cambodian evangelicalism. While the community has grown in recent decades, Christians nevertheless make up a small minority of the predominantly Buddhist diaspora. Wong explores what it is about Christianity that makes these converts willing to risk their social standing, familial bonds, and, in certain cases, physical safety in order to identify with the faith. Contributing to ongoing dialogues on conversion, reverse mission, and multiple religious belonging, this book will appeal to students and scholars of world Christianity, missiology, and the history of Christianity, as well as Southeast Asian studies, secular sociologies, and anthropologists operating within the field of religious studies. Byung Ho Choi is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History and Ecumenics, with a concentration in World Christianity and history of religions at Princeton Theological Seminary. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In the third of five special podcasts about from the recent SSEAC field schools to Southeast Asia, we will be hearing from students and staff from the field school to the Philippines, which looked at disaster risk and resilience. This field school was offered to students from arts, architecture, nursing, engineering, commerce and science. Leader Aaron Opdyke is joined by co-leader, Emily Nabong, and two University of Sydney students – Oli and Sophia. The students consider many of the important aspects of their experience including flexibility in research goals, managing change, the value of transdisciplinary research, cultural differences and navigating these with sensitivity, and gaining insights into their own educational experience by moving outside their usual environment. Dr Natali Pearson is Curriculum Coordinator at the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, a university-wide multidisciplinary center at the University of Sydney, Australia. Her research focuses on the protection, management and interpretation of underwater cultural heritage in Southeast Asia. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In the second of five special podcasts about from the recent SSEAC field schools to Southeast Asia, we will be hearing from students and staff from the field school to Indonesia, which looked at social justice. This field school was offered to students from law, political economy, geography, gender and cultural studies, Indonesian studies, and Asian studies. Leader Sonja van Wichelen is joined by co-leader, Dadung Mukitono, and two University of Sydney students – Bella and Sam. The students reflect on their learning, how to interact with the task at hand and research using methods from different disciplines, understanding the value of considering and applying the approach of students from faculties they don’t usually interact with, all while seeking to meet the needs of the local culture and situation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In late 2015 Daw Aung San Suu Kyi led Myanmar’s National League for Democracy to a smashing general election victory. In one of her first public appearances since the win, Suu Kyi went to a roadside to be photographed by journalists picking up garbage. Why? What was she doing there? The obvious answer to that question is: launching a nationwide trash clearance campaign. The less obvious but more interesting one is: outsourcing the polity.  That’s the title of a new book by Gerard McCarthy, Outsourcing the Polity: Non-State Welfare, Inequality and Resistance in Myanmar (Cornell University Press, 2023), which is the subject of this episode of New Books in Southeast Asian Studies. In it McCarthy explains how the NLD government’s failure to break with the political economy of military dictatorship was not due to structural constraints alone, but was ideologically motivated. Drawing on years of ethnographic and survey research in Myanmar, he shows how welfare capitalism can slip between regime types, and insidiously undermine programs for social justice through redistribution of wealth. Like this interview? If so you might also be interested in: Tamas Wells, Narrating Democracy in Myanmar Jane Ferguson, Repossessing Shanland  Nick Cheesman is Associate Professor, Department of Political & Social Change, Australian National University. He hosts the New Books in Interpretive Political & Social Science series on the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In 1987, Chris Stowers ditches his dull job in the UK and embarks on a trip throughout the Asia-Pacific, following countless other adventurers traveling with just a backpack and a miniscule budget in what he calls the “golden age of travel.” In his many adventures around the region, two particular stories stand out enough for Chris to turn into a book, Bugis Nights (Earnshaw, 2023). The first is his encounter with an older German woman in the Himalayan mountains, with a penchant for flirtation and teasing. The second is a maritime journey from a remote Indonesian island to Singapore, on a wooden sloop and a rowdy and raucous French crew. In this interview, Chris and I talk about his journey—both in Southeast Asia and the Himalayas—and the golden age of travel. Chris Stowers is a photographer and reporter, who has traveled to over seventy countries around the world. His work has appeared in publications like Newsweek, Forbes and the New York Times. His journey on the sloop led to his first story and photos being published, and began his career in photography. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Bugis Nights. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

COVID-19 in Southeast Asia: Insights for a Post-pandemic World (Ubiquity Press, 2021) brings together an ensemble of social scientists who offer critical reflections on how the pandemic was experienced in the region. It interrogates dominants narratives of Covid-19’s legacies and invites readers to reflect of what it means to return to ‘normal’ in contexts marked by inequalities, selective policy interventions, and invisibilised experiences of marginalised communities. The book is structured around three themes: (1) urbanisation, digital infrastructures, economies, and the environment; (2) migrants, (im)mobilities, and borders; and (3) collective action, communities, and mutual action. Each chapter offers a distinctive point of view that contribute to a wider project of decolonising knowledge production. Hyun Bang Shin is Professor of Geography and Urban Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science and directs the LSE Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre. Murray Mckenzie is a postdoctoral research assistant and research officer at the LSE Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre, and a strategic planning consultant. Do Young Oh is an assistant professor at the Department of Urban Planning and Engineering, Pusan National University.  Interested readers can have the open access version of the book using this link. Like this interview? You may also be interested in: Christian M. Anderson, Urbanism without Guarantees: The Everyday Life of a Gentrifying West Side Neighborhood, (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) Jacob Lederman, Chasing World-Class Urbanism: Global Policy Versus Everyday Survival in Buenos Aires, (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) Nicole Curato is a Professor of Sociology in the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra. She co-hosts the New Books in Southeast Asia Studies channel. This episode was created in collaboration with Erron C. Medina of the Development Studies Program of Ateneo De Manila University and Nicole Anne Revita. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

The International Labour Organization estimates that in Southeast Asia there are 30 million children engaged in paid work, 17 million in engaged in unpaid work and 50 million who don’t attend school. These figures can be a shock to people living in countries like Australia where childhood is typically a non-productive stage of life more readily associated with schooling and dependence on adults. What is the meaning of “childhood” in contexts of adversity where if you don’t work as a child, you and your family won’t survive? What does it mean where to attend school is to place your family in a precarious financial situation? To discuss these questions is Dr Maria Amigó, senior lecturer at the University of Sydney. Maria is a social anthropologist and has studied children and childhood in contexts of adversity for over 20 years. Amigó is the author of Children Chasing Money: Children's Work in Rural Lombok, Indonesia (VDM, 2010). Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Adoniram Judson was the 19th-century version of an American celebrity. Americans flocked to listen to his tales of being one of the first missionaries to enter the Kingdom of Burma. Americans wanted to hear of his mission in the Buddhist kingdom; Judson was reportedly uncomfortable with the attention. These missions to Burma flopped among the Buddhist majority, but won converts among its minorities: the Karen, the Kachin, and others. Alexandra Kaloyonides covers these missions in Baptizing Burma: Religious Change in the Last Buddhist Kingdom (Columbia University Press: 2023), her latest book. Alexandra Kaloyonides is an Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte where her teaching focuses on Buddhism. Dr. Kaloyanides serves as Associate Editor of Material Religion, served as Managing Editor of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, and served as editor of the Asian Traditions section of Marginalia Review of Books, a Los Angeles Review of Books Channel. Today, Alex and I talk about the missions to Burma, their success among the country’s minority groups, and how Christian faith became wrapped in the country’s identity formation. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Baptizing Burma. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

The Politics of Rights and Southeast Asia (Cambridge UP, 2022) offers an empirically-grounded approach to understanding the mobilisation of rights in the region. Instead of deriving definitions of rights from abstract philosophical text, court verdicts or statutes, the book advances a socio-legal approach which considers rights as social practices that take meaning from the various ways in which people enact, mobilise, and practice these rights. In doing so, the book offers a point of view that goes beyond the liberal versus critical rights perspective debate. The book is structured in three sections, with each section focusing on (1) the structural conditions that influence the emergence of rights mobilisation in the region; (2) the various ways in which people mobilise these rights; and (3) the consequences of these mobilisations. It concludes with a call to give rights a chance while embracing its incoherence. Lynette J. Chua is Professor of Law at the National University of Singapore (NUS). Like this interview? You may also be interested in: Donald P. Haider-Markel and Jami K. Taylor, Transgender Rights and Politics (University of Michigan Press, 2014) Rachel E Brulé, Women, Power, and Property (Cambridge University Press, 2020) Nicole Curato is a Professor of Sociology in the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra. She co-hosts the New Books in Southeast Asia Studies channel. This episode was created in collaboration with Erron C. Medina of the Development Studies Program of Ateneo De Manila University and Nicole Anne Revita. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Kathrin Eitel's book Recycling Infrastructures in Cambodia: Circularity, Waste, and Urban Life in Phnom Penh (Routledge, 2022) examines the recycling infrastructure in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. It considers the circular flows of waste and practices through 'infracycles', maintenance practices that tinker with the social and capitalist order, and postcolonial ways of doing politics that co-constitute predominant waste fantasies from which naturecultures ooze out, shaping urban life in their own way. In this context, socially marginalized waste pickers contest the capitalist system by creating tropes about freedom, labor autonomy, and the will to survive. In this regard, they are also meddling about a new social order that represents the fine line Cambodia is sashaying between tradition and modernity. Waste fantasies that are a result of environmental problematizations, however, perpetuate postcolonial ways of doing politics by exuding notions of waste as detached from its sociocultural context. But ultimately, waste slips through the cracks of these dominant imaginaries and global waste reduction models enacting new versions of what waste and the city is, providing opportunities for another future waste policy. This book is a unique contribution to the field of infrastructure studies emphasizing the importance of perceiving infrastructure as circular in smaller 'infracycles', rather than linear. It will be of interest to researchers in the field of environmental anthropology, science and technology studies, urban studies, and Southeast Asian studies. The Introduction of this book is available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. Kathrin Eitel is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies at the University of Zurich. Professor Michele Ford is the Director of the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, a university-wide multidisciplinary center at the University of Sydney, Australia. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In the southern Philippines, the Bohol community speaks a language they say one man, Pinay, created long ago, leaving it for a modern Filipino named Mariano Datahan to rediscover and reenliven. The Last Language on Earth: Linguistic Utopianism in the Philippines (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Piers Kelly tells the story of the Eskayan language through linguistic, ethnographic, and historical analysis. Kelly investigates the origins of the Eskayan language as well as its role in political and conceptual controversies around language diversity and colonial contact. Carefully avoiding—and problematizing—dichotomies such as “real or fake,” “invented or natural,” the book explores not only the nature of Eskayan, its writing system, lexicon, and syntax, but also its relationship to other languages employed in the Philippines and to strategies of colonial resistance across Southeast Asia. Malcolm Keating is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Yale-NUS College. His research focuses on Sanskrit works of philosophy in Indian traditions, in the areas of language and epistemology. He is the author of Language, Meaning, and Use in Indian Philosophy (Bloomsbury Press, 2019) and host of the podcast Sutras & Stuff. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

The East India Company is remembered as the world's most powerful, not to say notorious, corporation. But for many of its advocates from the 1770s to the 1850s it was also the world's most enlightened one.  Joshua Ehrlich reveals that a commitment to knowledge was integral to the Company's ideology. In The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge (Cambridge UP, 2023), he shows how the Company cited this commitment in defense of its increasingly fraught union of commercial and political power. He moves beyond studies of orientalism, colonial knowledge, and information with a new approach: the history of ideas of knowledge. He recovers a world of debate among the Company's officials and interlocutors, Indian and European, on the political uses of knowledge. Not only were these historical actors highly articulate on the subject but their ideas continue to resonate in the present. Knowledge was a fixture in the politics of the Company – just as it seems to be becoming a fixture in today's politics. Joshua Ehrlich is a historian of knowledge, political thought, the East India Company, the British Empire, and South and Southeast Asia. Currently Assistant Professor of History at the University of Macau, he received a PhD and MA from Harvard University and a BA from the University of Chicago. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Is migration good or bad for development? How does migration affect those who leave and those who stay behind? How are rural and urban livelihoods interconnected in Asian cities? What are the likely main migration trends in Asia the coming decade? And what can you learn from studying the same village for decades? To discuss these diverse questions, we are joined by two leading experts on development and migration in Asia, Jonathan Rigg and Marta Bivand Erdal. Drawing on extensive experience working in South and Southeast Asia, they discuss complex questions of leaving and staying in contemporary Asia, how to study migration processes and how context matters for understanding the impact of migration. Professor Jonathan Rigg is Chair in Human Geography at the University of Bristol. He has decades of experience working on development and migration in South and Southeast Asia, focusing on issues such as rural-urban relations, livelihoods, coping and resilience, hazards and disasters and, more broadly, rural development. In 2020, he was awarded the prestigious Victoria Medal from the Royal Geographical Society for his work. Marta Bivand Erdal is Research Professor at the Peace Research Institute in Oslo. She has done extensive research on migration processes in South Asia, as well as Norway and Poland, combining research on migration processes and transnational ties, with research on living together in culturally and religiously diverse societies. She currently leads the the ERC-funded Project ‘Migration rhythms in trajectories of upward social mobility in Asia’, studying migration and the formation of new middle classes in Karachi, Mumbai, Hanoi and Manilla. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

The Golden Voice: The Ballad of Cambodian Rock's Lost Queen (Life Drawn, 2023) is very well-reseraech graphic novel based on the life of beloved Cambodian singer Ros Serey Sothea, whose “Golden Voice” helped define Cambodia’s Golden Age of music until her mysterious disappearance in the killing fields of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. Developed in partnership with Sothea’s family. There is a saying in Cambodia: Music is the soul of a nation. Perhaps no one embodied that spirit more than Ros Serey Sothea, a young woman who would forever change the landscape of Cambodian music as the Queen with the Golden Voice. From a humble rice farmer to nationally recognized singer, Sothea’s success captured the hearts of the Khmer people. Throughout her career, she recorded over 500 songs, her signature angelic voice soaring over genres from traditional ballads to psychedelic rock and beyond. As the Cambodian civil war raged, Sothea's singing career continued to flourish, even when she served in the army as one of the country's first female paratroopers. After years of bloody conflict, the communist Khmer Rouge seized control, murdering artists and destroying their music, bringing Cambodia's golden age into a dark era of silence. Sothea’s fate is unknown. Ros Serey Sothea's golden voice lives on in the popular music of Cambodia to this very day. Gone but not forgotten, her legacy continues to inspire. The Golden Voice tells the story of Sothea’s life, developed alongside the surviving family who knew her, and accompanied by an interactive soundtrack. Gregory Cahill is an Emmy Award winning television producer for the CBS entertainment talk show The Talk. His previous TV credits include 24, Mad Men, and Medium. In 2006, Cahill wrote and directed a short film titled The Golden Voice, depicting Ros Serey Sothea's final days under Khmer Rouge. After years of research, he began work on a graphic novel also titled The Golden Voice, depicting Ros Serey Sothea's life story. The Golden Voice: The Ballad of Cambodian Rock's Lost Queen is his first book. Kat Baumann is an illustrator and comics creator from Southern Minnesota who graduated from the Visual Arts department of the Perpich Center for Arts Education in 2009, received my bachelor’s in Studio Art in 2013 and interned at Helioscope (formerly Periscope) Studio in 2014. She decided to become a comic artist at a young age when she was heavily influenced by Japanese manga and South Korean manhwa. Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Bookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter, founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the most revolutionary new organizations in the book world. Bookshop has found a way to retain the convenience of online book shopping while also supporting independent bookstores that are the backbones of many local communities.  Andy Hunter is CEO and Founder of Bookshop.org. He also co-created Literary Hub. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Inequality has always been key to understanding Indonesia’s development. But this is a multidimensional issue, and one that has manifested in vastly different ways in Indonesia over the years: from low and stable inequality, to the aspiration to inequality, to the relationship between inequality and collective violence. The way we understand inequality is contingent on what objects (of inequality) we are looking at, how it is conceptualised, and how it is measured. Zulfan Tadjoeddin, Associate Professor in Development Studies at Western Sydney University (WSU) shares the thinking he has on these issues. Inequality has been central to Zulfan’s research on political economy of development, about which he has published two books. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

From spectacular deaths in a drag musical to competing futures in a call center, Filipino Time: Affective Worlds and Contracted Labor (Fordham UP, 2021) examines how contracted service labor performed by Filipinos in the Philippines, Europe, the Middle East, and the United States generates vital affects, multiple networks, and other lifeworlds as much as it disrupts and dislocates human relations. Affective labor and time are re-articulated in a capacious archive of storytelling about the Filipino labor diaspora in fiction, musical performance, ethnography, and documentary film. Exploring these cultural practices, Filipino Time traces other ways of sensing, making sense of, and feeling time with others, by weaving narratives of place and belonging out of the hostile but habitable textures of labortime. Migrant subjects harness time and the imagination in their creative, life making capacities to make communal worlds out of one steeped in the temporalities and logics of capital. Allan Punzalan Isaac is a professor of American studies and English at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. He is the author of American Tropics: Articulating Filipino America, which received the Association for Asian American Studies Cultural Studies Book Award, and Filipino Time: Affective Worlds and Contracted Labor. He has taught at LaSalle University in Manila as a Senior Fulbright Scholar. Alize Arıcan is a Society of Fellows Postdoctoral Scholar at Boston University and an incoming Assistant Professor of Anthropology at CUNY—City College, focusing on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration. You can find her on Twitter @alizearican. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

What explains the varying treatment of ethnic minorities in Southeast Asia? Why have some states in the region been far more successful than others in handling relations with minorities? And why have countries like Thailand had far more challenging experiences with certain ethnic minorities than with others? In this podcast about Ethnicity and Politics in Southeast Asia (Cambridge UP, 2022), co-author Jacob Ricks is in conversation with Duncan McCargo about the key issues and arguments raised in this short but provocative book. Amy H. Liu is a professor of government at University of Texas, Austin, while Jacob I. Ricks is associate professor of political science at Singapore Management University.  Duncan McCargo is a professor in the public policy and global affairs programme at Nanyang Technological University.  This book conceptually disaggregates ethnicity into multiple constituent markers – specifically language, religion, and phenotype. By focusing on the interaction between these three ethnic markers, Liu and Ricks explore how overlap between these markers can affect whether a minority integrates within a broader ethnic identity; successfully extracts accommodation as unique group; or engages in a contentious and potentially violent relationship with the hegemon. The argument is tested through six case studies: (1) ethnic Lao in Thailand: integration; (2) ethnic Chinese in Thailand: integration; (3) ethnic Chinese in Malaysia: accommodation; (4) ethnic Malays in Singapore: accommodation; (5) ethnic Malays in Thailand: contention; and (6) ethnic Chinese in Indonesia: contention. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

How serious an issue is digital repression in Thailand? Who is behind it? And what effects does it have on Thai people? Listen to Janjira Sombatpoonsiri as she talks to Petra Alderman about this issue in the context of contemporary Thailand and the 2020-2021 student-led protests. Janjira Sombatpoonsiri is an Assistant Professor and Project Leader at the Institute of Asian Studies, Chulalongkorn University (Thailand), and a Research Fellow at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, the University of Helsinki and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

For more than a century before World War II, traders, merchants, financiers, and laborers steadily moved between places on the Indian Ocean, trading goods, supplying credit, and seeking work. This all changed with the war and as India, Burma, Ceylon, and Malaya wrested independence from the British Empire. Set against the tumult of the postwar period, Boats in a Storm: Law, Migration, and Decolonization in South and Southeast Asia, 1942-1962 (Stanford UP, 2023) centers on the legal struggles of migrants to retain their traditional rhythms and patterns of life, illustrating how they experienced citizenship and decolonization. Even as nascent citizenship regimes and divergent political trajectories of decolonization papered over migrations between South and Southeast Asia, migrants continued to recount cross-border histories in encounters with the law. These accounts, often obscured by national and international political developments, unsettle the notion that static national identities and loyalties had emerged, fully formed and unblemished by migrant pasts, in the aftermath of empires. Drawing on archival materials from India, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, London, and Singapore, Kalyani Ramnath narrates how former migrants battled legal requirements to revive prewar circulations of credit, capital, and labor, in a postwar context of rising ethno-nationalisms that accused migrants of stealing jobs and hoarding land. Ultimately, Ramnath shows how decolonization was marked not only by shipwrecked empires and nation-states assembled and ordered from the debris of imperial collapse, but also by these forgotten stories of wartime displacements, their unintended consequences, and long afterlives. Kalyani Ramnath is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Georgia, with research and teaching interests in legal history, histories of migration and displacement, transnational history, and questions of archival method. Kelvin Ng is a PhD candidate at the Department of History at Yale University. His research work brings together the social history of migration and the intellectual history of internationalism in four linked Indian Ocean spaces: British India, Republican China, British Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies. His dissertation examines three intertwined strands of anti-imperial thought—communist internationalism, pan-Islamism, and anti-caste radicalism—in relation to an oceanic political economy of unfree labor and uneven development. Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. His research focuses on the intersection of law, the occult sciences, and the environment across the Western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

What does civil society look like in Indonesia and Cambodia, and who are civil society elites? In this podcast interview, editors of the recently published NIAS Press edited volume Civil Society Elites. Field Studies from Cambodia and Indonesia, Astrid Norén-Nilsson, Amalinda Savirani and Anders Uhlin dive into the themes of their book, as well as the processes and experiences of their research. Interviewed by Fanny Töpper, this episode explores the dynamics within civil society groups, highlighting their social and political roles and the power relations within them. Civil Society Elites is the first systematic study of civil society elites in Southeast Asia (and indeed anywhere in the world). Purchase a hardcopy here. Astrid Norén-Nilsson is a senior lecturer at the Centre for East and Southeast Asian Studies, Lund University, Sweden. Her scholarship focuses on the politics of contemporary Cambodia. Amalinda Savirani is an associate professor at the Department of Politics and Government, Universitas Gadjah Mada, Indonesia. She has published widely on civil society movements in Indonesia. Anders Uhlin is Professor of Political Science at Lund University. His research centres on civil society activism, particularly in Southeast Asia. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, the University of Helsinki and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

This remarkable and timely ethnography explores how fishing communities living on the fringe of the South China Sea in central Vietnam interact with state and religious authorities as well as their farmer neighbors – even while handling new geopolitical challenges. The focus is mainly on marginal people and their navigation between competing forces over the decades of massive change since their incorporation into the Socialist Republic of Vietnam in 1975. The sea, however, plays a major role in this study as does the location: a once-peripheral area now at the center of a global struggle for sovereignty, influence and control in the South China Sea. The coastal fishing communities at the heart of this study are peripheral not so much because of geographical remoteness as their presumed social ‘backwardness’; they only partially fit into the social imaginary of Vietnam’s territory and nation. The state thus tries to incorporate them through various cultural agendas while religious reformers seek to purify their religious practices. Yet, recently, these communities have also come to be seen as guardians of an ancient fishing culture, important in Vietnam’s resistance to Chinese claims over the South China Sea. The fishers have responded to their situation with a blend of conformity, co-option and subtle indiscipline. A complex, triadic relationship is at play here. Within it are various shifting binaries – e.g. secular/religious, fishers/farmers, local ritual/Buddhist doctrine, etc. – and different protagonists (state officials, religious figures, fishermen and -women) who construct, enact, and deconstruct these relations in shifting alliances and changing contexts. Edyta Roszko's Fishers, Monks and Cadres: Navigating State, Religion and the South China Sea in Central Vietnam (NIAS/University of Hawaii Press, 2021) is a significant new work. Its vivid portrait of local beliefs and practices makes a powerful argument for looking beyond monolithic religious traditions. Its triadic analysis and subtle use of binaries offer startlingly fresh ways to view Vietnamese society and local political power. The book demonstrates Vietnam is more than urban and agrarian society in the Red River Basin and Mekong Delta. Finally, the author builds on intensive, long-term research to portray a region at the forefront of geopolitical struggle, offering insights that will be fascinating and revealing to a much broader readership. Adam Bobeck is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His PhD is entitled “Object-Oriented Azadari: Ontology and Ritual Theory”. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

What can we learn from Indonesia about democratic resilience and backsliding? Why should we think of Indonesian democracy as a useful example? And what are the three key lessons we can learn from it? In this episode, Dan Slater talks to Petra Alderman about the state of Indonesian democracy and the key ingredients that have kept it going so far. Dan Slater is James Orin Murfin Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan. He specialises in the politics and history of dictatorship and democracy, with a regional focus on Southeast Asia. Petra Alderman is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Leadership for Inclusive and Democratic Politics at the University of Birmingham and Research Fellow at CEDAR. If you would like to learn more about Indonesian democracy and its lessons, read Dan’s article ‘What Indonesian Democracy Can Teach the World’ in the Journal of Democracy. The People, Power, Politics podcast brings you the latest insights into the factors that are shaping and re-shaping our political world. It is brought to you by the Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation (CEDAR) based at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. Join us to better understand the factors that promote and undermine democratic government around the world and follow us on Twitter at @CEDAR_Bham! Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

The history of South Vietnam (1954-1975) is in the midst of a major revision. Historians such as Van Nguyen-Marshall are rejecting old clichés of corruption and subservience to the United States of America as they craft a new narrative that puts everyday Vietnamese people at the center of the story.  In Between War and the State: Civil Society in South Vietnam, 1954-1975 (Southeast Asia Program, 2023), she examines an array of voluntary activities, including mutual-help, professional, charitable, community development, student, women's, and rights organizations. Focusing on the public lives of South Vietnamese people, Between War and the State challenges persistent stereotypes of South Vietnam as a place without society or agency. Nguyen-Marshall shows how an active civil society survived despite difficulties imposed by the war, government restrictions, economic hardship, and external political forces. These competing political forces, which included the United States, Western aid agencies, and Vietnamese communist agents, created a highly competitive arena wherein the South Vietnamese state did not have a monopoly on persuasive or coercive power. To maintain its influence, the state sometimes needed to accommodate groups and limit its use of violence. Civil society participants in South Vietnam leveraged their social connections, made alliances, appealed to the domestic and international public, and used street protests to voice their concerns, secure their interests and carry out their activities. Van Nguyen-Marshall is an Associate Professor of History at Trent University where she specializes in modern Vietnamese History, focusing on associational life, civil society, and the Vietnam War. She has published a number of articles as well co-editing The Reinvention of Distinction: Modernity and the Middle Class in Urban Vietnam with Lisa Drummond and Daniele Belanger (2012) and her first book In Search of Moral Authority: The Discourse on Poverty, Poor Relief and Charity in French Colonial Vietnam (2008). Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

What does a map of Southeast Asia as a pegasus have to do with translation and Southeast Asia? How can we think of translation as anything other than a unidirectional practice of bringing meaning across languages? How can Southeast Asia challenge the way we think about translation?  Phrae Chittiphalangsri and Vicente L. Rafael, the editors of the first edited volume on translation and Southeast Asia Of Archipelagos and Peninsulas unpack these questions that are raised in the book, along with sharing their personal stories about translation, with Kukasina Kubaha, a NIAS SUPRA alumni. Phrae Chittiphalangsri is an Associate Professor of Translation Studies at Chulalongkorn University. She has written extensively on Orientalism, Translation, and Post-colonialism. She is also a literary translator working with Thai, English, and French. Vicente L. Rafael is a Professor of History and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Washington. His latest book The Sovereign Trickster: Death and Laughter in the Age of Duterte is published with Duke University Press like his previous books which include Contracting Colonialism, The Promise of the Foreign, and Motherless Tongues. Books and articles mentioned: On the Virtuality of Translation in Orientalism The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. About NIAS Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Demographic changes, rise in disposable income, and steady economic growth has led to a growing demand for healthcare services in Vietnam. But the public healthcare system struggles to meet the diverse healthcare needs of the Vietnamese population. Within this context, the private sector in Vietnam fills an important gap left by the public sector. Today’s guest is interested in why consumers choose private over public health services in Vietnam, and in particular, the social factors that influence these choices, including word of mouth referrals, the patient-doctor relationship, the behaviour of healthcare staff, and marketing. To discuss these issues is Dr Mai Nguyen, a public health specialist with the Ministry of Health in Vietnam. Mai was a SSEAC Writing Fellow in 2022, and her article looked at how public and private healthcare providers interact with consumers to affect their choices. Dr Natali Pearson is Curriculum Coordinator at the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, a university-wide multidisciplinary center at the University of Sydney, Australia. Her research focuses on the protection, management and interpretation of underwater cultural heritage in Southeast Asia. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Dr. Pierce Salguero sits down with two guests, Ounkham Souksavanh and Elizabeth Elliott, to talk about community engagement and community health in Laos. They discuss how Elizabeth as a medical anthropologist, and Ounkham as a physician, work together to build trust and improve healthcare access across an ethnically and religiously diverse landscape. Along the way, we learn about Elizabeth’s experience of foraging for herbs and Ounkham’s memories of growing up with traditional medicine in his family. If you want to learn about the landscape of Lao traditional healers and medicinal plants — with a few snake bites and plant talismans thrown in — then this episode is for you! Enjoy! And, if you want to hear from more experts on Buddhist medicine and related topics, subscribe to Blue Beryl for monthly episodes here. Resources mentioned in the podcast: Elizabeth's dissertation: "Potent Plants, Cool Hearts" (2021) Pierce Salguero, Traditional Thai Medicine: Buddhism, Animism, Yoga, Ayurveda (2016) Richard Poitier, Yû dî mî hèng "être bien, avoir de la force" (2007) Elizabeth's documentary: Traditional Medicine in Southern Laos (2023) Brand new book released after the interview was recorded: Djaja Djendoel Soejarto et al, Medicinal Plants of Laos (2023) Dr. Pierce Salguero is a transdisciplinary scholar of health humanities who is fascinated by historical and contemporary intersections between Buddhism, medicine, and crosscultural exchange. He has a Ph.D. in History of Medicine from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (2010), and teaches Asian history, medicine, and religion at Penn State University’s Abington College, located near Philadelphia. He is also the host (with Lan Li) of the Blue Beryl podcast. Subscribe to Blue Beryl here. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Why have issues of human rights become so contentious in Indonesia, 25 years after the much-heralded post-Suharto democratic transition? What kind of role has the Indonesian Foundation of Legal Aid Institutes, or LBH, performed in this field? Should those working on human rights try to work with governments and power-holders, or adopt an oppositional stance towards them? Timothy Mann is a postdoctoral researcher at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, and recently completed his PhD on Indonesian human rights issues at the University of Melbourne. In this podcast, Tim discusses his research on LBH and the dilemmas faced by those campaigning for greater human rights in a rapidly-changing Indonesia. Duncan McCargo is Director of the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies and a professor of political science at the University of Copenhagen. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In December 1936, a villager was led by a dream to the ruins of the West Mebon shrine in Angkor where he uncovered remains of a bronze sculpture. This was the West Mebon Visnu, the largest bronze remaining from pre-modern Southeast Asia, and a work of great artistic, historical, and political significance. Prominently placed in an island temple in the middle of the vast artificial reservoir, the West Mebon Visnu sculpture was an important focal point of the Angkorian hydraulic network. Interpretations of the statue, its setting, date, and role have remained largely unchanged since the 1960s--until now.  Integrating the latest archaeological and historical work on Angkor, extensive art historical analysis of the figure of Visnu Anantasayin in Hindu-Buddhist art across the region, and a detailed digital reconstruction of the sculpture and its setting, Marnie Feneley brings new light to this important piece. Marnie Feneley's Reconstructing God: Style, Hydraulics, Political Power and Angkor's West Mebon Visnu (National U of Singapore Press, 2023) will be of interest to art historians and curators, historians of Southeast Asia, and anyone curious about the art and history of Angkor. Patrick Jory teaches Southeast Asian History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. He can be reached at: p.jory@uq.edu.au. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Why is Malaysia in need of electoral reform? How can we explain recent changes including the anti-party hopping law and the successful UNDI18 campaign to lower the voting age? And what does the outcome Malaysia's GE15, the November 2022 general election, mean for the health of Malaysian democracy? In this podcast, editors Helen Ting and Donald Horowitz discuss their recent volume on electoral reform in Malaysia with NIAS Director Duncan McCargo  Helen Ting  is an associate professor at IKMAS at UKM, the National University of Malaysia, while Donald L. Horowitz is James B. Duke Professor of Law and Political Science Emeritus at Duke University. This wide-ranging volumes features 11 chapters on various aspects of Malaysia's electoral system.  Big political changes in Malaysia since 2018 have raised high expectations for electoral reform but much remains to be achieved. This impressive study takes stock of the state of democracy in Malaysia by offering readers a deep but readily understandable analysis of an array of electoral reform issues. Here is a resource that will interest the politically engaged as well as scholars of political process, a study that is both wide-ranging and focused, and a primer on electoral politics that will be of wide interest far beyond Malaysia. "an extremely timely publication" - Andrew Khoo, Bar Council Malaysia The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Jenna Grant is a cultural anthropologist from the University of Washington and author of Fixing the Image: Ultrasound and the Visuality of Care in Phnom Penh, published by University of Washington Press in 2022.  Introduced in Phnom Penh around 1990, at the twilight of socialism and after two decades of conflict and upheaval, ultrasound took root in humanitarian and then privatized medicine. Services have since multiplied, promising diagnostic information and better prenatal and general health care. In Fixing the Image Jenna Grant draws on years of ethnographic and archival research to theorize the force and appeal of medical imaging in the urban landscape of Phnom Penh. Set within long genealogies of technology as tool of postcolonial modernity, and vision as central to skilled diagnosis in medicine and Theravada Buddhism, ultrasound offers stabilizing knowledge and elicits desire and pleasure, particularly for pregnant women. Grant offers the concept of "fixing"--which invokes repair, stabilization, and a dose of something to which one is addicted--to illuminate how ultrasound is entangled with practices of care and neglect across different domains. Fixing the Image thus provides a method for studying technological practice in terms of specific materialities and capacities of technologies--in this case, image production and the permeability of the body--illuminating how images are a material form of engagement between patients, between patients and their doctors, and between patients and their bodies. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Did the bloody 1 February 2021 military coup in Myanmar produce an unexpected ‘solidarity dividend’ by unifying opponents of the new regime from a range of ethnic backgrounds and political perspectives? How can political ethnographers continue to study Myanmar without having physical access to the country? Why might it be fruitful to reimagine Myanmar through the lens of the ‘state-nation’ concept? Cecile Medaile is a postdoctoral researcher at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, and recently completed her PhD on Myanmar politics at the University of New South Wales. In this podcast, Cecile discusses her research on Myanmar’s ethnic minorities both before and after the February 2021 military coup. Duncan McCargo is Director of the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies and a professor of political science at the University of Copenhagen. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts are here. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Indirect rule is widely considered as a defining feature of the nineteenth and twentieth century British Empire but its divisive earlier history remains largely unexplored. Empire of Influence: The East India Company and the Making of Indirect Rule (Cambridge UP, 2023) traces the contentious process whereby the East India Company established a system of indirect rule in India in the first decades of the nineteenth century. In a series of thematic chapters covering intelligence gathering, violence, gift giving and the co-optation of the scribal and courtly elite, Callie Wilkinson foregrounds the disagreement surrounding the tactics of the political representatives of the Company and recaptures the experimental nature of early attempts to secure Company control. She demonstrates how these endeavours were reshaped, exploited and resisted by Indians as well as disputed within the Company itself. This important new account exposes the contested origins of these ambiguous relationships of 'protection' and coercion, while identifying the factors that enabled them to take hold and endure. Callie Wilkinson is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie European Postdoctoral Fellow at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

There is a growing list of human rights abuses and acts of violence against those who have sought to promote political transparency and freedom in Laos. Laos has long been an authoritarian state with no tolerance for public criticism. Increasingly, however, it appears to be also becoming a criminal state, where corrupt elites have enmeshed themselves within the state apparatus for the purpose of accumulating wealth. To discuss whether Laos is now a criminal state, Dr Kearrin Sims, Senior Lecturer in Development Studies at James Cook University, joins Natali Pearson on SSEAC Stories. Dr Sims researches the politics of development and regional connectivity within Mainland Southeast Asia, with a focus on ethical and inclusive development. His recent work examines the intersections between extractive development, criminality, and human rights. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Anne Giblin Gedacht’s Tōhoku Unbounded: Regional Identity and the Mobile Subject in Prewar Japan (Brill, 2022) centers cross-border mobility in its narrative of the history of Japan’s Tōhoku region in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book is a challenge to the stereotypical image of the Northeast as static and isolated. Focusing on Pacific migration―to Asia, North America, and the Philippines―Gedacht pieces together an account of how mobility and movement were instrumental in creating modern Tōhoku regional identities, and how this process was integral to Japan’s modern self-image. In this sense, Tōhoku Unbounded contributes to a growing body of literature exploring factors such as mobility and region in the construction of the modern world of nation-states. Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the University of Bergen's Department of Foreign Languages. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

The Indian Ocean world has a rich history of socio-economic and cultural exchanges across time and space. Connecting the Indian Ocean World Across Sea and Land (Routledge, 2023) and its companion, Merchants and Ports in the Indian Ocean World (Routledge, 2023), explore these connections around the wider Indian Ocean world. The book examines the many overlapping linkages that existed from the early modern period and into the colonial era. It offers a clear understanding of the economic networks that extended across the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic during the 19th century. With a critical historical lens, the volume discusses themes like the opium trade in the Malay-Indonesian Archipelago - the biggest opium trade market at the time; the Safavid mission to Siam; and the economic relationship between Pondicherry and West Africa, via France. Rich in archival material, this book will be of interest for scholars and researchers of Indian Ocean history, maritime history, Indian history, economic and commercial history, South Asian history, and social history, anthropology, and trade relations in general. Radhika Seshan is former head and retired professor of the Department of History, Savitribai Phule Pune University, and is now visiting faculty at the Symbiosis School for Liberal Arts, Pune, India. Her work has been primarily in the areas of economic history, particularly maritime and urban history of early modern India. Author of three books, she has edited or co-edited many others, and her most recent publication is Wage Earners in India 1500–1900: Regional Approaches in an International Context, co-edited with Jan Lucassen (2022). Ryuto Shimada is associate professor, Department of Asian History, Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology, The University of Tokyo. The author of The Intra-Asian Trade in Japanese Copper by the Dutch East India Company during the Eighteenth Century (2006), he has published extensively in Japanese and in English on aspects of the networks of the Indian Ocean world in the early modern age. Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University, Near Eastern Studies Department. His research focuses on the intersection of law, the occult sciences, and the environment across the western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Monetary Authorities: Capitalism and Decolonization in the American Colonial Philippines (Duke UP, 2022) investigates the ways in which racial and class hierarchies shaped the monetary policy and banking systems in the Philippines. Combining historical research and normative arguments calling for unconditional decolonization, Allan E. S. Lumba advances a powerful account of how the logics and practices of racial capitalism advanced the United States’ ‘counter-decolonization’ efforts in the Philippines. In this podcast, Lumba shares the book’s back story, his theoretical inspirations that informed his core arguments, and the importance of understanding the global capitalist order from the perspective of postcolonial nations. Allan E. S. Lumba is a Global American Studies postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University's Charles Warren Center and visiting faculty in the Department of History. He has also served as resident fellow at the Newberry Library in Chicago and University of Michigan's Bentley Library. His teaching experience and interests spans across myriad fields, including: Southeast Asian history, Asian American and Ethnic studies, U.S. in the World, and Comparative World history. The open access edition of this book is available here. Like this interview? You may also be interested in: Martin Edwards, The IMF, the WTO & the Politics of Economic Surveillance (Routledge 2018) Jakob Feinig, Moral Economies of Money: Politics and the Monetary Constitution of Society (Stanford University Press 2022) Nicole Curato is a Professor of Sociology in the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra. She co-hosts the New Books in Southeast Asia Studies channel. This episode was created in collaboration with Erron C. Medina of the Development Studies Program of Ateneo De Manila University and Nicole Anne Revita. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Blending travelogue, history, and archaeology, Searching for Ashoka: Questing for a Buddhist King from India to Thailand (SUNY Press, 2023) unravels the various avatars of India's most famous emperor, revealing how he came to be remembered—and forgotten—in distinctive ways at particular points in time and in specific locations. Through personal journeys that take her across India and to various sites and cities in Sri Lanka, Myanmar, and Thailand, archaeologist Nayanjot Lahiri explores how Ashoka's visibility from antiquity to the modern era has been accompanied by a reinvention of his persona. Although the historical Ashoka spoke expansively of his ideas of governance and a new kind of morality, his afterlife is a jumble of stories and representations within various Buddhist imaginings. By remembering Ashoka selectively, Lahiri argues, ancient kings and chroniclers created an artifice, constantly appropriating and then remolding history to suit their own social visions, political agendas, and moral purposes. Nayanjot Lahiri is Professor of History at Ashoka University. Her previous books include Finding Forgotten Cities: How the Indus Civilization was Discovered; Marshalling the Past: Ancient India and Its Modern Histories; and Ashoka in Ancient India, which was awarded the John F. Richards Prize in South Asian History in 2016. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In July 1813, a young American couple from Boston arrived in the Buddhist kingdom of Burma to preach the gospel. Although Burmese Buddhists largely resisted Christian evangelism, members of minority religious communities embraced Baptist teachings and practices, reimagining both Buddhism and Christianity in the process. In her new book, Baptizing Burma: Religious Change in the Last Buddhist Kingdom (Columbia UP, 2023), religious studies scholar Alex Kaloyanides explores this history of power and conversion through the lens of sacred objects. Previously Tricycle’s managing editor, Kaloyanides now serves as an assistant professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. In this episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sits down with Kaloyanides to discuss the religious material culture of 19th-century Burma, what we miss when we study religions solely through their texts, and how her research has shaped how she thinks about religious conflict today. Tricycle: The Buddhist Review provides a unique and independent public forum for exploring Buddhism, establishing a dialogue between Buddhism and the broader culture, and introducing Buddhist thinking to Western disciplines. Tricycle Talks is a monthly podcast featuring prominent voices from within and beyond the Buddhist fold. Listen to more episodes here. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Eighty years on, Lin Poyer's book War at the Margins: Indigenous Experiences in World War II (U Hawaii Press, 2022) offers a global and comparative view of the impact of World War II on Indigenous societies. Indigenous peoples, Poyer shows, had a distinct experience of WWII, as those on the margins of Allied and Axis empires and nation-states were drawn in as soldiers, scouts, guides, laborers, and victims. Using historical and ethnographic sources, Poyer examines how Indigenous communities emerged from the trauma of the wartime era with social forms and cultural ideas that laid the foundations for their twenty-first-century emergence as players on the world’s political stage. This book is available open access here. Lin Poyer is a cultural anthropologist and professor emerita at the University of Wyoming. Holger Droessler is an Assistant Professor of History at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. His research focuses on the intersection of empire and labor in the Pacific. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Why was the May 2023 Thai election such a historic election? What does the surprising Move Forward victory tell us about the state of Thai politics? And what happens next? Duncan McCargo and Ken Lohatepanont join Petra Alderman to discuss the historic Thai vote and the post-election developments. Duncan McCargo is Director of the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies and Professor of Political Science at the University of Copenhagen. Ken Lohatepanont is a PhD student in the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Ethnoreligious Otherings and Passionate Conflicts (Oxford UP, 2022) lays bare the causal mechanisms that lead state and non-state actors to identify particular ethnoreligious groups as threats to security, power, and status. It focuses on the cases of Indonesia, Myanmar, and the Philippines to demonstrate how ethnoreligious others are transformed from strangers to enemies through passions, nationalism, and securitization. Advancing a novel ethnoreligious othering framework, the book offers a distinctive approach to understanding protracted conflict beyond dominant paradigms in international relations and conflict studies. In this interview, author Michael Magcamit shares the book’s back story, his ethical principles when doing field research in emotionally-charged and securitised sites, and the policy implications of his research. Michael Magcamit is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Global Politics at the University of Manchester. Before joining Manchester in August 2023, Michael was a Lecturer in Security Studies at the University of Leicester (2021-2023), a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at Queen Mary University of London (2019-2021), and an assistant professor of Political Science at Musashi University (2016-2019). His research has been published in the International Studies Quarterly, International Politics, Political Science, and International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, among others. He is the author of Ethnoreligious Otherings and Passionate Conflicts (Oxford University Press, 2022) and Small Powers and Trading Security (Palgrave/Springer, 2016). To read the book, click the open access version here. Like this interview? You may also be interested in: Eve Monique Zucker and Ben Kiernan, Political Violence in Southeast Asia since 1945 (Routledge 2021) Elisabeth King and Cyrus Samii, Diversity, Violence, and Recognition: How Recognizing Ethnic Identity Promotes Peace (Oxford University Press 2020) Nicole Curato is a Professor of Sociology in the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra. She co-hosts the New Books in Southeast Asia Studies channel. This episode was created in collaboration with Erron C. Medina of the Development Studies Program of Ateneo De Manila University and Nicole Anne Revita. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In lower–income economies, a small change in people’s wellbeing may trigger a suite of behavioral responses, some of which may be unlawful as well as violent. Motives and modes of conflict vary. In regions with high agricultural dependence, conflict can be linked with harvest-time windfalls. Agriculture is a crucial sector for employment and income generation in South East Asia, where poverty is relatively high, and civil conflict and social unrest have been defining features of the region’s politics. Associate Professor of Economics David Ubilava discusses harvest time violence and why this is occurring in South East Asia. Dr Natali Pearson is Curriculum Coordinator at the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, a university-wide multidisciplinary center at the University of Sydney, Australia. Her research focuses on the protection, management and interpretation of underwater cultural heritage in Southeast Asia. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

re there ways to tackle pressing social, environmental and economic problems at once? In this episode, Professor Assunta Cuyegkeng from Ateneo de Manilla University in Philippines joins Pilvi Posio to discuss the research and practice of social entrepreneurship that offers potential solutions for building holistic social, economic and also environmental sustainability.  Based on the recent book Creating Sustainable Value in Social Enterprises: Stories of Social Innovation (Ateneo de Manila UP, 2021) she has published with her colleagues, Assunta introduces various examples of social enterprises in Philippines and challenges they face when aiming at generating social value through their innovative business models. These creative entrepreneurial practices engage and empower stakeholders and as such offer a way to compensate for systemic institutional failures especially in emergent economies often suffering from widespread poverty and inequality. Assunta Cuyegkeng is proferssor at the Department of Educational Leadership and Management of the Ateneo de Manilla university in Philippines, the director of the Ateneo Institute of Sustainability. Pilvi Posio is senior researcher at the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, Finland, and the coordinator of the project Finnish-ASEAN Academic Platform for Sustainable Development run by the Finnish University Network of Asian Studies. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

If you’ve visited Thailand even for a short time you’ve probably been given, or have come across, some basic instructions on dos and don’ts — where to put, or not to put, your hands and feet, what to wear or not to wear to a temple, why not to get angry in public, that sort of thing. Perhaps you’ve wondered about the pedagogies that give these social practices their durability. And whether you’ve been to the country or not you might have seen news reports showing prime ministers and army generals prostrate in front of members of the royal family, and have wondered how almost a century after the demise of the absolute monarchy deference to sovereign power is so resolutely performed. If so, then you’ve come to the right podcast! On this episode of New Books in Southeast Asian Studies one of the channel hosts, Patrick Jory, sits on the interviewee’s side of the microphone to talk about his A History of Manners and Civility in Thailand (Cambridge University Press, 2021). In a wide-ranging discussion Patrick outlines how manners have been codified over successive periods in Thailand; why Norbert Elias is still relevant for an understanding of the civilizing process not only in Europe but beyond, and the pertinence historical research for interpreting Thai society and politics into the 21st century. Like this interview? If so you might also be interested in: Patrick Jory, Thailand’s Theory of Monarchy Roderic Broadhurst et al, Violence and the Civilising Process in Cambodia Yoshinori Nishizaki, Dynastic Democracy: Political Families of Thailand  Nick Cheesman is Associate Professor, Department of Political & Social Change, Australian National University. He hosts the New Books in Interpretive Political & Social Science series on the New Books Network. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

What went wrong with Burma’s democratic experiment? How are we to understand the country’s turbulent politics in the wake of the 2021 coup? In this conversation with Duncan McCargo, Amitav Acharya talks about his new book on Burma, which draws extensively on communications with young activists he refers to as “thought warriors”. He also discusses the challenges of researching a closed country, and why he decided to write a crossover book that he hopes will reach beyond the usual academic audiences. A decade ago, Burma was full of light and hope. Today, it has descended into darkness and despair. The once promising political and opening up of the country has been set back, possibly for a long time. How did this happen? Why? Many outside observers were surprised by the latest developments, but in some ways they were rather predictable. For those watching Burma the February 2021 coup was in the making for some time.  Tragic Nation: Burma--Why and How Democracy Failed (Penguin Random House, 2023) provides a timely and insightful account of the political situation in Burma, assessing why the country experienced the coup, what are the implications for the people of Burma and the Southeast Asian region, and what role the international community can play to prevent Burma becoming a failed state. Amitav Acharya is a distinguished professor and the UNESCO Chair in Transnational Challenges and Governance, School of International Service, American University, Washington, DC. His writings on Southeast Asia include Whose Ideas Matter: Agency and Power in Asian Regionalism (Cornell, 2009). Duncan McCargo is director of the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies and a professor of political science at the University of Copenhagen. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Southeast Asia and South America are regions made up of largely illiberal states lacking stabilizing great powers or collective identities. But despite persistent territorial disputes, regime instability, and interstate rivalries, both regions have avoided large-scale war for decades. What accounts for the lack of war in these regions, and importantly, how are conflicts managed? In Practicing Peace: Conflict Management in Southeast Asia and South America (Oxford University Press, 2022), Dr. Aarie Glas offers a comparative regional perspective on conflict management and diplomacy in Southeast Asia and South America. Dr. Glas finds that regional interstate relations are shaped by particular habitual dispositions—discrete sets of processual and substantive qualities of relations understood and enacted by diplomatic communities of practice. Different habitual dispositions in each case shape conflict management and regionalism in important ways, and lead to a tolerance of limited regional violence. Dr. Glas expands on new developments in social International Relations theory to develop a practice-oriented and interpretive account of regional relations and explores the existence of habitual dispositions across crucial cases of regional conflict management, including the Southeast Asian response to the Preah Vihear dispute in 2011 and the South American response to the Cenepa conflict in 1995. Drawing on novel research methods and detailed interviews with regional practitioners, Practicing Peace challenges existing scholarly claims of peace in Southeast Asia and South America. Instead, Dr. Glas argues that officials successfully manage pervasive conflict short of war in both regions. He provides an in-depth look into how diplomacy unfolds and peace is practiced within diplomatic communities, from government actors to organizational officials, as they attempt to respond to and resolve territorial disputes. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Tamas Wells' book Narrating Democracy in Myanmar: The Struggle Between Activists, Democratic Leaders and Aid Workers (Amsterdam UP, 2021) analyses what Myanmar's struggle for democracy signified to Burmese activists and democratic leaders, and to their international allies, before the 2021 military coup. In doing so, it explores how understanding contested meanings of democracy helps make sense of the country's tortuous path before and after Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy won historic elections in 2015. Using Burmese and English language sources, Narrating Democracy in Myanmar reveals how the country's struggles for democracy existed not only in opposition to Burmese military elites, but also within networks of local activists and democratic leaders, and international aid workers. Professor Michele Ford is the Director of the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, a university-wide multidisciplinary center at the University of Sydney, Australia. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Khmer Nationalist: Sơn Ngc Thành, the CIA, and the Transformation of Cambodia (Northern Illinois UP, 2023) is a political history of Cambodia from World War II until 1975, examining the central role of Sõn Ngoc Thành. The book is a story of nationalist movements, political intrigue, coup attempts, war, and American intelligence operations. Matthew Jagel shows how central Sõn Ngoc Thành was to the rise of Cambodian nationalism, the brief period of Japanese dominance, the fight for independence from France, and the establishment of ties with the United States. Factoring Sõn Ngoc Thành into a discussion of Cambodian political history is a major contribution that will advance scholarly discourse about Cold War politics in Southeast Asia. Sõn Ngoc Thành’s career requires us to think about pre-Khmer Rouge Cambodia with much greater nuance. Dr. Matthew Jagel earned his MA at Northern Illinois University with a thesis entitled “PHILCAG: The History of Filipino Involvement in the Vietnam War” and his Ph.D. with a dissertation on Sõn Ngoc Thành (the source material for this book). Khmer Nationalist: Son Ngoc Thanh, the CIA, and the Transformation of Cambodia is his first book. He has taught at Northern Illinois University and worked for NIU’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies. Dr. Jagel currently teaches at St. Xavier University in Chicago. When he’s not doing all this amazing academic work, he’s causing trouble with Dr. Eric Jones, his co-host and unindicted co-conspirator, on Napalm in the Morning: The Vietnam War through Film, a podcast that asks serious questions about why John Wayne is facing the wrong way at sunset in The Green Berets and praises the artistic triumph that is Operation Dumbo Drop. Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

The concept of human dignity is a foundational one within human rights discourses, and is commonly used in the context of human rights and sustainable development policies and programs. But the meaning of ‘human dignity’, and its role, have seldom been interrogated rigorously or systematically. Instead, there exists a widespread presumption of universality, despite growing evidence that the concept of human dignity can be understood in profoundly different ways in different socio-cultural and political settings. Dr Rachel Killean and Dr Natali Pearson discuss human dignity in Cambodia, and prospects for human rights education. Dr Natali Pearson is Curriculum Coordinator at the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, a university-wide multidisciplinary center at the University of Sydney, Australia. Her research focuses on the protection, management and interpretation of underwater cultural heritage in Southeast Asia. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Cheryl Narumi Naruse talks about the transformation of Singapore over the past decades into a site of postcolonial promise, with economic prosperity and cultural soft power. She discusses a range of texts ranging from official state documents to the immensely popular book and movie adaptation of Crazy Rich Asians, which bear witness to and contribute to this change. Cheryl Narumi Naruse (nah-roo-seh) is Assistant Professor of English and the Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of the Humanities at Tulane University. Her research and teaching interests include contemporary Anglophone literatures and cultures (particularly those from Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands), diasporic Asian and Asian American literature, postcolonial theory, cultures of capitalism, and genre studies. Her first book, Becoming Global Asia: Contemporary Genres of Postcolonial Capitalism in Singapore is forthcoming from University of California Press in 2023. She is also working on a second monograph which explores the illegibility of Singapore/Malaysia—as the comparatively “cold” Southeast nations in the context of the Vietnam War—in Asian American and postcolonial studies.  Image: © 2023 Saronik Bosu Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In mid-April, Myanmar’s military bombed a village in the country’s northwest, killing over a hundred people in what’s been considered the deadliest attack in the now two-year civil war in the country: The result of the Myanmar military’s coup in February 2021. The airstrike happened after my conversation with Professor Amitav Acharya, author of Tragic Nation Burma--Why and How Democracy Failed (Penguin Random House SEA, 2022). Yet it’s a reminder of the coup and the civil war’s consequences for the people of Myanmar. Amitav Acharya is the UNESCO Chair in Transnational Challenges and Governance and Distinguished Professor at the School of International Service, American University, Washington, DC. Some of his many works include The End of American World Order (Polity: 2014); Constructing Global Order: Agency and Change in World Politics (Cambridge University Press: 2018); and, with Barry Buzan, The Making of Global International Relations (Cambridge University Press: 2019)—and many books besides about Southeast Asia. In this interview, Amitav and I talk about why Myanmar's military junta launched its coup (and derailed the country’s opening), how Myanmar’s population have reacted to these events, and the response of the international community. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Tragic Nation Burma. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

I was very excited to chat with Maurits Bastiaan Meerwijk as we share some obsessions, namely rats and plague in colonial Southeast Asia. His A History of Plague in Java, 1911-1942 (Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2022) is an engaging study of a massive public health campaign in the Dutch East Indies. As he records the most invasive colonial policy in Indonesian history, his work ties together the histories of disease, imperialism, and modernity. A History of Plague in Java, 1911-1942 will be of interest to Southeast Asianists, scholars of disease, and anyone interested the origins of modern state systems. Dr. Meerwijk earned his Ph.D in History at the University of Hong Kong with a dissertation entitled Dengue Fever in Modern Asia. He has been a Research Associate at the University of St. Andrews and a Lecturer at the University of Hong Kong. He is currently a postdoc researcher at the University of Leiden and the scientific secretary at the Health Council of the Netherlands. A History of Plague in Java, 1911-1942 is his first book. Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

The Rohingya population, from Myanmar’s Rakhine State, are a community almost living entirely in exile, whether in refugee camps in Bangladesh, or working on boats throughout the Indian Ocean. The Kutupalong refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, is now the world’s largest. But the Rohingya’s struggles began long before the crisis intensified in 2012 and 2017, as noted in Kaamil Ahmed’s first book, I Feel No Peace: Rohingya Fleeing Over Seas and Rivers (Hurst, 2023). Kaamil talks to Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh and beyond to understand how this community has tried to survive years of neglect and at times hostility from the governments and institutions meant to look after them. In this interview, Kaamil and I talk about the Rohingya population, their lives in the refugee camps, and their attempts to make a life for themselves. Kaamil Ahmed is a journalist at The Guardian, covering international development, who previously lived in and reported from Jerusalem, Bangladesh and Turkey. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of I Feel No Peace. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

The American war in Vietnam has left many long-lasting scars that have not yet been sufficiently examined. The worst of them were inflicted in a tiny area bounded by the demilitarized zone between North and South Vietnam and the Ho Chi Minh Trail in neighboring Laos. That small region saw the most intense aerial bombing campaign in history, the massive use of toxic chemicals, and the heaviest casualties on both sides. In The Long Reckoning: A Story of War, Peace, and Redemption in Vietnam (Knopf, 2023), George Black recounts the inspirational story of the small cast of characters—veterans, scientists, and Quaker-inspired pacifists, and their Vietnamese partners—who used their moral authority, scientific and political ingenuity, and sheer persistence to attempt to heal the horrors that were left in the wake of the military engagement in Southeast Asia. Their intersecting story is one of reconciliation and personal redemption, embedded in a vivid portrait of Vietnam today, with all its startling collisions between past and present, in which one-time mortal enemies, in the endless shape-shifting of geopolitics, have been transformed into close allies and partners. The Long Reckoning is being published on the fiftieth anniversary of the day the last American combat soldier left Vietnam. AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Passport Entanglements examines the problems with documents issued to Indonesian migrant workers in Hong Kong and explores the larger role that passports and other types of documentation play in gendered migration, precarious labor, and bureaucracy. Focusing on the politics and inequalities embedded in passports, anthropologist Nicole Constable considers how these instruments determine legal status and dictate rights. Constable finds that new biometric technologies and surveillance do not lead to greater protection, security, or accuracy, but rather reinforce violent structures on already vulnerable women by producing new vulnerabilities and reproducing old ones. Nicole Constable is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh and author of several books, including Romance on a Global Stage: Pen Pals, Virtual Ethnography, and "Mail Order" Marriages and Born Out of Place: Migrant Mothers and the Politics of International Labor. Alize Arıcan is a Society of Fellows Postdoctoral Scholar at Boston University, focusing on urban anthropology, futurity, care, and migration. Her work has been featured in Environment and Planning D, Current Anthropology, and City & Society, among other journals and public-facing platforms. You can find her on Twitter @alizearican. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

How might we imagine justice in times of ecological harm? How are human struggles for social justice entangled with the lives of other beings including plants, animals, fungi, and microbes? What is at stake when claims are made about who or what is the subject of justice? These questions and more are explored in this conversation between Terese Gagnon and Sophie Chao, co-editor of the new volume The Promise of Multispecies Justice from Duke University Press. In addition to unpacking key questions posed by the volume Terese and Sophie discuss some of the volume’s chapters, which are empirically rooted in Asia. These chapters cover topics of spectral justice in the Indian Himalayas, and justice for humans and “pests” on banana plantations in the Philippines region of Mindanao. Additionally, Sophie shares about her research on more-than-human solidarities in racial justice protests in the Indonesian-controlled province of West Papua. This interdisciplinary conversation covers critical developments in the social sciences and humanities as well as works of contemporary art and poetry including by Chamorro scholar Craig Santos Perez, author of Navigating CHamoru Poetry. Sophie Chao is Discovery Early Career Researcher Award Fellow and Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sydney. Her research investigates the intersections of Indigeneity, ecology, capitalism, health, and justice in the Pacific. Chao is author of In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua and co-editor of The Promise of Multispecies Justice. Related podcasts Karen Sanctuaries: Memory, Biodiversity, and Political Sovereignty Urban Climate Change and Adaptation: Messages from the IPCC Report for Southeast Asia Transcendence and Sustainability: Asian Visions with Global Promise The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Mai Nardone’s Welcome Me to the Kingdom (Random House, 2023) opens with two migrants from Thailand’s northeast who travel to Bangkok to make a new life for themselves in the bustling city. As they enter, they pass under a sign, asking visitors to “Take Home a Thousand Smiles.” It’s an ironic start to their lives in Bangkok, as the two live an unstable, hardscrabble life on Bangkok’s fringes. The two are just a few of the characters that populate Mai Nardone’s short story collection. From a mixed-race daughter of an American-Thai couple, to two “strayboys” jumping from job to job, Mai’s characters try to carve a niche for themselves in a changing and sometimes unforgiving city. In this interview, Mai and I talk about Thailand, the divergence between its public hospitality and the unstable lives of the migrants that live there, and how authors should write about this Southeast Asian country. Mai Nardone is a Thai and American writer whose fiction has appeared in American Short Fiction, Granta, McSweeney’s, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. He lives in Bangkok. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Welcome Me to the Kingdom. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

The question of who is Chinese and how Chineseness as an identity is constituted has been a recurring question, particularly in the context of the extensive Chinese diasporic community. In Contesting Chineseness: Nationality, Class, Gender and New Chinese Migrants (Amsterdam University Press in 2022), Dr Sylvia Ang investigates these questions in the context of Singapore, with a specific focus on unravelling why tensions exist between Singaporean-born Chinese and new Chinese migrants from the mainland despite a shared sense of ethnicity, heritage, and culture. Combining traditional and digital ethnographic methods, she brings to life the intricate contests between Singaporean Chinese and new Chinese migrants on what it means to be Chinese. Contesting Chineseness is a valuable and timely contribution to the literature on the Chinese overseas, which demonstrates how an intersection of local and global developments have come to shape the experiences of contemporary Chinese migrants working and living in Singapore. Bernard Z. Keo is Lecturer in Asian History at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia and specialises in decolonisation and nation-building in Southeast Asia. He can be contacted at: b.keo@latrobe.edu.au. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Gender in Southeast Asia (Cambridge UP, 2022) examines how gender norms are constructed and contested in a region the book describes as ‘a fertile place for analysing gender differences that both defy and modify dominant paradigms that emanate from the Western world’ (p.1). In less than 100 pages, Professor Mina Roces provides a clear and compelling summary of pioneering work on gender studies in the region, identifies the contradictory discourses of gender ideals that shape historical and contemporary power relations and puts a spotlight on how religion and authoritarian governments advanced and policed gender constructs. The book concludes by mapping the various ways in which citizens and transnational movements resist, contest, and transform dominant cultural constructions. Mina Roces is a Professor of History in the School of Humanities and Languages in the Faculty of Arts, Design and Architecture. Her research interests lie in twentieth century Philippine history particularly women’s history as well as the history of dress. She is book series editor for the Sussex Library of Asian and Asian American Studies Book Series and leader of the UNSW Research Cluster on Imperial, Colonial and Transnational Histories. In 2016 she was elected fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Nicole Curato is a Professor of Sociology in the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra. She co-hosts the New Books in Southeast Asia Studies channel. This episode was created in collaboration with Erron C. Medina of the Development Studies Program of Ateneo De Manila University and Ariane Defreine of the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre at the University of Sydney. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Over the past few centuries, vast areas of the world have been violently colonized by settlers. But why did states like Australia and the United States stop settling frontier lands during the twentieth century? At the same time, why did states loudly committed to decolonization like Indonesia and China start settling the lands of such minorities as the West Papuans and Uyghurs? Settling for Less: Why States Colonize and Why They Stop (Princeton University Press, 2023) by Dr. Lachlan McNamee traces this bewildering historical reversal, explaining when and why indigenous peoples suffer displacement at the hands of settlers. Dr. McNamee challenges the notion that settler colonialism can be explained by economics or racial ideologies. He tells a more complex story about state building and the conflicts of interest between indigenous peoples, states, and settlers. Drawing from a rich array of historical evidence, Dr. McNamee shows that states generally colonize frontier areas in response to security concerns. Elite schemes to populate contested frontiers with loyal settlers, however, often fail. As societies grow wealthier and cities increasingly become magnets for migration, states ultimately lose the power to settle frontier lands. Settling for Less uncovers the internal dynamics of settler colonialism and the diminishing power of colonizers in a rapidly urbanizing world. Contrasting successful and failed colonization projects in Australia, Indonesia, China, and beyond, this book demonstrates that economic development—by thwarting colonization—has proven a powerful force for indigenous self-determination. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Why do very small groups, like the Ahmadiyah sect in Indonesia, become targets of mobilization and repression? How do political entrepreneurs play a role in facilitating violence against such groups? What practical issues should we consider when conducting field research on contentious phenomena? In this episode, Prof. Jessica Soedirgo, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Amsterdam, joins Dr. Mai Van Tran, a postdoc at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, to discuss her book project on the constitutive threat of micro-sized groups. This topic has become increasingly important given the rising rate of persecution against marginalized religious groups around the world. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-a... Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

The Myanmar coup on February 1, 2021 shocked the world, and ended an opening that had fostered hopes for democratization and economic development. The Tatmadaw, Myanmar’s military, reversed a decade’s worth of changes, and sparked a civil conflict that has continued for two years since the coup. Why did the military launch a coup? What reasons do the Tatmadaw give for seizing such a central role in the country’s affairs? Oliver Slow, a reporter who was based in Myanmar over the past decades, shares his on-the-ground experiences in his recent book Return of the Junta: Why Myanmar’s Military Must Go Back to the Barracks (Bloomsbury, 2023) In this interview, Oliver and I talk about his history in Myanmar, how the military grew to see itself as the protectors of Myanmar–despite what the people think–and the complicated conflict in Rakhine State. Oliver Slow is an award-winning multimedia journalist. Previously based in Southeast Asia for more than a decade, he’s recently returned to the United Kingdom, where he works for the BBC. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Return of the Junta. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

When scholars analyse Thai politics, they tend to give importance to institutions like the monarchy, the military, the parliament, and political parties; or, political ideas like ‘royalist nationalism’ or democracy. But what if the real driver of Thai politics was none of these things, but instead, political families?  Yoshinori Nishizaki examines this proposition in his new book, Dynastic Democracy: Political Families in Thailand, which has just been published by University of Wisconsin Press in 2022. In this incredibly researched book, Nishizaki makes the powerful argument that it is the struggles between different political families have helped shape modern Thai politics. In pursuing this argument Nishizaki questions some of the major assumptions about Thailand’s political history. The book’s approach may also help us in understand the contemporary politics of other Southeast Asian countries. Patrick Jory teaches Southeast Asian History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. He can be reached at: p.jory@uq.edu.au. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

What does it mean to design democratic cities and democratic citizens in a time of mass urbanization and volatile political transformation?  Citizen Designs: City-Making and Democracy in Northeastern Thailand (U Hawaii Press, 2021) addresses this question by exploring the ways that democratic urban planning projects intersect with emerging political aspirations among squatters living in the northeastern Thai city of Khon Kaen. Based on ethnographic and historical research conducted since 2007, Citizen Designs describes how residents of Khon Kaen’s railway squatter communities used Thailand’s experiment in participatory urban planning as a means of reimagining their citizenship, remaking their communities, and acting upon their aspirations for political equality and the good life. It also shows how the Thai state used participatory planning and design to manage both situated political claims and emerging politics.  Through ethnographic analysis of contentious collaborations between residents, urban activists, state planners, participatory architects, and city officials, Eli Elinoff’s analysis reveals how the Khon Kaen’s railway settlements became sites of contestation over political inclusion and the meaning and value of democracy as a political form in the first decades of the twenty-first century. Elinoff examines how residents embraced politics as a means of enacting their equality. This embrace inspired new debates about the meaning of good citizenship and how democracy might look and feel. The disagreements over citizenship, like those Elinoff describes in Khon Kaen, reflect the kinds of aspirations for political equality that have been fundamental to Thailand’s political transformation over the last two decades, which has seen new political actors asserting themselves at the ballot box and in the streets alongside the retrenchment of military authoritarianism. Citizen Designs offers new conceptual and empirical insights into the lived effects of Thailand’s political volatility and into the current moment of democratic ambivalence, mass urbanization, and authoritarian resurgence. Eli Elinoff is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Anthropology at the Victoria University of Wellington. He is also the co-editor of Disastrous Times: Beyond Environmental Crisis in Urbanizing Asia and the co-founder of Commoning Ethnography which is an off-centre, annual, international, peer-engaged, open access, online journal dedicated to examining, criticizing, and redrawing the boundaries of ethnographic research, teaching, knowledge, and praxis. Amir Sayadabdi is a Lecturer in Anthropology at Victoria University of Wellington. He is mainly interested in anthropology of food and its intersection with gender studies, migration studies, and studies of race, ethnicity, and nationalism. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

A unique Buddhist tradition, accessible in English for the first time—translations of forty-five Cambodian Dharma songs, with contextualizing essays and a link to audio of stunning vocal performances.  Trent Walker's Until Nirvana's Time: Buddhist Songs from Cambodia (Shambhala, 2022) is the first collection of traditional Cambodian Buddhist literature available in English, presenting original translations of forty-five poems. Introduced, translated, and contextualized by scholar and vocalist Trent Walker, the Dharma songs in this book reveal a distinctive Southeast Asian genre of devotion, mourning, and contemplation. Their soaring melodies have inspired Cambodians for generations, whether in daily prayers or all-night rituals.  Trained in oral and written lineages in Cambodia, Walker presents a carefully curated range of poems from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries that capture the transformative wisdom of the Khmer Buddhist tradition. Many of the poems, having been transcribed from old cassette tapes or fragile bark-paper manuscripts, are printed here for the first time. A link to recordings of selected songs in English and Khmer accompanies the book. These frank and compelling poems offer mirrors to our own lives—even as they challenge Buddhist conventions of how to die, how to grieve, and how to repay the ones we love. Selected recordings of Dharma songs can be accessed here: Trent Walker--Dharma Songs. You can download Trent Walker's 1631-page-long dissertation here: Unfolding Buddhism. Here's the link to register for his course at Barre Center: Story and Song. Jessica Zu is an intellectual historian and a scholar of Buddhist studies. She is an assistant professor of religion at the University of Southern California. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Where does the concept of “community” come from? How does it shape the lives of Hindus and Muslims in metropolitan Yangon? And how do these people navigate between their ethno-religious and other cosmopolitan identities? In this episode, Prof. Judith Beyer, a Professor of Social and Political Anthropology at the University of Konstanz, joins Dr. Mai Van Tran, a postdoc at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, to discuss her latest book Rethinking Community in Myanmar: Practices of We-Formation Among Muslims and Hindus in Urban Yangon (NIAS Press, 2022). In it, she offers the first anthropological monograph of Muslim and Hindu lives in contemporary Myanmar. The book introduces the concept of “we-formation” as a fundamental yet underexplored capacity of humans to relate to one another outside of and apart from demarcated ethno-religious lines and corporate groups. Her argument also provides an alternative lens to understand the dynamics of the ongoing Myanmar Spring Revolution. The work on this episode was supported by funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, under grant agreement No 101079069. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Like other global frontiers, the Cambodia-Vietnam borderlands are a hotspot for migration, land claims, and markets for newly introduced commodities. These topics and more are the focus of Sango Mahanty’s recent book, Unsettled Frontiers: Market Formation in the Cambodia-Vietnam Borderlands (Cornell University Press, 2022). The book argues that frontier agricultural markets emerge from diverse commodity networks that constitute a dynamic and disruptive market ‘rhizome.’ In this podcast, Sango addresses several related themes, including: the relationship between frontiers and borderlands in this region; the role of rural migration and land-claiming in frontier markets; the nexus between market formation and state formation; and what it means to think ‘rhizomically’ about frontier markets. Sango also touches on how these insights translate to ongoing processes of social and environmental change, such as those imposed by climate change. Sango Mahanty is Professor in the Resources, Environment, and Development Program at the ANU Crawford School of Public Policy. Sango is a critical geographer who studies the politics of green economies, frontier markets and nature-society transformations in Cambodia and Vietnam. Professor Michele Ford is the Director of the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, a university-wide multidisciplinary center at the University of Sydney, Australia. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In this podcast, the host, Lara Momesso, interviews the Taiwanese movie director Asio Liu on his most recent movie project on the Vietnamese refugee camps in Penghu. Many of us are familiar with the inexorable flow of Vietnamese boat people right after the end of the war in Vietnam. Though, very few know that some of the Vietnamese boat people landed in Penghu, in the Taiwan Strait, just off the west coast of Taiwan and they ended up living there until they were resettled. The Penghu refugee camps were destroyed at the beginning of the 2000s. By revealing the process of discovering the refugee camps in Penghu and connecting with the refugees who have been there, Asio discusses personal and collective aspects of a phenomenon that brings together global, regional and local issues and which has become the subject of a 20 year-long project. For those who are interested to know more about this issue, here you can find some links: Asio Liu asio.liu@gmail.com Instagram: The Chiangmei Refugee Archive (CRAA) Facebook: @澎湖難民營三部曲 Penghu Refugee Camps Trilogy at the Taiwan Strait Twitter: @CRAA_Chiangmei Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In this episode, we discuss Arve Hansen’s new book Consumption and Vietnam’s New Middle Classes: Societal Transformations and Everyday Life (Springer, 2022). In this book, Hansen studies the dramatic changes in consumption patterns in Vietnam over the past decades, focusing on how everyday life changes in the context of rapid economic development and capitalist transformations. How does a consumer society emerge and take shape in Vietnam’s socialist market economy? What is consumer socialism? Why should we study the consumption patterns of Asia’s new middle classes, and are there similarities between the middle classes in Vietnam and India? To discuss these questions, we are joined by the author and Manisha Anantharaman Manisha Anantharaman, associate professor of Justice, Community and Leadership at Saint Mary's College of California in the Bay Area. She teaches and does research on the politics of sustainability, and has among many other things written extensively on the ‘environmentalism’ of India’s middle classes. Arve Hansen is a human geographer at the Centre for Development and the Environment at the University of Oslo, teaching and researching consumption and sustainability with particular focus on Vietnam. He also leads the Norwegian Network for Asian Studies with Kenneth Bo Nielsen. Kenneth Bo Nielsen is an Associate Professor at the dept. of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and one of the leaders of the Norwegian Network for Asian Studies. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Malaysia is a classic example of a plural society, with a diverse population consisting of the indigenous peoples, collectively called bumiputera, and the descendants of immigrant populations from southern China, South Asia, the Middle East and Europe. In this multi-ethnic context, the question of identity, notably of Malay identity, has remained elusive and open to varying interpretations. Joining Dr Natali Pearson on SSEAC Stories, Professor Tom Pepinsky contends that identity is not set in stone, but is emergent, situational and contingent. Focusing on the concept of ethnic identity in Malaysia, he argues that in contemporary Malaysia, the Malay identity is a socially constructed identity. To put it in simple terms, Malays did not make Malaysia; Malaysia made Malays. About Tom Pepinsky: Tom Pepinsky is the Walter F. LaFeber Professor of Government and Public Policy at Cornell, and also the Director of the Cornell Southeast Asia Program and Non-resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. He studies comparative politics and political economy, with a special focus on Indonesia and Malaysia. His current research looks at the political economy of ethnicity in the Malay world. He is the co-author of Piety and Public Opinion: Understanding Indonesian Islam (Oxford University Press, 2018) and the co-editor of Beyond Oligarchy: Wealth, Power, and Contemporary Indonesian Politics (Cornell University Press 2014). For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Why has Thailand had 20 constitutions since 1932? What accounts for the remarkable veneration Thais often feel towards these short-lived documents? How is that military coups can be viewed as completely legal in Thailand? And what accounts for the leading role prominent legal experts play in Thailand’s political order? In this podcast, Thailand scholar Duncan McCargo talks to Eugénie Mérieau about her wide-ranging new book, Constitutional Bricolage: Thailand's Sacred Monarchy vs. The Rule of Law (Bloomsbury, 2021), which analyses the unique constitutional system in operation in Thailand as a continuous process of bricolage between various Western constitutional models and Buddhist doctrines of Kingship. Reflecting on the category of 'constitutional monarchy' and its relationship with notions of the rule of law, it investigates the hybridised semi-authoritarian, semi-liberal monarchy that exists in Thailand. By studying constitutional texts and political practices in light of local legal doctrine, the book shows that the monarch's affirmation of extraordinary prerogative powers strongly rests on wider doctrinal claims about constitutionalism and the rule of law. This finding challenges commonly accepted assertions about Thailand, arguing that the King's political role is not the remnant of the 'unfinished' borrowing of Western constitutionalism, general disregard for the law, or cultural preference for 'charismatic authority', as generally thought. Drawing on materials and sources not previously available in English, this important work provides a comprehensive and critical account of the Thai 'mixed constitutional monarchy' from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Eugénie Mérieau is an Associate Professor of Public Law (maîtresse de conférences) at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, and a member of the Sorbonne Institute of Philosophical and Legal Research (CNRS). Enjoyed this podcast? Here are some related recent podcasts on Thailand from the New Books Network: Puangthong Pawakapan on Infiltrating Society: The Thai Military’s Internal Security Affairs Supalak Ganjanakhundee on A Soldier King: Monarchy and Military in the Thailand of Rama X Duncan McCargo on Network Monarchy Duncan McCargo on Fighting for Virtue: Justice and Politics in Thailand  Duncan McCargo is director of the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, and a professor of political science at the University of Copenhagen. For his work on Thai politics, go here. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

From the 1950s to the 1970s, Philippine Chinese were Southeast Asia's most exemplary Cold Warriors among overseas Chinese. During these decades, no Chinese community in the region was more vigilant in identifying and rooting out suspected communists from within its midst; none was as committed to mobilizing against the People's Republic of China as the one in the former US colony. Ironically, for all the fears of overseas Chinese communities' ties to the PRC at the time, the example of the Philippines shows that the "China" that intervened the most extensively in any Southeast Asian Chinese society during the Cold War was the Republic of China on Taiwan.  Kung Chien Wen’s Diasporic Cold Warriors: Nationalist China, Anticommunism, and the Philippine Chinese, 1930s-1970s (Cornell UP, 2022) tells the story of the Philippine Chinese as pro-Taiwan, anticommunist partisans, tracing their evolving relationship with the KMT and successive Philippine governments over the mid-twentieth century. Throughout, he argues for a networked and transnational understanding of the ROC-KMT party-state and demonstrates that Taipei exercised a form of nonterritorial sovereignty over the Philippine Chinese with Manila's participation and consent. Challenging depoliticized narratives of cultural integration, he also contends that, because of the KMT, Chinese identity formation and practices of belonging in the Philippines were deeply infused with Cold War ideology. Drawing on archival research and fieldwork in Taiwan, the Philippines, the United States, and China, Diasporic Cold Warriors reimagines the histories of the ROC, the KMT, and the Philippine Chinese, connecting them to the broader canvas of the Cold War and postcolonial nation-building in East and Southeast Asia. Kung Chien Wen is an Assistant Professor in History at the National University of Singapore. His research straddles the fields of Chinese migration and diaspora, the Cold War and decolonisation in Southeast Asia, and modern China and Taiwan in the world. Benjamin Goh is a MPhil in World History Candidate at the University of Cambridge. He focuses on global youth and education histories in Southeast Asia and is presently working on his dissertation that explores world history-making at the University of Malaya in the 1950s and 1960s. He tweets at @BenGohsToSchool. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Seiji Shirane’s Imperial Gateway: Colonial Taiwan and Japan's Expansion in South China and Southeast Asia, 1895-1945 (Cornell UP, 2022) demonstrates that colonial Taiwan was an imperial center in its own right, a political, social, and economic hub for the southern expansion of Japan’s empire led by officials with agendas that did not always match those of the government in Tokyo. In addition to this contribution to the study of Japanese empire, Imperial Gateway highlights two aspects of the history that are often underappreciated in the Anglophone literature. First, Shirane expands the aperture of his narrative beyond bilateral Sino-Japanese relations to encompass a dynamic multilateral milieu that includes colonial Taiwan, the region’s Western powers, and the Taiwanese subjects of the empire called “overseas Taiwanese” (sekimin) by Japan. Second, Shirane pays particular attention to the agency not just of the Government-General installed by Japan to rule over Taiwan, but also the “overseas Taiwanese” both wooed by the Japanese to advance imperial ambitions and also pursuing their own autonomous interests. Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the University of Bergen's Department of Foreign Languages. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Drawing on an extensive study with young individuals who migrated to Singapore and Tokyo in the 2010s, The EU Migrant Generation in Asia: Middle-Class Aspirations in Asian Global Cities (Policy Press, 2022) by Helena Hof sheds light on the friendships, emotions, hopes, and fears involved in establishing life as Europeans in Asia. It demonstrates how migration to Asian business centres has become a way of distinction and an alternative route of middle-class reproduction for young Europeans during that period. The perceived insecurities of life in the crisis-ridden EU result in these migrants’ onward migration or prolonged stays in Asia. Capturing the changing roles of Singapore and Japan as migration destinations, this pioneering work makes the case for EU citizens’ aspired lifestyles and professional employment that is no longer only attainable in Europe or the West. Helena Hof is Senior Research Fellow and Lecturer at the Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies, University of Zurich, and Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. Shatrunjay Mall is a PhD candidate at the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He works on transnational Asian history, and his dissertation explores intellectual, political, and cultural intersections and affinities that emerged between Indian anti-colonialism and imperial Japan in the twentieth century. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

The second half of the nineteenth century is correctly known to have culminated in the emergence of the gold standard as the first truly international monetary regime. The processes leading up to this remarkable feat are, however, far less documented or understood. Economic historians have only recently started digging into the causes behind the 'fall of silver' that preceded the scramble for gold. It is nowadays clear that its effects were felt worldwide. Not in the least, silver depreciation severely affected East-West trade. It was, among other factors, behind the bankruptcy of several powerful institutions as the Oriental Bank Corporation. Yet at the same time, it cemented the position of other banks, some of which exist until this very day (HSBC, Standard Chartered). What did these banks know that others did not? In Accounting for the Fall of Silver: Hedging Currency Risk in Long-Distance Trade with Asia, 1870-1913 (Oxford UP, 2020), Michael Schiltz explains that the 1870s and 1880s witnessed furious experiments with new financial products and, equally important, strategies for hedging exchange rate risk. Drawing on archives that have never been used before, the book throws new light on an important episode of nineteenth century world history. At the same time, it illuminates lesser known aspects of the first gold standard period. It draws attention to the existence of 'carry trades' between European money markets and the lesser liquid Asian periphery; and describes the creation of financial contracts with the sole aim of enabling commodity finance among Asian mercantile centers. Michael Schiltz is associate professor at Hokkaido University. His has published widely on the financial history of modern Japan, including his first book The Money Doctors from Japan – Finance, Imperialism, and the Building of the ‘Yen Bloc’ (Harvard University Press, 2012). Ghassan Moazzin is an Assistant Professor at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences and the Department of History at the University of Hong Kong. He works on the economic and business history of 19th and 20th century China, with a particular focus on the history of foreign banking, international finance and electricity in modern China. His first book, Foreign Banks and Global Finance in Modern China: Banking on the Chinese Frontier, 1870–1919, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2022. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Are there viable alternatives to the ethnocentric model of nation-state in post-colonial societies? How did the Peranakan, a non-Malay community, imagine a different Malayan nation and strive to materialize it? How might researchers thoroughly investigate the political history of a marginalised group? And do the historical experiences from Malaya offer relevant lessons for resisting present-day ultra-nationalist developments elsewhere? In this episode, Dr. Bernard Keo, a Lecturer at La Trobe University, joins Dr. Mai Van Tran, a postdoc at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, to discuss his research on nation building, based on an extensive interrogation of Malaya’s complex path to independence. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

"Comfort women" or ianfu is the euphemism used by the Japanese military for the women they compelled to do sex work in the Second World War. The role of comfort women in history remains a topic of importance — and emotion — around the world. It is well-known that an elaborate series of comfort stations, or comfort houses, were organised by the Japanese administration across Singapore during the Occupation from 1942 to 1945. So why did no local former comfort women come forward and tell their stories when others across Asia began to do publicly in the 1990s? To understand this silence, The Comfort Women of Singapore in History and Memory (National University of Singapore Press, 2022) by Dr. Kevin Blackburn details the sex industry serving the Japanese military during the wartime occupation of Singapore: the comfort stations, managers, procuresses, girls and women who either volunteered or were forced into service and in many cases sexual slavery. Could it be that no former comfort women remained in Singapore after the war? Dr. Blackburn shows through a careful weighing of the different kinds of evidence why this was not the case. The immediate post-war years, and efforts to repatriate or ‘reform’ former comfort women fills in a key part of the history. Dr. Blackburn then turns from history to the public presence of the comfort women in Singapore's memory: newspapers, novels, plays, television, and touristic heritage sites, showing how comfort women became known in Singapore during the 1990s and 2000s. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

At the turn of the twentieth century, the US government viewed education as one sure way of civilizing “others” under its sway—among them American Indians and, after 1898, Filipinos. Teaching Empire: Native Americans, Filipinos, and Us Imperial Education 1879-1918 (UP of Kansas, 2019) considers how teachers took up this task, first at the Carlisle Indian Boarding School in Pennsylvania, opened in 1879, and then in a school system set up amid an ongoing rebellion launched by Filipinos. Drawing upon the records of fifty-five teachers at Carlisle and thirty-three sent to the Philippines—including five who worked in both locations—the book reveals the challenges of translating imperial policy into practice, even for those most dedicated to the imperial mission. These educators, who worked on behalf of the US government, sought to meet the expectations of bureaucrats and supervisors while contending with leadership crises on the ground. In their stories, Elisabeth Eittreim finds the problems common to all classrooms—how to manage students and convey knowledge—complicated by their unique circumstances, particularly the military conflict in the Philippines. Eittreim’s research shows the dilemma presented by these schools’ imperial goal: “pouring in” knowledge that purposefully dismissed and undermined the values, desires, and protests of those being taught. To varying degrees these stories demonstrate both the complexity and fragility of implementing US imperial education and the importance of teachers’ own perspectives. Entangled in US ambitions, racist norms, and gendered assumptions, teachers nonetheless exhibited significant agency, wielding their authority with students and the institutions they worked for and negotiating their roles as powerful purveyors of cultural knowledge, often reinforcing but rarely challenging the then-dominant understanding of “civilization.” Examining these teachers’ attitudes and performances, close-up and in-depth over the years of Carlisle’s operation, Eittreim’s comparative study offers rare insight into the personal, institutional, and cultural implications of education deployed in the service of US expansion—with consequences that reach well beyond the imperial classrooms of the time. Jane Scimeca is Professor of History at Brookdale Community College. @JaneScimeca1 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Rioting for Representation: Local Ethnic Mobilization in Democratizing Countries (Cambridge UP, 2021) examines the conditions that inflame ethnic riots after the fall of authoritarian rule as well as the factors that cause violence to subside. It examines the case of post-1998 Indonesia but it provokes reflection on the legacies of ethnic riots in post-authoritarian countries’ long-term political development. In this podcast, Risa J. Toha argues that it is not inherent ethnic or cultural differences that drive violence but the extent of political exclusion. Once institutions for political inclusion become stronger, violence dissipates. She explains institutional mechanisms that facilitate a stronger sense of political inclusion and reflects on the motivations for political elites to deescalate violence. The podcast concludes with methodological reflections on the importance of focusing on case studies in the district or municipality level, and the role of ‘small cases’ in generating ‘big ideas.’ Dr Risa J. Toha is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale-NUS College in Singapore. Like this interview? You may also be interested in: Adis Maksić,  Ethnic Mobilization, Violence, and the Politics of Affect: The Serb Democratic Party and the Bosnian War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) Roberto Carmack, Kazakhstan in World War II: Mobilization and Ethnicity in the Soviet Empire (University Press of Kansas, 2019). Nicole Curato is a Professor of Sociology in the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra. She co-hosts the New Books in Southeast Asia Studies channel. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Andrea Acri and Peter Sharrock's The Creative South: Buddhist and Hindu Art in Mediaeval Maritime Asia (2 volumes; Iseas-Yusof Ishak Institute, 2022) examines the creative contribution of Maritime Asia towards shaping new paradigms in the Buddhist and Hindu art and architecture of the mediaeval Asian world. Far from being a mere southern conduit for the maritime circulation of Indic religions, in the period from ca. the 7th to the 14th century those regions transformed across mainland and island polities the rituals, icons, and architecture that embodied these religious insights with a dynamism that often eclipsed the established cultural centres in Northern India, Central Asia, and mainland China. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

“Kopi Dulu,” means “coffee first” in Indonesian–a common phrase from Indonesians who are happy to have coffee anywhere, anytime and with anyone. At least, that was Mark Eveleigh’s experience, as a travel writer and reporter, traveling across the country’s many islands. The phrase gives us the title of his latest book: Kopi Dulu: Caffeine-Fuelled Travels Through Indonesia (Penguin Southeast Asia, 2022). Mark travels through Indonesia’s cities and villages, jungles and seas, sharing his experience with the country’s nature, history, and possibility for adventure. In this interview, Mark joins the show to share his stories on islands like Java, Sumatra, and Borneo, and why it’s important to pay attention to this large Southeast Asian country. Mark Eveleigh is a travel writer and photographer whose work has, over 25 years, graced the pages of some of the world's most prestigious travel titles. The British-born writer (who lived most of his first decade in West Africa) has traveled widely in Africa, Latin America and Asia working for some of the world’s most prestigious publications – including BBC, Telegraph, Guardian, Independent, National Geographic Traveler, Conde Nast Traveller and CNN. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Kopi Dulu. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In post-growth Japan, some people are looking to Southeast Asia, especially Malaysia, as a source of new hope. A notable change in the recent pattern of global migration is the movement of people within Asia. Previous studies on Asian migration have mostly considered the movement of people from Asia to Europe and North America. Yet in recent years, countries in Asia have emerged as major receiving sites of intra-regional migration. Joining Dr Natali Pearson on SSEAC Stories, Dr Shiori Shakuto takes a closer look at Japanese retirement migration to Malaysia, revealing some of the motivations for inter-Asian migration, and what that might tell us about their hopes and dreams for a different kind of life. About Shiori Shakuto: Shiori Shakuto is a Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sydney. Her feminist research bridges household economies with transnationalism, with a particular focus on the movement of people and (domestic) things between Japan and Malaysia. Her recent projects have focused on the rise of Japanese migration to Malaysia in the aftermath of various disasters – at the scales of personal, national and environmental. Shiori’s research shows how transnational movement destabilises heteronormative lifecourse, and how gendered household practices in turn shape and reshape the existing hegemonic geopolitical relations. She is the co-editor of the Special Issue, “Gender, Migration and Digital Communication in Asia” (2022). For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

What is the Third World? The term has essentially been scrubbed from our collective consciousness. What once used to be something concrete seems to have vanished into thin air. Today, the Third World seems to be “a closed chapter in world history.” But my guests today are determined that it not remain so. In their new edited volume, Inventing the Third World: In Search of Freedom for the Postwar Global South, historians Gyan Prakash, Jeremy Adelman, and their collaborators argue that the multiple and overlapping projects of the Third World offer an alternative globalism to neoliberal globalization. Characterized, fundamentally, by the search for freedom from imperial domination, a focus on the Third World helps reframe our understanding of the second half of the twentieth century. Elisa Prosperetti is an Assistant Professor in International History at the National Institute of Education in Singapore. Her research focuses on the connected histories of education and development in postcolonial West Africa. Contact her at here. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

The city of Chiang Mai in northern Thailand has become the destination for a growing segment of the international tourism market: religious tourism. International tourists visit Buddhist temples, volunteer as English teachers, discuss Buddhism with student monks, and experiment with meditation. In her new book, Religious Tourism in Northern Thailand: Encounters with Buddhist Monks (University of Washington Press, 2021), Brooke Schedneck examines this growing phenomenon. While such interactions may constitute yet another case of the commodification of Buddhism, religious tourism in Buddhist Chiang Mai can also be seen as another way in which Thai Buddhism is adapting to a more globalized, market-oriented society. It may even constitute a new opportunity for Buddhist missionary work. Religious Tourism in Northern Thailand has been shortlisted for the EuroSEAS Humanities Book Prize for 2022. Patrick Jory teaches Southeast Asian History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. He can be reached at: p.jory@uq.edu.au. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

How do ideas manifest outside of their place of origin, and how do they change once they do? The Emergence of Global Maoism: China’s Red Evangelism and the Cambodian Communist Movement, 1949–1979 (Cornell University Press, 2022) by Matthew Galway examines how ideological systems become localized, both in the indigenization of Marxism-Leninism by Mao Zedong and, more significantly, the indigenization of Maoism by the Communist Party of Kampuchea. Galway carefully investigates how Maoism was received, adapted, utilized, and ultimately rejected in Cambodia, examining in particular the different ways Paris-educated CPK leaders Pol Pot, Hou Yuon, and Hu Nim approached and interpreted Mao's writings and ideas. This intellectual history is wonderfully rich, theoretically grounded in Edward Said’s "traveling theory" model and filled with close readings of little-known, complex texts. The Emergence of Global Maoism is a necessary read for those interested in the history of modern China, Cambodia, and global Maoism, as well as for anyone who has ever wondered what a historian might do with an economics dissertation (the answer: see chapter four). In addition to seeking out The Emergence of Global Maoism, interested listeners should also have a look at “Peasant Worker Communist Spy: A Chinese Intelligence Agent Looks Back at His Time in Cambodia,” a portrait of a CCP intelligence agent in Cambodia, as well as Experiments with Marxism-Leninism in Cold War Southeast Asia (ANU Press, 2022) edited by Matthew Galway and Marc H. Opper, with chapters on the adoption of Marxism in the Dutch East Indies, Maoism in the Philippines, and the Chinese Communist Party in Laos, among other fascinating case studies of experiments with Marxism-Leninism in Southeast Asia. Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a PhD candidate in History and East Asian Languages at Harvard. She works on Manchu language books and is interested in anything with a kesike. She can be reached at sbramaoramos@g.harvard.edu Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

China re-opened border in a final farewell to its strict zero-COVID policy on the 8th of January, 2023. But in the first few weeks of January, the Myanmar side of the border and the Myanmar immigration authorities refused to open the border for fear of COVID surge. This has continued to affect the livelihood of Myanmar jewellers who used to travel to China to do business. In this episode, Julie Yu-Wen Chen (University of Helsinki) talks to Juliet Zhu from the Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia at Mahidol University in Thailand. Juliet Zhu is currently a postdoctoral researcher. She has been conducting research on Myanmar jewellers since her doctoral study at the same university. As Juliet illuminates, since the late 1980s, generations of Myanmar jewellers have settled down in the Chinese border cities next to northern Myanmar. Currently, most of them are based in Dehong Prefecture, a border prefecture in southwestern China’s Yunnan Province. In the past few years, they have faced increasingly precarious economic and social conditions due to China’s anti-corruption campaign, the Belt and Road Initiative and the rise of live-streaming trade in the transnational jewellery business. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many Myanmar immigrants have left China. Listeners can read Zhu’s 2021 co-authored paper to learn more about her study and find a map of her studied area in this paper. Julie Yu-Wen Chen is Professor of Chinese Studies at the Department of Cultures at the University of Helsinki (Finland). Dr. Chen serves as one of the editors of the Journal of Chinese Political Science (Springer, SSCI). Formerly, she was chair of Nordic Association of China Studies (NACS) and Editor-in-Chief of Asian Ethnicity (Taylor & Francis). You can find her on University of Helsinki Chinese Studies’ website, Youtube and Facebook, and her personal Twitter. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

The ocean is more connective device than barrier, bringing together diverse topics, time-periods and geographies. It has linked and connected the various littorals of Asia into a segmented, yet at the same time, a unitary circuit over roughly the past 500 years since the so-called age of contact initiated a quickening of patterns and engagements that already existed. But despite the centrality of the maritime domain, there hasn’t really been a single study looking at Asia’s seas through a broad macro-lens. Joining Dr Natali Pearson on SSEAC Stories, Professor Eric Tagliocozzo seeks to address this gap. Drawing from his latest book, In Asian Waters: Oceanic Worlds from Yemen to Yokohama (Princeton University Press, 2022), he provides a sweeping account of how the seas and oceans of Asia have shaped the region’s history for the past half millennium, leaving an indelible mark on the modern world in the process. About Eric Tagliacozzo: Eric Tagliacozzo is the John Stambaugh Professor of History at Cornell University, where he teaches Southeast Asian history. He is the director of Cornell's Comparative Muslim Societies Program, the director of the Cornell Modern Indonesia Project, and the contributing editor of the journal Indonesia. Much of his work has centered on the history of people, ideas, and material in motion in and around Southeast Asia, especially in the colonial age. His first book, Secret Trades, Porous Borders: Smuggling and States Along a Southeast Asian Frontier (Yale University Press, 2005), examined many of these ideas by analysing the history of smuggling in the region. His second book, The Longest Journey: Southeast Asians and the Pilgrimage to Mecca (Oxford University Press, 2013), attempted to write a history of this very broad topic from earliest times to the present. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

How do farmers struggle for land and democracy in Myanmar’s hybrid political system? How might a feminist approach to this question look like and enable novel findings? In which ways can researchers make the most of ethnographic methods to understand ordinary people’s survival strategies? And do experiences from rural Myanmar reflect the wider changing landscape of development in the Global South? In this episode, Dr. Hilary Faxon, a Marie Curie Fellow in the Department of Food and Resource Economics at the University of Copenhagen, joins Dr. Mai Van Tran, a postdoc at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, to discuss her upcoming book on grassroots struggles over land, based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Myanmar. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In The Made-Up State: Technology, Trans Femininity, and Citizenship in Indonesia (Cornell UP, 2022), Benjamin Hegarty contends that warias, one of Indonesia's trans feminine populations, have cultivated a distinctive way of captivating the affective, material, and spatial experiences of belonging to a modern public sphere. Combining historical and ethnographic research, Hegarty traces the participation of warias in visual and bodily technologies, ranging from psychiatry and medical transsexuality to photography and feminine beauty. The concept of development deployed by the modern Indonesian state relies on naturalizing the binary of "male" and "female." As historical brokers between gender as a technological system of classifying human difference and state citizenship, warias shaped the contours of modern selfhood even while being positioned as nonconforming within it. The Made-Up State illuminates warias as part of the social and technological format of state rule, which has given rise to new possibilities for seeing and being seen as a citizen in postcolonial Indonesia. Like this interview? If so, you might also be interested in: David Reeve, To Remain Myself: The History of Onghokham Lynette J. Chua, The Politics of Love in Myanmar: LGBT Mobilization and Human Rights as a Way of Life Anjalee Cohen, Youth Culture and Identity in Northern Thailand: Fitting in and Sticking Out Professor Michele Ford is the Director of the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, a university-wide multidisciplinary center at the University of Sydney, Australia. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Malaysia held its fifteenth general election on 19 November 2022 after it was called at short notice before the end of the last government’s term. What was this election all about? How to understand its results? Can we consider Malaysia to be experiencing a democratic transition? And what comparative lessons does this election offer for political competitions elsewhere in Southeast Asia? In this episode, Duncan McCargo, director of the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) and a professor of political science at the University of Copenhagen, joins Mai Van Tran, a postdoctoral researcher at NIAS, to discuss his experience observing Malaysia’s GE15 on the ground. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

On September 2, 1945, Japan surrendered to the United States, ending the Second World War. Yet the Japanese invasion had upended the old geopolitical structures of European empires, leaving old imperial powers on the decline and new groups calling for independence on the rise. That unsteady situation sparked a decade of conflict: in Indonesia, in Vietnam, in China and in Korea, as esteemed military historian Professor Ronald Spector writes about in his latest book, A Continent Erupts: Decolonization, Civil War, and Massacre in Postwar Asia, 1945–1955, published by W. W. Norton in 2023. In this interview, Ronald and I talk about the decade of conflict following the Second World War–and whether these conflicts were inevitable in the postcolonial, Cold War world. Ronald H. Spector, professor emeritus of history and international relations at George Washington University, is the author of seven books, including Eagle Against the Sun: The American War With Japan (Free Press: 1984) and In the Ruins of Empire: The Japanese Surrender and the Battle for Postwar Asia (Random House: 2008). You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of A Continent Erupts. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In 2013, the Journal of Burma Studies published an article titled “An Introduction to Wa Studies.” It seems that even within the last decade the Wa, an upland people living predominantly on what is today the Burma-China frontier, still needed to be introduced to other scholars of the region. Magnus Fiskesjö, the article’s author, began with the caveat that it was by no means complete and was intended only by way of brief introduction. But the article held out the promise of more, and now its author has delivered, with Stories from an Ancient Land: Perspectives on Wa History and Culture (Berghahn, 2021). In this episode, Magnus joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to discuss everything from rice beer to silver mining, opium production and warfare, the tension between the Wa egalitarian ethos and practices of slave holding, and the present and possible future conditions for a people on the periphery of mainland Southeast Asia in an age of intolerant ethno-nationalism. Like this interview? If so you might also be interested in: Holly High, Projectland: Life in a Lao Socialist Model Village Jane Ferguson, Repossessing Shanland: Myanmar, Thailand and a Nation-State Deferred James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States  Nick Cheesman is Associate Professor, Department of Political & Social Change, Australian National University and Senior Fellow, Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy, University at Buffalo (Fall 2022). He hosts the New Books in Interpretive Political & Social Science series on the New Books Network. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Where do the spices we find in our kitchen cabinets come from? What can we learn from tracing spices and their commodities and how does their trade impact the livelihoods of ethnic minority farmers in the Sino-Vietnamese uplands? Annuska Derks and Jean-Francois Rousseau, co- editors with Sarah Turner of the book Fragrant Frontier Global Spice Entanglements in the Sino Vietnamese Uplands, joined Julia Heinle discussing their recently published NIAS Press edited volume. Fragrant Frontier demystifies the contemporary spice trade originating from the Sino-Vietnamese uplands and is available as an Open Access Book on the NIAS Press Website here. Purchase a hardcopy of the book here. & check out the visual story maps here. Annuska Derks is an associate professor and departmental co-director at the University of Zurich. She is a social anthropologist interested in social transformation processes in Southeast Asia, in particular in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand. Her research focuses on migration, labor, gender, as well as the social lives of things, and interrogates discourses of development and innovation. Jean-François Rousseau is an associate professor at the University of Ottawa. He is a development geographer with research focusing on the relationships between agrarian change, infrastructure development – especially hydropower dams and sand-mining – and ethnic minority livelihood diversification in Southwest China. Sarah Turner is Professor of Geography at McGill University. She is a development geographer specializing in ethnic minority livelihoods, agrarian change, and everyday resistance in upland northern Vietnam and southwest China. She also works with street vendors and other members of the mobile informal economy, as well as small-scale entrepreneurs in urban Southeast Asia. Widely published, she is also an editor of the journals Geoforum and Journal of Vietnamese Studies. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, the University of Helsinki and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

On 9 November 2022, Malaysia held its 15th General Elections. These elections took place within an unprecedentedly open and fragmented political landscape. Instead of the usual two main coalitions contending as frontrunners, Malaysia now has three main coalitions: Barisan Nasional (BN), Pakatan Harapan (PH), and Perikatan Nasional (PN). Not one of these coalitions won enough seats to form government, and it was only after much jockeying around that Pakatan Harapan, led by Anwar Ibrahim, was able to cobble together enough support to form the so-called unity government. Joining Dr Natali Pearson on SSEAC Stories, Dr Azmil Tayeb unpacks Malaysia’s recent elections and its evershifting political landscape, discussing the return of ethnoreligious political parties, the future of coalition politics and the unexpected voting patterns of young Malaysian voters. About Azmil Tayeb: Dr Azmil Tayeb is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Social Sciences, Universiti Sains Malaysia in Penang. He has done extensive research on political Islam, social movements and local government politics, particularly in Indonesia and Malaysia. He is currently a Visiting Research Fellow at ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore and an Adjunct Professor at Universitas Negeri Malang in East Java, Indonesia. He is the author of Islamic Education in Indonesia and Malaysia: Shaping Minds, Saving Souls (Routledge, 2018). He is also the co-editor of a forthcoming book by Routledge titled Education and Power in Contemporary Southeast Asia. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Critics of globalisation come in many forms from environmentalists to trade unionists and many others in between. In the midst of all the controversy less attention has been paid to how big a phenomenon globalisation actually is and how it compares to another trend – regionalism. In this podcast Owen Bennett Jones discusses The Globalisation Myth: Why Regions Matter (Yale University Press, 2022) with its author, Shannon K. O Neil.  Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Why some of Asia’s authoritarian regimes have democratized as they have grown richer—and why others haven’t Over the past century, Asia has been transformed by rapid economic growth, industrialization, and urbanization—a spectacular record of development that has turned one of the world’s poorest regions into one of its richest. Yet Asia’s record of democratization has been much more uneven, despite the global correlation between development and democracy. Why have some Asian countries become more democratic as they have grown richer, while others—most notably China—haven’t?  In From Development to Democracy: The Transformations of Modern Asia (Princeton University Press, 2022),' Dan Slater and Joseph Wong offer a sweeping and original answer to this crucial question. Slater and Wong demonstrate that Asia defies the conventional expectation that authoritarian regimes concede democratization only as a last resort, during times of weakness. Instead, Asian dictators have pursued democratic reforms as a proactive strategy to revitalize their power from a position of strength. Of central importance is whether authoritarians are confident of victory and stability. In Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan these factors fostered democracy through strength, while democratic experiments in Indonesia, Thailand, and Myanmar were less successful and more reversible. At the same time, resistance to democratic reforms has proven intractable in Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, China, Vietnam, and Cambodia. Reconsidering China’s 1989 crackdown, Slater and Wong argue that it was the action of a regime too weak to concede, not too strong to fail, and they explain why China can allow democracy without inviting instability. The result is a comprehensive regional history that offers important new insights about when and how democratic transitions happen—and what the future of Asia might be. Javier Mejia is an economist teaching at Stanford University, whose work focuses on the intersection between social networks and economic history. His interests extend to topics on entrepreneurship and political economy with a geographical specialty in Latin America and the Middle East. He received a Ph.D. in Economics from Los Andes University. He has been a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at New York University--Abu Dhabi and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Bordeaux. He is a regular contributor to different news outlets. Currently, he is Forbes Magazine op-ed columnist. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

How far did post-UNTAC Cambodia exemplified an expanded Habermasian public sphere? What happened when a range of aid agencies, private donors, activists and academics showed up with all sorts of competing agendas for educational and cultural projects? In conversation with Duncan McCargo, former Center for Khmer Studies director Philippe Peycam discusses his book reflecting on Cambodia's first decade following the new millennium, and explains (inter alia) why he has so much admiration for librarians and publishers.   Cultural Renewal in Cambodia: Academic Activism in the Neoliberal Era (Brill and ISEAS, 2020) narrates the establishment of a cultural project in post-war Cambodia. It depicts a country at the crossroads of conflicting imaginaries, and shows through the story of the first decade of the Center for Khmer Studies how the neoliberal agenda of ‘northern’ academic institutions effectively constrained alternative ‘southern’ visions of development. Philippe Peycam is the director of the International Institute for Asian Studies in Leiden. He served as director of the Center for Khmer Studies from 1999 to 2009; https://www.iias.asia/profile/... Duncan McCargo is director of the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, and a professor of political science at the University of Copenhagen. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Chasing Wrongs and Rights: My Experience Defending Human Rights Around the World (Simon & Schuster, 2022) by Elaine Pearson, the Asia Director at Human Rights Watch, is an intimate account of her journey fighting for human rights across the world. Part personal journey, part insider’s peek into the work of international human rights organizations, Chasing Wrongs and Rights is also a primer on advocacy with governments, an indictment of Australia’s human rights record and foreign policy, a career guide for people who want to work in human rights, and a reflection about what it takes for human rights change to happen. Above all the book comes out as a tribute to the activists and victims that she met, worked with, and fought for over the years in Thailand, Indonesia, Cambodia, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Papua New Guinea, Australia, and many other places. In this interview, Elaine talks about the work that Human Rights Watch does, her family history in China, her early career in anti-trafficking, her run-ins with abusive or complacent governments, and why fighting for accountability always makes a difference. Nicholas Bequelin is a human rights professional with a PhD in history and a scholarly bent. He has worked about 20 years for Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, most recently as Regional director for Asia. He’s currently a Visiting Scholar and Lecturer at Yale Law School. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In 2012, Cambodia’s most prominent environmental activist was brutally murdered in a high-profile conservation area in the Cardamom Mountains. Tragic and terrible, this event magnifies a crisis in humanity’s efforts to save nature: failure of the very tools and systems at hand for advancing global environmental action. Sarah Milne spent more than a decade working for and observing global conservation projects in Cambodia. During this time, she saw how big environmental NGOs can operate rather like corporations. Their core practice involves rolling out appealing and deceptively simple policy ideas, like Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES). Yet, as policy ideas prove hard to implement, NGOs must also carefully curate evidence from the field to give the impression of success and effectiveness. In Corporate Nature: An Insider's Ethnography of Global Conservation (U Arizona Press, 2022), Milne delves inside the black box of mainstream global conservation. She reveals how big international NGOs struggle in the face of complexity—especially in settings where corruption and political violence prevail. She uses the case of Conservation International’s work in Cambodia to illustrate how apparently powerful NGOs can stumble in practice: policy ideas are transformed on the ground, while perverse side effects arise, like augmented authoritarian power, illegal logging, and Indigenous dispossession. The real power of global conservation NGOs is therefore not in their capacity to control what happens in the field but in their capacity to ignore or conceal failings. Milne argues that this produces an undesirable form of socionature, called corporate nature, that values organizational success over diverse knowledges and ethical conduct. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In the Philippines, unknown numbers of children are in institutional care. Commonly known as residential care or orphanages, these institutions have been established to fill a social welfare gap, and to better support child welfare and protection efforts. But what are the implications for the children in these institutions, and what does this system tell us about the monetisation of their welfare? Joining Dr Natali Pearson on SSEAC Stories, Dr Steven Roche discusses the risks to children’s safety and wellbeing when placed in unsuitable youth residential care institutions, and what policy changes are necessary to ensure child wellbeing and welfare in institutional care. About Steven Roche: Dr Steven Roche is a Lecturer in Social Work and early career researcher at Charles Darwin University. He researches child protection and social policy settings with a particular focus on child and family welfare in the Philippines, and teaches across child protection and social work theory units. His doctoral research, completed in 2020 at Monash University, explored the role of residential care as a child protection mechanism in the Philippines, concentrating on young people’s perspectives and experiences of living in residential care and the social context that surrounds their care and protection. Steven has published a range of articles on this topic across leading social work and social policy journals. He has a forthcoming (late 2022) book chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Child Protection Systems titled ‘Protecting children in the Philippines: a system focused overview of policy and practice’. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

What is the journalism culture in Vietnam? What role does Sweden play in the transformation of Vietnamese journalism? How has Swedish media aid fulfilled its political aim to contribute to the democratic development of media in Vietnam? Andreas Mattsson speaks about how two media aid projects from Sweden were used to intervene in the development of journalism in Vietnam between 1993 and 2007. In a conversation with Joanne Kuai, PhD candidate at Karlstad University, Sweden and an affiliated PhD student at NIAS, Andreas Mattsson talks about how the Swedish media aid intervened in the Vietnamese media by contributing to a technological transition of journalism although the training in newsroom management and media ethics were challenged by conflicting journalism ideology and social norms. Drawing from interviews with Swedish trainers from the media aid projects and informed by his analysis of project documents that provide first-hand information from a period when Vietnamese journalism underwent a dramatic transition towards the digitalized media system existing today, Andreas Mattsson hopes to contribute to de-colonialize media theory to rethink the development of journalism in the Global South. Andreas Mattsson is a lecturer and program director at the School of Journalism at the Department of Communication and Media, Lund University. He is also a PhD student at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Helsinki and an affiliated researcher at the Swedish South Asian Studies Network (SASNET) at Lund University. He has conducted research and taught about journalism practice and digital technology from a comparative international perspective. Besides his university assignments, he works as a freelance journalist for various Swedish and Nordic newspapers and magazines. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, Asianettverket at the University of Oslo, and the University of Helsinki. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. About NIAS: http://www.nias.ku.dk/ Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Vietnam and Russia share a common socialist history dating back to the Cold War. But since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and Vietnam’s đổi mới reforms, Russia has also become a destination for Vietnamese labour migrants who dream of making their fortune. Working in markets, garment factories, and as small traders – both legally and illegally - they live precarious lives, harassed by police, loan sharks, market bosses, and criminals. While huge profits can be made, these migrants are acutely vulnerable to sudden changes in market conditions and government policy, not to mention the bitter Russian cold. In Vietnamese Migrants in Russia: Mobility in Times of Uncertainty (Amsterdam UP, 2020), Lan Anh Hoang presents an astonishing account of the struggles of Vietnamese migrants in Russia. The book also raises broader issues: about the global phenomenon of labour migration of unskilled Asian workers; and most poignantly, about how conditions of acute uncertainty and dependence on the market in a foreign land, upset migrants’ normal conceptions of social values and morality. Vietnamese Migrants in Russia: Mobility in Times of Uncertainty won the 2022 Association of Mainland Southeast Asian Scholars (AMSEAS) prize for best first book. Patrick Jory teaches Southeast Asian History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. He can be reached at: p.jory@uq.edu.au. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Anthropological Witness: Lessons from the Khmer Rouge Tribunal (Cornell UP, 2022) tells the story of Alexander Laban Hinton's encounter with an accused architect of genocide and, more broadly, Hinton's attempt to navigate the promises and perils of expert testimony. In March 2016, Hinton served as an expert witness at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, an international tribunal established to try senior Khmer Rouge leaders for crimes committed during the 1975–79 Cambodian genocide. His testimony culminated in a direct exchange with Pol Pot's notorious right-hand man, Nuon Chea, who was engaged in genocide denial. Anthropological Witness looks at big questions about the ethical imperatives and epistemological assumptions involved in explanation and the role of the public scholar in addressing issues relating to truth, justice, social repair, and genocide. Hinton asks: Can scholars who serve as expert witnesses effectively contribute to international atrocity crimes tribunals where the focus is on legal guilt as opposed to academic explanation? What does the answer to this question say more generally about academia and the public sphere? At a time when the world faces a multitude of challenges, the answers Hinton provides to such questions about public scholarship are urgent. Jeff Bachman is Senior Lecturer in Human Rights at American University’s School of International Service in Washington, DC. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Regional demand for renewable hydropower from the Mekong River and its tributaries in Laos is on the rise. In June 2022, Laos exported one hundred megawatts of hydropower to Singapore via Thailand and Malaysia – a historic milestone that further establishes Laos as the battery of Asia. However, these developments take place amid rising concerns for the ecological future of the transboundary Mekong River and the millions of people who depend on it. Joining Dr Natali Pearson on SSEAC Stories, Dr Ming Li Yong exposes how further hydropower development on the Mekong River could negatively affect ecosystems, resulting in decreased food security and jeopardising livelihoods in the river basin. She also discusses processes of public consultation and how they fail to consider local communities’ opinions on these contested projects. About Ming Li Yong: Ming Li is a Fellow at the East-West Center in Honolulu, Hawai’i. She researches transboundary water governance and hydropower development in the Mekong River Basin. Her research focuses on community-based natural resource management, civil society movements, public participation, and the institutional arrangements that influence the politics of water resources development in the Mekong region. She received her Ph.D. from The University of Sydney and has previously taught courses on environmental ethics, sustainability, and food at the School for Field Studies and Paññāsāstra University of Cambodia, and at the National Institute of Education in Singapore. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In the nineteenth century, one group of American merchants reported an odd request from the Vietnamese emperor. An envoy asked if the traders could help procure a commodity brought by a previous delegation: a precious good that turned out to be a bottle of Best Durham bottled mustard. That’s one small anecdote in Eric Tagliocozzo’s latest book, In Asian Waters: Oceanic Worlds from Yemen to Yokohama (Princeton University Press: 2022), which charts hundreds of years of history across Asia’s waters, from the South China Sea through the Persian Gulf. Eric weaves together historical research and on-the-ground fieldwork to show how Asia’s oceans can be a better way to understand the region than its land borders. In this interview, Eric and I talk about these Asian waters, stretching from the Middle East to East Asia, and the history and fieldwork that went into Eric’s book. Eric Tagliacozzo is the John Stambaugh Professor of History at Cornell University. His many books include Secret Trades, Porous Borders: Smuggling and States along a Southeast Asian Frontier, 1865–1915 (Yale University Press: 2009) and The Longest Journey: Southeast Asians and the Pilgrimage to Mecca (Oxford University Press: 2013). You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of In Asian Waters. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In 1998, the Belitung, a ninth-century western Indian Ocean–style vessel, was discovered in Indonesian waters. Onboard was a full cargo load, likely intended for the Middle Eastern market, of over 60,000 Chinese Tang-dynasty ceramics, gold, and other precious objects. It is one of the most significant shipwreck discoveries of recent times, revealing the global scale of ancient commercial endeavors and the centrality of the ocean within the Silk Road story. But this shipwreck also has a modern tale to tell, of how nation-states appropriate the remnants of the past for their own purposes, and of the international debates about who owns—and is responsible for—shared heritage. The commercial salvage of objects from the Belitung, and their subsequent sale to Singapore, contravened the principles of the 2001 UNESCO Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage and prompted international condemnation. The resulting controversy continues to reverberate in academic and curatorial circles. Major museums refused to host international traveling exhibitions of the collection, and some archaeologists announced they would rather see the objects thrown back in the sea than ever go on display. Shipwrecks are anchored in the public imagination, their stories of treasure and tragedy told in museums, cinema, and song. At the same time, they are sites of scholarly inquiry, a means by which maritime archaeologists interrogate the past through its material remains. Every shipwreck is an accidental time capsule, replete with the sunken stories of those on board, of the personal and commercial objects that went down with the vessel, and of an unfinished journey. In this moving and thought-provoking reflection of underwater cultural heritage management, Natali Pearson reveals valuable new information about the Belitung salvage, obtained firsthand from the salvagers, and the intricacies in the many conflicts and relationships that developed. In tracing the Belitung’s lives and afterlives, Belitung: The Afterlives of a Shipwreck (U Hawaii Press, 2022) shifts our thinking about shipwrecks beyond popular tropes of romance, pirates, and treasure, and toward an understanding of how the relationships between sites, objects, and people shape the stories we tell of the past in the present. Like this interview? If so, you might also be interested in: Elisabeth Kramer, The Candidate's Dilemma: Anticorruptionism and Money Politics in Indonesian Election Campaigns Edward Aspinall and Ward Berenschot, Democracy for Sale: Elections, Clientelism, and the State in Indonesia Professor Michele Ford is the Director of the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, a university-wide multidisciplinary center at the University of Sydney, Australia. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

How do transnational Filipino families remain connected through mobile media technologies? In (Im)mobile Homes: Family Life at a Distance in the Age of Mobile Media (Oxford UP, 2022), Earvin Charles B. Cabalquinto explains the different ways in which smartphones, messaging apps, and social media facilitate transnational connectivity. He explains how relationships of care, intimacy, and connection to the homeland are established through digital routines shaped by power relations and familial expectations. Aside from providing an overview of the book’s key themes, the podcast goes deep into the methodological complexities of documenting intimate lives through mobile phone technologies as well as the ethical challenges of writing intimate portraits of Filipinos’ everyday lives.Earvin Charles B. Cabalquinto is a lecturer at Deakin University in Australia. Like this interview? You may also be interested in: Elizaveta Friesem, Media is Us: Understanding Communication and Moving Beyond Flame (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021) Zoetanya Sujon, The Social Media Age (SAGE, 2021). Nicole Curato is a Professor of Sociology in the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra. She co-hosts the New Books in Southeast Asia Studies channel. This episode was created in collaboration with Erron C. Medina of the Development Studies Program of Ateneo De Manila University. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In March 2022 the U.S. government announced its determination that genocide was committed by the Myanmar military against Rohingya communities in Myanmar’s Rakhine State in 2017. What will this mean for the roughly one million Rohingya refugees living in neighboring countries, for Rohingya IDPs in Rakhine, and for post-coup Myanmar? In this episode, part two of a two-part series, Terese Gagnon speaks with Kyaw Zeyar Win about this long-awaited determination and the possible implications for Rohingya both within and outside post-coup Myanmar. Click here to listen to part one of the series covering the securitization of Rohingya and roots of the 2017 genocide. Kyaw Zeyar Win is a Project Coordinator at the International Republican Institute in Washington D.C. He is an expert in international relations and human rights with a focus on Myanmar. He holds a master’s in IR from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University where he was an Open Society Fellow. He is author of the chapter “Securitization of the Rohingya in Myanmar” from the book Myanmar Transformed? People, Places and Politics. Terese Gagnon is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Copenhagen and the Nordic Institute of Asian studies researching Karen food, seed, and political sovereignty. You might also be interested in these related podcasts:  --Karen Sanctuaries Memory, Biodiversity and Political Sovereignty --The Politics of Protest in Myanmar --What Remains: Textiles from Tuol Sleng The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Indonesian citizens, and those of neighbouring Southeast Asian countries, have long suffered recurring haze pollution caused by peatland fires in Indonesia. To avoid these forest fires, and reduce the environmental harm and negative health impacts that transboundary haze gives rise to, Indonesia needs to restore its degraded peatlands. President Joko Widodo started this task in 2016 when he established the Peatland Restoration Agency, tasked with rehabilitating 2 million hectares of degraded peatland. What has this ad hoc body achieved since then, and where will it go from here? In this episode, Dr Natali Pearson is joined by Dr Rini Astuti to discuss why peatland fires are a particularly acute issue in Southeast Asia, and how Indonesia can play a crucial role in effectively mitigating transboundary haze in the region. About Rini Astuti: Dr Rini Astuti is a Research Fellow at Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University. Rini is also the Global Public Voices Fellow for the Mario Einaudi Center on International Studies at Cornell University. Her research focuses on environmental governance and climate change in the Southeast Asia region (Indonesia in particular). She previous worked at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, where she was part of the multidisciplinary team researching forest & peatland fire and transboundary haze in Southeast Asia. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In Subversive Archaism: Troubling Traditionalists and the Politics of National Heritage (Duke UP, 2022), Michael Herzfeld explores how individuals and communities living at the margins of the modern nation-state use nationalist discourses of tradition to challenge state authority under both democratic and authoritarian governments. Through close attention to the claims and experiences of mountain shepherds in Greece and urban slum dwellers in Thailand, Herzfeld shows how these subversive archaists draw on national histories and past polities to claim legitimacy for their defiance of bureaucratic authority. Although vilified by government authorities as remote, primitive, or dangerous—often as preemptive justification for violent repression—these groups are not revolutionaries and do not reject national identity, but they do question the equation of state and nation. Herzfeld explores the political strengths and vulnerabilities of their deployment of heritage and the weaknesses they expose in the bureaucratic and ethnonational state in an era of accelerated globalization. Iqra Shagufta Cheema writes and teaches in the areas of digital cultures, postmodernist postcolonial literatures, transnational digital feminisms, gender and sexuality studies, and global south film studies. Follow them on Twitter. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Working on Southeast Asia, one thing we tend to hear a lot of is the notion that civil society is shrinking, and that authoritarianism is on the rise. In fact the rise of anti-democratic and anti-liberal forces and ideas seems to be on the rise around the world, not just in the region. Joining Dr Natali Pearson on SSEAC Stories, Professor Garry Rodan argues that contrary to popular claims, civil society is not generally shrinking in Southeast Asia. It is instead transforming, resulting in important shifts in the influences that can be exerted through it. Drawing from his book Civil Society in Southeast Asia: Power Struggles and Political Regimes (Cambridge University Press, 2022), he argues that political and ideological differences in Southeast Asia have sharpened as anti-democratic and anti-liberal social forces compete with democratic and liberal elements in civil society. About Garry Rodan: Garry Rodan is an Honorary Professor of Political Science & International Studies at The University of Queensland, Emeritus Professor of Politics & International Studies at Murdoch University, and an elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia. His research thematically analyses dynamic regime struggles between authoritarian, liberal and democratic forces and ideologies in Southeast Asia. He gives special analytical attention to the underlying political economy foundations of these struggles. Garry is the author of Civil Society in Southeast Asia: Power Struggles and Political Regimes (Cambridge University Press, 2022) and Participation without Democracy: Containing Conflict in Southeast Asia, (Cornell University Press, 2018). For more details on Garry Rodan’s publications, go here. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Michael Francis Laffan’s Under Empire: Muslim Lives and Loyalties Across the Indian Ocean World, 1775–1945 (Columbia University Press, 2022) traces a tapestry of historical actors, empires, and ideas across the Indian Ocean world. Starting with an imam banished from eastern Indonesia to the Cape of Good Hope in 1780 to build a new Muslim community with a mix of fellow exiles, enslaved people, and even the men tasked with supervising his detention. To nineteenth-century colonial chroniclers who invent the legend of the “loyal Malay” warrior, whose anger can be tamed through the “mildness” of British rule. And a Tunisian-born teacher who arrived in Java from Istanbul in the early twentieth century becomes an enterprising Arabic-language journalist caught between competing nationalisms. Telling these stories and many more, Michael Laffan offers a sweeping exploration of two centuries of interactions among Muslim subjects of empires and future nation-states around the Indian Ocean world. Under Empire follows interlinked lives and journeys, examining engagements with Western, Islamic, and pan-Asian imperial formations to consider the possibilities for Muslims in an imperial age. It ranges from the dying era of the trading companies in the late eighteenth century through the period of Dutch and British colonial rule up to the rise of nationalist and cosmopolitan movements for social reform in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Laffan emphasizes how Indian Ocean Muslims by turn asserted loyalty to colonial states in pursuit of a measure of religious freedom or looked to the Ottoman Empire or Egypt in search of spiritual unity. Bringing the history of Southeast Asian Islam to African and South Asian shores, Under Empire is an expansive and inventive account of Muslim communal belonging on the world stage. Michael Francis Laffan is professor of history and Paula Chow Chair in International and Regional Studies at Princeton University. He is the author of Islamic Nationhood and Colonial Indonesia (2003) and The Makings of Indonesian Islam (2011) as well as the editor of Belonging Across the Bay of Bengal (2017). Kelvin Ng co-hosted the episode. He is a Ph.D. candidate at Yale University, History Department. His research interests broadly lie in the history of imperialism and anti-imperialism in the early-twentieth-century Indian Ocean circuit. Tamara Fernando co-hosted the episode. She is a Past & Present postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Historical Research, London, and an incoming assistant professor in the history of the global south at SUNY Stony Brook University. Her present book project, Of Mollusks and Men, is a history of pearl diving across the Persian Gulf, the Gulf of Mannar and the Mergui archipelago. She is interested in histories of science, environment, and labour across the Indian Ocean. Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at PrincetonUniversity, Near Eastern Studies Department. His research focuses on the intersection of law, the occult, and the environment across the western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

The Asmat are an indigenous people of Indonesian Papua and are renowned for their artistic carving flair and complex life-cycle rituals. They also have big ambitions that reach as far as the Vatican. Over the past five decades, pressures from the state, religious authorities, and the global art market, have led to profound cultural changes and a widespread sense of predicament, dysphoria and disempowerment among the Asmat. In this episode of SSEAC Stories, Dr Natali Pearson is joined by Dr Roberto Costa to discuss the social changes experienced by the Asmat people, and the material and ethical alternatives they are developing in response to a wide range of socio-cultural, religious, and ecological predicaments. About Roberto Costa: Roberto Costa (PhD in Anthropology, 2021) currently works as a sessional academic at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Sydney and the School of Social Sciences at Macquarie University. He has published in the areas of politics, religion, ethics, materiality and human-non-human relations, mainly on his research in Indonesia and Papua/Melanesia. His research interests also include digital activism, phenomenology, and visual and sensory anthropology, the latter stemming from his prior educational formation as a musician. His present project focuses on rewriting his doctoral thesis into a book. In his doctoral research, he looked at the efforts of the Asmat, a people group in the south of Indonesian Papua, to actualise material and ethical alternatives to socio-cultural, religious and ecological predicaments. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In March of 2022 the U.S. government announced its determination that genocide was committed by the Myanmar military against Rohingya communities in Myanmar’s Rakhine State in 2017. What will this mean for the roughly one million Rohingya refugees living in neighboring countries, for Rohingya IDPs in Rakhine State, and for post-coup Myanmar? In this episode Terese Gagnon speaks with Kyaw Zeyar Win about this long-awaited determination. In this conversation we hear from Zeyar about the violent origins of the Rohingya genocide, rooted in the long history of securitization of Rohingya in Myanmar. Terese and Zeyar discuss the possible implications of the genocide determination for Rohingya both within and outside of post-coup Myanmar. Kyaw Zeyar Win is a Project Coordinator at the International Republican Institute in Washington D.C. He is an expert in politics, international relations, and human rights with a focus on Myanmar. He holds a master’s in international relations from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University where he was an Open Society Fellow. He has previously worked at organizations including Voice of America and Amnesty International. He is author of the chapter “Securitization of the Rohingya in Myanmar” from the book Myanmar Transformed? People, Places and Politics. Terese Gagnon is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies at University of Copenhagen in the "The Politics of Climate and Sustainability in Asia”. She holds a PhD in anthropology from Syracuse University. Her dissertation is about Karen food, seed, and political sovereignty across landscapes of home and exile. Links to related podcasts: https://nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast/podcasts/karen_sanctuaries/ https://nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast/podcasts/the-politics-of-protest-in-myanmar/ https://nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast/podcasts/what-remains-textiles-from-tuol-sleng/ The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

The Vietnamese victory over the French forces at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, which ended almost a century of French colonial rule in Indochina, is one of the most famous events in the history of anticolonialism. How were the Vietnamese communists able to achieve this remarkable victory over a much more powerful colonial force? This is the question Chris Goscha seeks to answer in his new book, The Road to Dien Bien Phu: A History of the First War for Vietnam (Princeton UP, 2022). In doing so, Goscha re-enters the vexed debate about the relative importance of nationalism and communism in Vietnam’s struggle against foreign powers. And he puts forward a compelling argument about the importance of “war communism” to the Vietnamese victory over the French. Chris Goscha is Professor of History and International Relations at the University of Quebec at Montreal, Canada, and a prize-winning author of works on the modern history of Vietnam. Patrick Jory teaches Southeast Asian History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. He can be reached at: p.jory@uq.edu.au. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

What explains the uneven meatification of diets in three of Asia’s core ‘emerging economies’? How and why is meat consumption changing today, and what role have American fast-food chains played? To discuss these questions and more, Helene Ramnæs, coordinator for the Norwegian Network for Asian Studies, is joined by Marius Korsnes, Kenneth Bo Nielsen and Arve Hansen. Asian diets include considerably more meat now than in the recent past, but meat is a contested issue. China and Vietnam have experienced some of the world’s most dramatic meat booms but vegetarianism increases and concerns for unsafe production methods and negative health effects have made people cautious about the meat they eat. While India defies global meat trends, contemporary India is not as vegetarian as it claims, and a large beef sector exists in an uneasy relationship with Modi’s hindu-nationalist regime. Marius Korsnes specialises in Science and Technology Studies at the Department for Interdisciplinary Studies of Culture at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). His work focuses on sustainable consumption and production and he is PI of the ERC project: “A Middle Way? Probing Sufficiency through Meat and Milk in China” Kenneth Bo Nielsen is a social anthropologist working on social movements and the political economy of development in India. In addition to working and teaching at the University of Oslo, he also leads the Norwegian Network for Asian Studies with Arve Hansen. Arve Hansen is a human geographer at the Centre for Development and the Environment at the University of Oslo, teaching and researching consumption and sustainability, and with a particular interest in meat and meat avoidance. He also leads the Norwegian Network for Asian Studies with Kenneth Bo Nielsen. Karen Lykke Syse and Arve Hansen: Changing Meat Cultures Food Practices, Global Capitalism, and the Consumption of Animals The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

The phenomenon of “war brides” from Japan moving to the West has been quite widely discussed, but this book tells the stories of women whose lives followed a rather different path after they married foreign occupiers. During Okinawa’s Occupation by the Allies from 1945 to 1972, many Okinawan women met and had relationships with non-Western men who were stationed in Okinawa as soldiers and base employees. Most of these men were from the Philippines. In Okinawan Women's Stories of Migration: From War Brides to Issei (Routledge, 2022), Zulueta explores the journeys of these women to their husbands’ homeland, their acculturation to their adopted land, and their return to their native Okinawa in their late adult years. Utilizing a life-course approach, she examines how these women crafted their own identities as first-generation migrants or “Issei” in both the country of migration and their natal homeland, their re-integration to Okinawan society, and the role of religion in this regard, as well as their thoughts on end-of-life as returnees. This book will be of interest to scholars looking at gender and migration, cross-cultural marriages, aging and migration, as well as those interested in East Asia, particularly Japan/Okinawa. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

We are all familiar with the spread of disinformation on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. But just when we thought we’d seen the worst of it, along comes TikTok. What started out as an app for dance challenges and musical duets has, in recent times, emerged as one of the most concerning tools for amplifying political propaganda and lies. What does this mean in a country like the Philippines, where there are more than 89 million social media users? Joining Dr Natali Pearson on SSEAC Stories, Assistant Professor Maria Elize Mendoza analyses the influential role of social media in Philippine political affairs, revealing intricate webs of disinformation, propaganda, and citizen mobilisation, with colossal political ramifications. About Maria Elize Mendoza: Maria Elize H. Mendoza is currently an Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science, University of the Philippines Diliman. She obtained her BA (magna cum laude) and MA degrees in Political Science under the BA-MA (Honours) Program of the Department of Political Science, University of the Philippines Diliman. She teaches courses on Philippine politics and social, economic, and political thought. Her research interests include Philippine local politics, the politics of education, and the relationship between social media and political participation. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

How did superpower competition and the cold war affect writers in the decolonizing world? In The Aesthetic Cold War: Decolonization and Global Literature (Princeton UP, 2022), Peter Kalliney explores the various ways that rival states used cultural diplomacy and the political police to influence writers. In response, many writers from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean—such as Chinua Achebe, Mulk Raj Anand, Eileen Chang, C.L.R. James, Alex La Guma, Doris Lessing, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and Wole Soyinka—carved out a vibrant conceptual space of aesthetic nonalignment, imagining a different and freer future for their work. Kalliney looks at how the United States and the Soviet Union, in an effort to court writers, funded international conferences, arts centers, book and magazine publishing, literary prizes, and radio programming. International spy networks, however, subjected these same writers to surveillance and intimidation by tracking their movements, tapping their phones, reading their mail, and censoring or banning their work. Writers from the global south also suffered travel restrictions, deportations, imprisonment, and even death at the hands of government agents. Although conventional wisdom suggests that cold war pressures stunted the development of postcolonial literature, Kalliney’s extensive archival research shows that evenly balanced superpower competition allowed savvy writers to accept patronage without pledging loyalty to specific political blocs. Likewise, writers exploited rivalries and the emerging discourse of human rights to contest the attentions of the political police. A revisionist account of superpower involvement in literature, The Aesthetic Cold War considers how politics shaped literary production in the twentieth century. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Tanya Jakimow's book Susceptibility in Development: Micropolitics of Local Development in India and Indonesia (Oxford UP, 2020) offers a novel approach to understanding power in development through theories of affect and emotion. Development agents - people tasked with designing or delivering development - are susceptible to being affected in ways that may derail or threaten their 'sense of self'. This susceptibility is in direct relation to the capacity of others to engender feelings in development agents: an overlooked form of power. Susceptibility in Development proposes a new analytical framework to enable new readings of power relations and their consequences for development. Susceptibility in Development offers a comparative ethnography of two types of local development agents: volunteers in a community development program in Medan, Indonesia, and women municipal councillors in Dehradun, India. Ethnographic accounts that are attentive to the emotions and affects engendered in encounters between individuals provide a fresh reading of the relations shaping local development. Local development agents may be more 'susceptible' than workers and volunteers from the global North, yet the capacity/susceptibility to affect/be affected orders relations and shapes outcomes of development more broadly. In theorising from the local, Susceptibility in Development offers fresh insights into power dynamics in development. Like this interview? If so you might also be interested in: Nicole Curato, Democracy in a Time of Misery: From Spectacular Tragedies to Deliberative Action Edward Aspinall and Ward Berenschot, Democracy for Sale: Elections, Clientelism, and the State in Indonesia Professor Michele Ford is the Director of the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, a university-wide multidisciplinary center at the University of Sydney, Australia. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Can spiritually and religiously inspired environmental movements in Asia help reach the global goal of environmental sustainability? This question lies at the heart of the research project “Transcendence and Sustainability: Asian Visions with Global Promise” that we focus on in this episode. Also known as TRANSSUSTAIN, the project builds on the observation that scholars, activists, and even politicians in many Asian countries have found inspiration in traditional knowledge and in the premodern texts and practices of, for instance, Daoist, Buddhist, Hindu, and Confucian traditions to envision more ecologically sustainable futures. Exploring the mobilization and recalibration of such traditional Asian religio-philosophical ideas in response to the global environmental crisis, the project seeks to assess the potential of Asian environmental movements for helping us build sustainable global futures. Mette Halskov Hansen is professor of China Studies at the University of Oslo. Amita Baviskar is professor of Environmental Studies and Sociology and Anthropology at Ashoka University. Lu Chen is a Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Oslo. Kenneth Bo Nielsen is an Associate Professor at the dept. of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and one of the leaders of the Norwegian Network for Asian Studies. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

To Remain Myself: The History of Onghokham (ASAA Southeast Asia Publications Series / NUS Press, 2022) is a particularly vivid biography of a remarkable individual, an Indonesian historian and public intellectual who was both a public figure and a multi-minority member, being Dutch educated, Indonesian Chinese, gay, alcoholic, irreligious and hedonist, in a conservative society. This is the first Indonesian biography where the interior life is closely recorded: the fears, doubts, confusions; the issues of sexuality, the mental breakdown, the jailing, the later success, joys and celebrity, as a historian, public intellectual and famous cook. This biography breaks out of the Indonesian Chinese category. It is primarily an Indonesian story. In its early chapters this biography reveals much about the ‘sugar king’ Chinese aristocracy of Indonesia, from the inside. In its later chapters this book shows much about the development of Indonesians writing their own post-colonial history, and the intellectual influences on this writing. Onghokham was a senior public intellectual with over 300 writings over 50 years, containing original insights into many varied Indonesian topics, including colonial history and its effects on modern politics and society; the Indonesian Chinese; ‘outsiders’ -- marginal people; the jago or brigand as people’s champion; sexuality in Indonesia past and present; food; the Oedipus complex; painting; traditional Javanese beliefs from the palace to the peasant. Like this interview? If so, you might also be interested in: Elisabeth Kramer, The Candidate's Dilemma: Anticorruptionism and Money Politics in Indonesian Election Campaigns Edward Aspinall and Ward Berenschot, Democracy for Sale: Elections, Clientelism, and the State in Indonesia  Professor Michele Ford is the Director of the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, a university-wide multidisciplinary center at the University of Sydney, Australia. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Despite decades of research into the historic settlements of Mainland Southeast Asia, our understanding of the region’s long-term settlement history remains incomplete. We know, for example, that mainland Southeast Asia was home to the world’s most extensive pre-industrial low-density urban complex at the site of Greater Angkor in Cambodia – but we don’t know how the site, and its low-density configuration, fits within the broader settlement history of the region. Yet understanding these settlement histories is important not only for understanding what happened in the past, but also for how we interpret settlement patterns developing across the region today. Joining Dr Natali Pearson on SSEAC Stories, Dr Ben Dharmendra takes us on a journey spanning millenia to explore the long-term history of settlement development across Mainland Southeast Asia. About Ben Dharmendra: Ben Dharmendra recently completed his PhD at the University of Sydney. His research is focused on how human settlements develop through time and the effects they create. His PhD project involved reconstructing the long-term history of Mainland Southeast Asian settlements and how this history influenced the development of the region from around 500BCE to 1900CE. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In The City in Time: Contemporary Art and Urban Form in Vietnam and Cambodia (U Washington Press, 2021), Pamela N. Corey provides new ways of understanding contemporary artistic practices in a region that continues to linger in international perceptions as perpetually “postwar.” Focusing on art from the last two decades, Corey connects artistic developments with social transformations as reflected through the urban landscapes of Ho Chi Minh City and Phnom Penh. As she argues, artists’ engagements with urban space and form reveal ways of grasping multiple and layered senses and concepts of time, whether aligned with colonialism, postcolonial modernity, communism, or postsocialism. Featuring a variety of creative production, including staged and documentary photography, the moving image, and public performance and installation, The City in Time illustrates how artists from Vietnam and Cambodia have envisioned their rapidly changing worlds. Holiday Powers (@holidaypowers) is Assistant Professor of Art History at VCUarts Qatar. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary art in Africa and the Arab world, postcolonial theory, and gender studies. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

How did the Cold War shape culture and political power in decolonizing countries and give rise to authoritarian regimes in the so-called free world? Cold War Reckonings: Authoritarianism and the Genres of Decolonization (Fordham UP, 2021) tells a new story about the Cold War and the global shift from colonialism to independent nation-states. Assembling a body of transpacific cultural works that speak to this historical conjuncture, Jini Kim Watson reveals autocracy to be not a deficient form of liberal democracy, but rather the result of Cold War entanglements with decolonization. Focusing on East and Southeast Asia, the book scrutinizes cultural texts ranging from dissident poetry, fiction, and writers’ conference proceedings of the Cold War period, to more recent literature, graphic novels, and films that retrospectively look back to these decades with a critical eye. Paying particular attention to anti-communist repression and state infrastructures of violence, the book provides a richaccount of several U.S.–allied Cold War regimes in the Asia Pacific, including the South Korean military dictatorship, Marcos’ rule in the Philippines, illiberal Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew, and Suharto’s Indonesia. Watson’s book argues that the cultural forms and narrative techniques that emerged from the Cold War-decolonizing matrix offer new ways of comprehending these histories and connecting them to our present. The book advances our understanding of the global reverberations of the Cold War and its enduring influence on cultural and political formations in the Asia Pacific. Cold War Reckonings earned Honorable Mention for the 2022 René Wellek Prize. Jini Kim Watson is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at New York University. She is the author of The New Asian City: Three-dimensional Fictions of Space and Urban Form and editor, with Gary Wilder, of The Postcolonial Contemporary: Political Imaginaries for the Global Present. Victoria Oana Lupașcu is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at University of Montréal. Her areas of interest include medical humanities, visual art, 20th and 21st Chinese, Brazilian and Romanian literature and Global South studies. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Though human rights monitors talk of fact-finding missions and reports, human rights facts are, like all social phenomena, not in fact found but made — through processes by which we come to know and talk about them. But how exactly does that happen? And how, by attending to these processes, might we arrive at a more robust understanding of human rights facts? These are the kinds of questions animating Ken MacLean’s new book, Crimes in Archival Form: Human Rights, Fact Production and Myanmar (University of California Press, 2022). In this episode Ken joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to explore some of the answers he arrived at after years of research on the complexities of human rights fact production about crimes against humanity in eastern Myanmar, or Burma, and to discuss how it is possible to cast a critical eye over how human rights facts are made and not only remain engaged in causes for human rights, but to make them even stronger at a time that human rights facts are sorely tested, and the truth about facts has never been more contested. Like this interview? If so you might also be interested in: Lynette Chua, The Politics of Love in Myanmar: LGBT Mobilisation and Human Rights as a Way of Life Tyrell Haberkorn, In Plain Sight: Impunity and Human Rights in Thailand Ken MacLean, The Government of Mistrust: Illegibility and Bureaucratic Power in Socialist Vietnam Nick Cheesman is Associate Professor, Department of Political & Social Change, Australian National University and Senior Fellow, Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy, University at Buffalo (Fall 2022). He hosts the New Books in Interpretive Political & Social Science series on the New Books Network. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

As the Asia-Pacific becomes the central stage of the US-China rivalry, Vietnam has emerged as one of the key countries to watch. While Vietnam has positioned itself as a critical player in the United States’ Indo-Pacific strategy, and Hanoi’s distrust of China has grown in response to Beijing’s increasingly aggressive stance in the South China Sea, the Vietnam-China relationship transcends mere geopolitical binaries. Joining Dr Natali Pearson on SSEAC Stories, Nguyen Khac Giang discusses Vietnam and China’s complex relationship, reflecting on the intimate ideological links, economic dependency, and security concerns that link the two countries. He discusses some of the key strategic challenges faced by Vietnam, how they can be negotiated, and whether it is possible for Hanoi to leverage relations with both China and the United States to minimise the potential geo-political risks associated with great power competition. About Nguyen Khac Giang: Nguyen Khac Giang is a research fellow at Vietnam Centre for Economic and Strategic Studies (VESS). Giang is currently a PhD candidate at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, where he compares the Vietnamese and Chinese political developments. His academic work appears in, among others, the Asian Journal of Political Science, Contemporary Southeast Asia, the Constitutional Political Economy, and the Asia & the Pacific Policy Studies. Giang is a frequent commentator on Vietnamese affairs and writes extensively for major Vietnamese and English news outlets such as the Saigon Times, The Diplomat, VnExpress, and the East Asia Forum. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

France and Germany in the South China Sea, c. 1840-1930 Maritime Competition and Imperial Power (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) explores imperial power and the transnational encounters of shipowners and merchants in the South China Sea from 1840 to 1930. With British Hong Kong and French Indochina on its northern and western shores, the ‘Asian Mediterranean’ was for almost a century a crucible of power and an axis of economic struggle for coastal shipping companies from various nations. Merchant steamers shipped cargoes and passengers between ports of the region. Hong Kong, the global port city, and the colonial ports of Saigon and Haiphong developed into major hubs for the flow of goods and people, while Guangzhouwan survived as an almost forgotten outpost of Indochina. While previous research in this field has largely remained within the confines of colonial history, this book uses the examples of French and German companies operating in the South China Sea to demonstrate the extent to which transnational actors and business networks interacted with imperial power and the process of globalisation. Bert Becker is Honorary Associate Professor at the University of Hong Kong. He is the author, amongst other publications, of biographies of Georg Michaelis and Michael Jebsen. His work has also appeared in a range of academic journals, including Cross-Currents and Modern Asian Studies. Ghassan Moazzin is an Assistant Professor at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences and the Department of History at the University of Hong Kong. He works on the economic and business history of 19th and 20th century China, with a particular focus on the history of foreign banking, international finance and electricity in modern China. His first book, Foreign Banks and Global Finance in Modern China: Banking on the Chinese Frontier, 1870–1919, is was recently published by Cambridge University Press. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

After decades of authoritarian rule by the Barisan Nasional coalition, a new alliance, Pakatan Harapan, was voted in in 2018, marking Malaysia’s first-ever transfer of federal power through elections in what was widely heralded as the start of a democratic transition. But that new government collapsed within two years, and Malaysian politics has remained unstable ever since. With elections likely to be called soon, what accounts for the remarkable turbulence in Malaysian politics, and what does it say about how regimes are remade? Joining Dr Natali Pearson on SSEAC Stories, Professor Meredith Weiss discusses the state of politics in Malaysia, reflecting on the promises, both fulfilled and broken, brought about by GE14, and, looking to the future, considering ways for Malaysia to continue moving forward. About Meredith Weiss: Meredith Weiss is Professor of Political Science in the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs & Policy at the University at Albany, SUNY. In several books—most recently, The Roots of Resilience: Party Machines and Grassroots Politics in Southeast Asia (Cornell, 2020), and the co-authored Mobilizing for Elections: Patronage and Political Machines in Southeast Asia (Cambridge, 2022)—and a dozen edited or co-edited volumes, she addresses issues of social mobilization, civil society, and collective identity; electoral politics and parties; and regime change and institutional reform in Southeast Asia, especially Malaysia and Singapore. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

The twelve chapters of Moral Foods: The Construction of Nutrition and Health in Modern Asia (U Hawai’i Press, 2020) are divided into three sections: Good Foods, Bad Foods, and Moral Foods. Using case studies from nineteenth- and twentieth-century China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Korea, and Malaysia, these chapters investigate the moralization of food in modern Asia. These studies on moral food regimes are highly specific, but their implications, especially about the malleability of food as an object of moralization, are far reaching. The first chapter in Good Foods, by Francesca Bray, examines the construction of rice as a symbol of self in Japan and Malaysia. Jia-Chen Fu’s contribution looks at the “goodness” of soymilk in China. Izumi Nakayama’s work is about the emergence of breastmilk as a “good food” in Meiji-period Japan. Finally, Michael Liu writes about Chinese experimentation with nutrition during WWII. David Arnold’s chapter on moral foods―especially rice―in India during the period of British colonial rule begins the second section on “bad” and even “dangerous” foods. The other three chapters in this section address bad foods in South Korea, Japan, and Hong Kong, respectively. Tae-Ho Kim looks at discourses on rice, barley, and wheat in modern South Korea. Tatsuya Mitsuda writes on the creation of badness around sweet confections in Japan. Finally, Robert Peckham examines bad foods in the context of British colonial public health programs in Hong Kong. In the final section, Lawrence Zhang shows how changing visions of the health and morality of tea track with geopolitical, cultural, and scientific developments in the modern relations between East Asia and the West. Angela Ki Che Leung’s looks at the modern reinterpretation of vegetarianism in China. Volker Scheid also looks at China, specifically at the reconstitution of traditional Chinese medicinal knowledge and practice. Finally, Hilary Smith’s chapter tackles the moral meanings that accrued to milk in modern China. Each of these chapters shares the volume’s overall interest in both the moral regimes of food in the context of modern nation-building and the bodies and lives of consumers. Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the University of Bergen's Department of Foreign Languages. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Every nation in Asia has dealt with COVID-19 differently and with varying levels of success in the absence of clear and effective leadership from the WHO. As a result, the WHO’s role in Asia as a global health organization is coming under increasing pressure. As its credibility is slowly being eroded by public displays of incompetence and negligence, it has also become an arena of contestation. Moreover, while the pandemic continues to undermine the future of global health governance as a whole, the highly interdependent economies in Asia have exposed the speed with which pandemics can spread, as intensive regional travel and business connections have caused every area in the region to be hit hard. The migrant labor necessary to sustain globalized economies has been strained and the security of international workers is now more precarious than ever, as millions have been left stranded, seen their entry blocked, or have limited access to health services. Public Health in Asia During the Covid-19 Pandemic (Amsterdam UP, 2022) provides an accessible framework for understanding the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic in Asia, with a specific emphasis on global governance in health and labor. This is an open-access book. Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Southeast Asia is a region often associated with authoritarian resilience and democratic decline. In this podcast, Professor Baogang He examines the various ways in which Southeast Asian countries have institutionalised mechanisms for deliberative democracy to address complex governance issues. He is the editor (together with Michael Breen, and James Fishkin) of Deliberative Democracy in Asia (Routledge, 2022). Deliberative democracy – an approach to political decision-making that places emphasis on inclusive, reflective, and other-regarding discussion – is manifest in long-standing practices of consensus-building and communitarian politics in the region. Professor He explains how introducing public deliberation into different political regimes can simultaneously give voice to ordinary citizens while also entrenching elite domination. Professor He draws on a range of case studies in Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines, and reflects on the wider trend of deliberative democratization in Asia and beyond. Baogang He is a Professor of International Relations at Deakin University in Australia. Like this interview? You may also be interested in: Adele Webb, Chasing Freedom: The Philippines Long Journey to Democratic Ambivalence (Sussex University Press, 2022) Roman David and Ian Holliday. Liberalism and Democracy in Myanmar (Oxford University Press, 2018) Meredith Weiss, Student Activism in Malaysia: Crucible. Mirror, Sideshow (Cornell SEAP/NUS Press, 2011) Nicole Curato is a Professor of Sociology in the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra. She co-hosts the New Books in Southeast Asia Studies channel. This episode was created in collaboration with Erron C. Medina of the Development Studies Program of Ateneo De Manila University. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

As the newest nation in Southeast Asia, Timor-Leste has been independent for just over 20 years. Timor-Leste is regularly ranked the most democratic nation in the region, and since reclaiming independence in May 2002, the country’s political situation has grown increasingly complex, with the emergence of new parties, new coalitions and new leaders. Yet the recent presidential election in April 2022 delivered the return of a familiar face: Jose Ramos Horta, once an activist in exile, and now President of Timor-Leste for a second time with the powerful backing of politician Xanana Gusmão. Joining Dr Natali Pearson on SSEAC Stories, Professor Michael Leach analyses the implications of Jose Ramos-Horta’s return to the presidency in Timor-Leste, exposing two fundamental competing trends in national politics. On the one hand, the recent electoral campaign was testament to the dynamism of Timorese politics, with a broader field of candidates vying for the presidency. On the other, the ballots laid bare the continuing influence of the 1975 generation of male politicians on national politics. Looking forward, Professor Leach reflects on the significance of these results for the parliamentary elections to be held in early 2023. About Michael Leach: Professor Michael Leach is a comparative political scientist with twenty years research experience in Timor-Leste and the Pacific. He is a leading commentator and analyst of the politics and history of Timor-Leste, and a co-founder of the international area studies association, the Timor-Leste Studies Association. He is the author of Nation-Building and National Identity in Timor-Leste (Routledge, 2017); and co-editor (with Andrew McWilliam) of the Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Timor-Leste (Routledge, 2019). For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In the voluminous literature on the history of modernisation theory and its associated concept of development since the end of World War II, much of the focus lies on the efforts undertaken by developed nations—most notably the United States and Soviet Union—to establish a model for developing countries to build not just their economies but their nations as well. Eschewing this paradigm, Dr Nicholas Ferns’ excellent monograph Australia in the Age of International Development, 1945-1975: Colonial and Foreign Aid Policy in Papua New Guinea and Southeast Asia (published by Routledge in 2020) provides a rich and important intervention that highlights how the ideas and practices that underpinned international development were shaped not only by the Cold War superpowers but by middle powers like Australia as well. Focussing particularly on Australia’s development aid efforts in Papua New Guinea and Southeast Asia through its own formulation of the ‘New Deal’ for the former and the Colombo Plan for the latter, Ferns brings to light the complexity of a country caught in the middle of its own perception as being between a developed and developing nation, between British and American economic and developmental influences, and between serving as a colonial power in its own right while also supporting anti-colonial movements. Bernard Z. Keo is Lecturer in Asian History at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia who specialises in decolonisation and nation-building in Southeast Asia. He can be contacted at: b.keo@latrobe.edu.au. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

This year sees the publication of the fourth edition of the book, A History of Thailand (Cambridge UP, 2022), by Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit. Remarkably, the Thai language translation of the book, ประวัติศาสตร์ไทยร่วมสมัย, is now in its 13th edition. This makes A History of Thailand arguably the most successful general book on Thai history of the modern period for both Thai and international readers. In this substantially revised and updated edition, Baker and Pasuk make sense of Thailand’s tumultuous modern politics, and its society and economy, by placing it within a longer-term historical narrative. The theme of the book is the formation of the modern nation-state, and how different social forces have attempted to gain influence over it. Patrick Jory teaches Southeast Asian History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. He can be reached at: p.jory@uq.edu.au. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

With the upcoming G20 summit this November, all eyes should be on Indonesia – the fourth largest country in the world and current holder of G20 presidency. How has Indonesia reacted so far to the war in Ukraine? Why are so many Indonesians sympathetic to Russia, despite Indonesia’s historical tendency to favour the underdog in international disputes? What does all this have to do with the price of instant noodles in Jakarta? And why exactly have some people suggested that Indonesian president Joko Widodo might be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize? In this episode, Saskia Lilli Lehtsalu, an intern at University of Tartu Asia Center, takes a look at Indonesian perspectives on the war in Ukraine together with Radityo Dharmaputra. Radiyo is a junior research fellow in Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies at the University of Tartu, Estonia and a lector in international relations at Universitas Airlangga, Indonesia. Radityo has written a number of commentaries about Indonesian perspectives on the Ukraine war, which can be accessed through the links below: Why do so many Indonesians back Russia’s invasion of Ukraine? Why many Indonesian experts are pro-Russia and ignoring Ukraine’s perspective How will Indonesia deal with Russia and Ukraine at the G20?Jokowi’s visits to Russia and Ukraine are more about domestic gains than the global interest The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Duy Lap Nguyen's book The Unimagined Community: Imperialism and Culture in South Vietnam (Manchester UP, 2019) proposes a reexamination of the Vietnam War from a perspective that has been largely excluded from historical accounts of the conflict, that of the South Vietnamese. Challenging the conventional view of the conflict as a struggle on the part of the Vietnamese people against US imperialism and its puppets, the study presents a wide-ranging investigation of South Vietnamese culture, from political philosophy and psychological warfare to popular culture and film. Beginning with a genealogy of the concept of a Vietnamese "culture," as it emerged as a product of modern print media in the context of European imperialism, the book concludes with a reflection on the rise of urban mass culture during the period of the American intervention. In addition, the study provides an extended analysis of one of the most remarkable, but least understood aspects of this particular history of imperialism and culture: the attempt by the early South Vietnamese state to overcome the Communist Revolution by carrying its own "Personalist revolution" in the countryside. Contrary to the conventional view of Vietnamese Personalism as a religious and authoritarian ideology, the study contends that the latter was in fact an anticolonial form of communitarian socialism, derived from the Marxist theology developed by the French philosopher, Emmanuel Mounier. Reexamining the war from the South Vietnamese perspective, The unimagined community pursues the provocative thesis that the conflict, in this early stage, was not an anti-communist crusade, but a struggle between two competing versions of anticolonial communism. Duy Lap Nguyen is Assistant Professor at the University of Houston in their School of World Cultures and Literatures and holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from UC Irvine. His research interests include Critical theory, visual Studies, Vietnamese studies, world cinema and literature Thomas Kingston is an incoming Berkeley Fellow in South and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His PhD research looks at the intellectual history and political economy of Southeast Asia. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Japan's Occupation of Java in the Second World War: A Transnational History (Bloomsbury, 2018) by Ethan Mark draws upon written and oral Japanese, Indonesian, Dutch and English-language sources to narrate the Japanese occupation of Java as a transnational intersection between two complex non-Western Asian societies – one a colonizer and the other colonized. The book places this narrative in a larger wartime context of domestic, regional, and global crisis. Japan's occupation of Java is here revealed in a radically new and nuanced light, as an ambiguous encounter revolutionary in the degree of mutual interests that drew the two sides together, fascinating and tragic in its evolution, and profound in the legacies left behind. Mark structures his study around a diverse group of Japanese and Indonesians captivated by the wartime vision of a 'Greater Asia.' The book is not only the first transnational study of Japan's wartime occupation of Java, but the first to focus on the Second World War experience in transnational terms 'on the ground' anywhere in Asia. Breaking new ground interpretatively, thematically, and narratively, Mark's monumental study is of vital significance for students and scholars of modern Asian and global history. Ethan Mark is a Senior University Lecturer in Modern Japanese History at Leiden University in the Netherlands. He specializes in modern Japanese history, with a particular expertise in Japanese imperialism and the social and cultural history of the 1920s-1940s. He is also a scholar of modern Indonesia. Shatrunjay Mall is a PhD candidate at the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He works on transnational Asian history, and his dissertation explores intellectual, political, and cultural intersections and affinities that emerged between Indian anti-colonialism and imperial Japan in the twentieth century. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

On 9 May 2018, an ideologically diverse opposition alliance called Pakatan Harapan (PH) defeated the long-ruling Barisan Nasional (BN) coalition which had dominated politics in Malaysia since the 1980s. This was the first regime change in Malaysia’s history. This outstanding development was shortly followed by a series of defections culminating in the collapse of the Pakatan Harapan government in February 2020, after just 22 months in power. A new government was sworn in in March 2020, led by Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin, but only lasted until August 2021, when another new government led by Prime Minister Ismail Sabri Yakoob was formed. As Malaysia gears up for its 15th general elections to be held in the second half of 2022, Professor Elvin Ong joins Dr Natali Pearson on SSEAC Stories to discuss the tumultuous state of Malaysian politics. Drawing on his book Opposing Power: Building Opposition Alliances in Electoral Autocracies (University of Michigan Press, 2022), Professor Ong reflects on the numerous challenges—structural, perceptual, and strategic—that can often undermine the opposition, and offers insights into what may happen at the upcoming ballot in Malaysia. About Elvin Ong: Elvin Ong is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the National University of Singapore. He is also Chair Elect of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei (MSB) Studies Group. Previously, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Southeast Asia Research (CSEAR) in the Institute of Asian Research (IAR) at the University of British Columbia. His research has been published in various political science disciplinary journals such as Party Politics and the American Journal of Political Science, as well as various regional journals such as Contemporary Southeast Asia and the Journal of East Asian Studies. His book Opposing Power is published by the University of Michigan Press, under the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies book series. His PhD is from Emory University, and his MPhil is from the University of Oxford. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

How can we get our articles in Asian studies published? What criteria should we use in selecting what journals to target? On what basis do journal editors make decisions on what articles to publish? How should prospective authors deal with harsh and even contradictory reviewer reports? In this special double-length summer podcast, based on an online event convened by NIAS in 2021, two editors of Asian studies journals discuss the challenges of publishing high-quality articles in the field, in a lively and wide-ranging conversation with NIAS Director Duncan McCargo. Julie Yu-Wen Chen is Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Helsinki. One of the editors of the Journal of Chinese Political Science, until recently Julie was also the editor-in-chief of Asian Ethnicity. Hyung-Gu Lynn is AECL/KEPCO Chair in Korean Research at the University of British Columbiaand the longstanding editor of Pacific Affairs. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In The Candidate's Dilemma: Anticorruptionism and Money Politics in Indonesian Election Campaigns (Cornell UP, 2022), Elisabeth Kramer tells the story of how three political candidates in Indonesia made decisions to resist, engage in, or otherwise incorporate money politics into their electioneering strategies over the course of their campaigns. As they campaign, candidates encounter pressure from the institutional rules that guide elections, political parties, and voters, and must also negotiate complex social relationships to remain competitive. For anticorruption candidates, this context presents additional challenges for building and maintaining their identities. Some of these candidates establish their campaign parameters early and are able to stay their course. For others, the campaign trail results in an avalanche of compromises, each one eating away at their sense of what constitutes "moral" and "acceptable" behavior. The Candidate's Dilemma delves into the lived experiences of candidates to offer a nuanced study of how the political and personal intersect when it comes to money politics, anticorruptionism, and electoral campaigning in Indonesia. Like this interview? If so, you might also be interested in: Edward Aspinall and Ward Berenschot, Democracy for Sale: Elections, Clientelism, and the State in Indonesia Tanya Jakimow, Susceptibility in Development: Micropolitics of Local Development in India and Indonesia  Professor Michele Ford is the Director of the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, a university-wide multidisciplinary center at the University of Sydney, Australia. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In the spring of 1954, after eight years of bitter fighting, the war in Vietnam between the French and the communist-led Vietminh came to a head. With French forces reeling, the United States planned to intervene militarily to shore-up the anti-communist position. Turning to its allies for support, first and foremost Great Britain, the US administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower sought to create what Secretary of State John Foster Dulles called a "united action" coalition. In the event, Winston Churchill's Conservative government refused to back the plan. Fearing that US-led intervention could trigger a wider war in which the United Kingdom would be the first target for Soviet nuclear attack, the British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, was determined to act as Indochina peacemaker - even at the cost of damage to the Anglo-American "special relationship". In Anthony Eden, Anglo-American Relations and the 1954 Indochina Crisis (Bloomsbury, 2019), Kevin Ruane and Matthew Jones revisit a Cold War episode in which British diplomacy played a vital role in settling a crucial question of international war and peace. Eden's diplomatic triumph at the 1954 Geneva Conference on Indochina is often overshadowed by the 1956 Suez Crisis which led to his political downfall. This book, however, recalls an earlier Eden: a skilled and experienced international diplomatist at the height of his powers who may well have prevented a localised Cold War crisis escalating into a general Third World War. Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

The last few years have brought to the fore the brilliant work of scientists as they worked to find a vaccine for Covid-19. But have you ever stopped to think about the role of biological materials in this and other science- and health-related research? In this episode of SSEAC Stories, Dr Natali Pearson is joined by Associate Professor Sonja van Wichelen to take a close look at the complex world of global health governance, with a particular focus on biotechnology and bioscience governance in Indonesia. They discuss the crucial role of biological materials exchange for scientific research, what rules govern their use, and the history of inequality that has underpinned scientific use of biological materials. Taking Indonesia’s recent efforts to gain leverage in the uneven space of the global bioeconomy, they explore how bioscience governance mechanisms can perpetuate, or sometimes help address, global power inequalities in the way biological material is used. About Sonja van Wichelen: Sonja van Wichelen is Associate Professor with the School for Social and Political Sciences at the University of Sydney. She researches the social implications of biotechnology and law and has focused on reproductive technologies in previous projects. More recently she is examining bioscience governance in Southeast Asia. Focusing on Indonesia, she is particularly interested in the relationship between regulatory frameworks and global inequality. She is the author of Legitimating Life: Adoption in the Age of Globalization and Biotechnology (Rutgers University Press, 2019), and Religion, Gender, and Politics in Indonesia: Disputing the Muslim Body (Routledge, 2010). For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

What is the relationship between the military and the monarchy in Thailand? How has that relationship changed since King Vajiralongkorn (Rama X) assumed the throne in 2016? Why have recent military coups in Thailand been staged partly in order to defend the throne? And how far can earlier interpretations of Thai politics be adapted to explain the growing influence of the monarchy in recent years? Supalak Ganjanakhundee discusses his new fascinating book A Soldier King: Monarchy and Military in the Thailand of Rama X (ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, 2022) with Duncan McCargo, director of the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, University of Copenhagen. Supalak is a former editor of The Nation newspaper, and a visiting fellow at the Pridi Banomyong Institute, Thammasat University, Thailand. “The book is a significant contribution to understanding the important yet shifting patterns of relationship between the monarchy and military in Thailand. It is widely known that the monarchy-military union has played crucial roles in politics throughout modern Thai history. This book: A Soldier King: Monarchy and Military in the Thailand of Rama X offers a comprehensive account and sound analysis about the newly formed monarchy-military network, demonstrating clearly how the new king tightens his grip since late 2016 as well as his different style from his late father King Bhumibol.” -- Charnvit Kasetsiri, Thammasat University, Bangkok Enjoyed this episode? You might also enjoy our podcast with Puangthong Pawakapan, on her book Infiltrating Society: The Thai Military’s Internal Security Affairs https://newbooksnetwork.com/infiltrating-society Duncan McCargo is an eclectic, internationalist political scientist, and literature buff: his day job is directing the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, at the University of Copenhagen. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

The story of India and Indians in World War II has been overshadowed by other historical events of the 1940s, a busy decade that included such historical watersheds as Indian independence (and the anti-colonial nationalist movement that led to it), as well as the partition of the Indian subcontinent. Indeed, many in Europe and North America, and even many in India, probably know very little about how crucial India was to the outcome of World War II. India and Indians were a very important part of World War II, and it is not an exaggeration to say that the role of India and Indians was indispensable in securing the victory of the British and Allied powers against Nazi Germany and imperial Japan. The stories of Indians in World War II have often been forgotten in popular accounts and memories of the conflict, but that is now changing, as more authors and scholars cover this subject. Through highlighting the remarkable life and career of Jehangir Anklesaria, a heroic Parsi (Indian Zoroastrian) doctor who lived in Rangoon at the outbreak of the conflict, Dr. Tehmton S. Mistry’s The 24th Mile: An Indian Doctor’s Heroism in War-torn Burma (Harper Collins, 2021) makes a major contribution to our memory of World War II with the unique story of one individual during the most devastating conflict in human history. When the Japanese invaded Burma in December 1941, Jehangir sent his wife and daughter by ship to India, but feeling duty-bound, he decided to stay back in Burma. He joined the war effort and worked tirelessly to quell a cholera epidemic. He then found himself one of thousands on the trek through the treacherous jungle and mountains towards safety in northeastern India. The book reminds us of the difference a single individual’s foresight and leadership can make in bringing about better outcomes, even amidst war and disease. The 24th Mile is a work of creative non-fiction, which means that although the storyline abides by the historical narrative of the period and follows historical figures, the author has taken the creative license to create secondary fictional characters, write descriptions, and recreate dialogues among the characters. The author, Tehmton Mistry, is part of the extended family and next generation of the protagonist’s family, and he successfully and evocatively recreates the story of Jehangir’s grit and heroism in a death-defying journey to safety in a major theater of World War II. Tehmton S. Mistry is a retired obstetrician and gynaecologist who practiced in St. Louis, Missouri. Born and raised in Mumbai (Bombay), Dr. Mistry moved to the United States from India in the early 1970s, together with his wife – whom he met when he studied at St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai. The protagonist of The 24th Mile, Dr. Jehangir Anklesaria, was his wife’s uncle and a key influence on their early life. Now retired and living in California, Dr. Mistry enjoys writing, among other hobbies. Shatrunjay Mall is a PhD candidate at the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He works on transnational Asian history, and his dissertation explores intellectual, political, and cultural intersections and affinities that emerged between Indian anti-colonialism and imperial Japan in the twentieth century. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

What is the relationship between Spirit Possession Rituals and Buddhism in mainland Southeast Asia? How has modernity transformed Spirit Possession cults in the 21st century and what has led to the efflorescence of possession rituals across Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam in recent decades? Bénédicte Brac de la Perrière and Peter A. Jackson joined Terese Gagnon on the Nordic Asia Podcast handing out important insights of their new edited volume Spirit Possession in Buddhist Southeast Asia, Worlds ever More Enchanted that was published with NIAS Press in March 2022. Spirit Possession examines the upsurge of spirit cults and diverse forms of magical ritual in Buddhist Southeast Asia by exploring the interplay of neoliberal capitalism, visual media, the network cultures of the Internet, and the politics of cultural heritage and identity. Visit the NIAS Press Webshop to find the book and get your copy here. Bénédicte Brac de la Perrière is an anthropologist at the National Center of Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris and former director of its Center for Southeast Asian Studies (CASE). She specializes on Burma-Myanmar, where she has conducted regular field research since the 1980s, and has written widely on religion and rituals. Peter A. Jackson is Emeritus Professor in Thai cultural history at the Australian National University. Over the past four decades, he has written extensively on religion, gender and sexuality in modern Thailand as well as critical approaches to Asian area studies. His ongoing research includes studying media and masculinity in Thai gay cultures and religion and ritual in Thai communities affected by HIV. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Jacob Gotfried Haafner (1754–1809) was one of the most popular European travel writers of the early nineteenth century, writing in the Romantic mode. A Dutch citizen, Haafner spent more than twenty years of his early life living outside of Europe, in India, Ceylon, Mauritius, Java, and South Africa. Books like his popular Travels in a Palanquin were translated into the major European languages, and his essays against the work of Christian missionaries in Asia stirred up great controversy. Haafner worked to spread understanding of the cultures he’d come to know in his journeys, promoting European understanding of Indian literature, myth, and religion, translating the Ramayana into Dutch. In Life Under the Palms: The Sublime World of the Anti-Colonialist Jacob Haafner (NUS Press, 2020), Paul van der Velde tells an affecting story of a young man who made a world for himself along the Coromandel Coast, in Ceylon and Calcutta, but who returned to Europe to live the last years of his life in Amsterdam, suffering an acute nostalgia for Asia. This is compelling reading for anyone interested in European response to the cultures of Asia. Cresa Pugh is a PhD Candidate in sociology and social policy at Harvard University. For more information visit scholar.harvard.edu/cresa and follow her on Twitter @CresaPugh. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

The durability of strongmen leaders in Southeast Asia has puzzled many scholars and observers of the region. In the book Strategies of Authoritarian Survival and Dissensus in Southeast Asia: Weak Men versus Strongmen (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), Sokphea Young offers a critical examination of the ways in which the ruling regime in Cambodia maintains political power, and how these strategies of regime maintenance extend to countries like Malaysia and Indonesia. For Young, one way of understanding the longevity of strongman rule is by focusing on the cycle of interaction between government, business, and civil society. He finds that extractive economic institutions in Southeast Asia are essential in maintaining the power of regimes. While grassroots organisations use various tactics of resistance, Young argues that the outcomes of these protests, ultimately, are determined by the strength of neopatrimonial ties between business elites and the regime. In this podcast, Young reflects on the book’s lessons for activist movements and civil society organisations in the region, how his background on international development and finance shaped his thinking on the book, the methodological opportunities available for researchers to conduct rigorous research on sensitive political matters, and the emerging developments in studying strongmen in Southeast Asia that are worth monitoring. Dr Sokphea Young is currently an honorary research fellow at the University College London. Like this interview? You may also be interested in: Sebastian Strangio, Cambodia: From Pol Pot to Hun Sen and Beyond (Yale University Press, 2020) Nicole Curato is a Professor of Sociology in the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra. She co-hosts the New Books in Southeast Asia Studies channel. This episode was produced in collaboration with Erron C. Medina of the Development Studies Program of Ateneo De Manila University. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Jazz in Socialist Hà Nội: Improvisations between Worlds (Routledge, 2022) examines the germination and growth of jazz under communist rule—perceived as the "music of the enemy" and "ideologically decadent"—in the Vietnamese capital of Hà Nội. After disappearing from the scene in 1954 following the end of the First Indochina War, jazz reemerged in the public sphere decades later at the end of the Cold War. Since then, Hà Nội has established itself as a vital and vibrant jazz center, complete with a full jazz program in the national conservatoire. Featuring interviews with principal players involved in cultivating the scene from past to present, this book presents the sociocultural encounters between musicians and the larger powers enmeshed in the broader political economy, detailing jazz’s journey to garner respect comparable to classical music as an art form possessing high artistic value. Ethnographical sketches explore how Vietnamese musicians learn and play jazz while sustaining and nurturing the scene, providing insight as to how jazz managed to grow in such an environment. Jazz in Socialist Hà Nội sheds light on those underlying caveats that allow Vietnamese jazz musicians to navigate the middle grounds between "worlds"—between music and politics—not as an act of resistance, but as realisation of artistic expression. Adam Bobeck is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His PhD is entitled “Object-Oriented Azadari: Shi’i Muslim Rituals and Ontology”. For more about his work, see www.adambobeck.com. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In Alluring Monsters: The Pontianak and Cinemas of Decolonization (Columbia University Press, 2021), film scholar Rosalind Galt offers a cinematic exploration of the pontianak, a female vampire ghost whose origins stem back to pre-Islamic animist tradition but who is continues to be feared and revered in Malay cultures to this day. In the 1950s, the pontianak haunted the screens of late colonial Singapore in a series of popular films that combined appeals to indigenous animism with the affective force of the horror genre. Although the pontianak would disappear from view following the breakdown of the studio system, she would once again wreak havoc in postcolonial Southeast Asian film and society from the early 2000s onwards. In this book, Galt explores the enduring appeal of the Pontianak, framing her as an ambivalent agent of gender subversion, a precolonial figure of disturbance within postcolonial cultures, and a haunting presence that sheds light on a range of questions—surrounding race, religion, nationalism, and modernity—in Malaysia and Singapore. As Alluring Monsters demonstrates, the Pontianak has much to tell us about intersecting issues of decolonisation: femininity and modernity; globalisation and indigeneity; racial identities and nation; Islam and animism; and heritage and environmental destruction. Jules O’Dwyer is Research Fellow in Film Studies and French at the University of Cambridge. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

What enabled the 2022 electoral victory of Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the son of a dictator that the historic People Power Revolution ousted 36 years ago? To what extent did the campaign of Bongbong Marcos’ main rival, Leni Robredo, represent a progressive alternative? Do the election results reflect a larger phenomenon of “illiberal turn” across electoral regimes in Asia and beyond? What are at stake now that the Marcos-Duterte duo will once again govern the Philippines together? In this episode, Prof. Duncan McCargo, Director of the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, joins Dr. Mai Van Tran, a postdoc at the institute, to discuss his experience being an election observer on the ground and his reflections on the electoral campaigns, dynastic politics, Gen Z voters, and future political scenarios. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Myanmar—or Burma, if that’s the name you prefer—is one of a small set of countries: nations that, despite natural bounty and a vibrant population, remain underdeveloped due to conflict, economic mismanagement and international isolation. Yet Myanmar has a habit of enchanting those who have the opportunity to visit the country. One such person was Erin Murphy, author of Burmese Haze: US Policy and Myanmar’s Opening—and Closing (Association for Asian Studies: 2022). Erin had a front-row seat to the major changes in U.S. policy towards Myanmar under the Obama Administration, in reaction to the country’s opening and democratic reform, a process halted by the 2021 coup. Erin Murphy has worked on Asia issues since 2001. She has spent her career in several public and private sector roles, including as an analyst on Asian political, foreign policy, and leadership issues at the Central Intelligence Agency, a director for Indo-Pacific with a development finance agency, leading her boutique advisory firm focused on Myanmar, and as an English teacher with the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Program in Saga ken, Japan. Erin can be followed on Twitter. In this interview, Erin and I talk about Myanmar, what drove its brief reopening, how U.S. policy towards the country changed—and whether Myanmar’s experience is valuable to us today, at a time when sanctions are back in the news. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Burmese Haze. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Colonial Myanmar was teeming with animals, both wild and domesticated. Yet few histories have devoted close attention to the importance of animals to British colonial rule in Myanmar. Jonathan Saha’s new book, Colonizing Animals: Interspecies Empire in Myanmar (Cambridge UP, 2021), does exactly this. According to Saha, imperialism was an “interspecies affair”. Colonial empires would have been impossible without the human mobilization and management of various animal species to first conquer, and then to maintain these empires. Saha brings together the emerging field of animal studies with the more established field of postcolonial studies to produce a new history of colonial Myanmar where the relationship between humans and animals is front and centre. In doing so. Saha highlights the importance of the lives of “non-human” animals in how we understand Southeast Asian history.” Patrick Jory teaches Southeast Asian History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. He can be reached at: p.jory@uq.edu.au. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Why did Chadchart Sittipunt win the Bangkok governor race? What does his win tell us about broader political trends in Thailand? And how did it feel covering the Bangkok election? Saksith Saiyasombut, CNA’s Thailand Correspondent in Bangkok, joins Petra Alderman to talk about the significance of the Bangkok governor race – and the local administrative and council elections – and the challenges of being a journalist in Thailand. Saksith Saiyasombut is CNA’s Thailand Correspondent based at its Bangkok Bureau, where he focuses on the latest political, social and economic developments in Thailand. Since joining full-time in July 2016, he has covered major news events such as the passing of King Bhumibol Adulyadej in 2016, the Royal Cremation Ceremony in 2017, the 2018 Chiang Rai Tham Luang cave rescue, the 2019 Thai elections, the 2019 Royal Coronation Ceremony of King Maha Vajiralongkorn and the 2020-2021 youth-led Thai protests. Dr Petra Alderman (prev. Desatova) is an associate researcher at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies and a post-doctoral research fellow at the International Development Department at the University of Birmingham. Her research interests lie in the area of authoritarian legitimation, electoral studies and promotional politics. Her regional focus is on Southeast Asia and has a particular expertise on Thailand. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, consumers across East and Southeast Asia have found themselves turning to Thai soap operas known as “Boys Love series” as a source of comfort and joy. Originally deriving from Japanese comic book culture, Boys Love, or BL, represents just one of many instances where the queer popular culture of Japan has transformed sexual culture in Southeast Asia through the development of new expressions of gender and sexuality. Joining Dr Natali Pearson on SSEAC Stories, Dr Thomas Baudinette shines the spotlight on the influence of Japanese queer popular across Southeast Asia, highlighting how, across the region, young consumers – most prominently from sexual minority communities – have been turning away from Western media to draw upon Japanese popular culture in the ongoing search for affirmative representation and tools to not only make sense of their minoritised sexualities, but to also advocate for their emancipation. About Tom Baudinette: Dr Thomas Baudinette is Senior Lecturer in Japanese and International Studies, Department of Media, Communication, Creative Arts, Language, and Literature at Macquarie University. Thomas’s scholarly research focuses upon the role of Asian popular culture in informing knowledge about gender and sexuality across East and Southeast Asia. His first book is Regimes of Desire: Young Gay Men, Media, and Masculinity in Tokyo (University of Michigan Press, 2021). His second book is Boys Love Media in Thailand: Celebrity, Fans, and Transnational Asian Queer Popular Culture (Bloomsbury, forthcoming). For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

“Nước Việt Nam: a home, a cradle, a point of departure” (Gandhi, 1). The Vietnamese word nước embraces the duality of land and water with an idea of “home.” Through a nuanced examination of the meaning of homeland and politics of belonging, Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi proposes nước to understand complex positionalities of refugee settlers on lands sutured through the traumas of US empire, militarization, and settler colonialism. Division in area studies has foreclosed conversations on how histories of settler colonialism and empire bring to light unexpected connections between Indigenous people and settlers across the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. By bringing together Vietnamese refugee settlers in Israel Palestine and Guam, Gandhi asks the difficult question of how we can imagine decolonial futurities when the creation of “home” for refugee settlers was predicated on the settler colonial project of dispossessing Indigenous people. Drawing inspiration from nước that embraces contradictions through relationality, Gandhi charts both the archipelago of US empire and resistance to imagine decolonization based on fraught acknowledgement of histories and relationalities between people, land, and water. Gandhi's new monograph is a vital read for both scholars and public interested in critical refugee studies, Indigenous studies, settler colonialism, US empire, and archipelagic history.  Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi is an assistant professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (Tovaangar). Her interdisciplinary research engages critical refugee studies, settler colonial studies, and transpacific studies. She also hosts a podcast, Distorted Footprints, through her Critical Refugee Studies class. Da In Ann Choi is a PhD student at UCLA in the Gender Studies department. Her research interests include care labor and migration, reproductive justice, social movement, citizenship theory, and critical empire studies. She can be reached at dainachoi@g.ucla.edu. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In Projectland: Life in a Lao Socialist Model Village (U Hawaii Press, 2021), anthropologist Holly High combines an engaging first-person narrative of her fieldwork with a political ethnography of Laos, more than forty years after the establishment of the Lao PDR and more than seven decades since socialist ideologues first “liberated” parts of upland country. In a remote village of Kandon, High finds that although socialism has declined significantly as an economic model, it is ascendant and thriving in the culture of politics and the politics of culture. Kandon is remarkable by any account. The villagers are ethnic Kantu (Katu), an ethnicity associated by early ethnographers above all with human sacrifice. They had repelled French control, and as the war went on, the revolutionary forces of Sekong were headquartered in Kandon territories. In 1996, Kandon village moved and resettled in a plateau area. “New Kandon” has become Sekong Province’s first certified “Culture Village,” the nation’s very first “Open Defecation Free and Model Health Village,” and the president of Laos personally granted the village a Labor Flag and Medal. High provides a unique and timely assessment of the Lao Party-state’s resettlement politics, and she recounts with skillful nuance the stories that are often cast into shadows by the usual focus on New Kandon as a success. Her book follows the lives of a small group of villagers who returned to the old village in the mountains, effectively defying policy but, in their words, obeying the presence that animates the land there. Revealing her sensibility with tremendous composure, High tells the experiences of women who, bound by steep bride-prices to often violent marriages, have tasted little of the socialist project of equality, unity, and independence. These women spoke to the author of “necessities” as a limit to their own lives. In a context where the state has defined the legitimate forms of success and agency, “necessity” emerged as a means of framing one’s life as nonconforming but also nonagentive. Like this interview? If so, you might also be interested in: Jane Ferguson, Repossessing Shanland: Myanmar, Thailand, and a Nation-State Deferred Nick Enfield, The Languages of Mainland Southeast Asia Tanya Jakimow, Susceptibility in Development: Micropolitics of Local Development in India and Indonesia  Professor Michele Ford is the Director of the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, a university-wide multidisciplinary center at the University of Sydney, Australia. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Energy, and who controls it, has emerged as a major issue in Southeast Asia in recent years. Nowhere is this issue more evident than in the Mekong region, where China’s influence on the politics of energy has been steadily on the rise under the umbrella of its Belt and Road Initiative. China’s investments have supported Cambodia in being able to meet its increasing domestic energy demand, and are also helping Laos to fulfil its vision of becoming the ‘battery of Asia’. Meanwhile, renewed US commitment and additional funding to the Mekong region has been welcomed. Nevetheless, whether that translates into viable alternatives to Beijing’s massive trade and investment, and growing influence, remains to be seen. Joining Dr Natali Pearson on SSEAC Stories, Dr Andrea Haefner unpacks the role of Chinese energy politics in Laos and Cambodia, and reflects on the impact of the recent economic downturn caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. About Andrea Haefner: Dr Andrea Haefner is a Lecturer at the Griffith Asia Institute and has over 15 years of experience working with academia, government, and international organisations across Australia, Germany, and Southeast Asia, especially the Mekong region where she lived and worked for four years in Laos. Andrea's research focuses on transboundary river basin, geopolitics, and governing civil society in the Mekong region. Besides publishing several peer-reviewed articles, Andrea's book on Negotiating for Water Resources - Bridging Transboundary River Basins was published with Routledge in 2016. In addition to focusing on impact research and policy relevance, Andrea also works on several projects on the ground and regularly leads capacity building programs. In 2021, Andrea received the ABDC Award for Innovation and Excellence in International Education. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Tonlé Sap is one of Southeast Asia’s, if not one of the world’s, natural wonders. Between the dry and wet seasons, the lake expands almost six times in size to cover an area the size of Kuwait. The flows are so strong that the Tonlé Sap river actually reverses course, with water from the lake flowing into the Mekong river. And that means the lake is one of the most biodiverse in the world, with fish populations that have sustained fishing communities for generations. But the lake is currently stressed by climate change, overfishing, and hydropower damming. Abby Seiff’s Troubling the Water: A Dying Lake and a Vanishing World in Cambodia (U of Nebraska Press, 2022) tells the stories of those who live along the lake’s shores, and how they try to keep their lives and livelihoods going. In this interview, Abby and I talk about Tonlé Sap, how it’s changed in recent years–and what the lake’s communities tell us about what it means to be a climate refugee. Abby Seiff is a journalist who was based in Southeast Asia for nearly a decade, working as an editor at the Cambodia Daily and the Phnom Penh Post and writing for publications such as Time, the Economist, Al Jazeera, and Pacific Standard, among others. She is now a freelance correspondent. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Troubling the Water. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Investigating the development of Filipino popular dance and performance since the late 20th century, Choreographing in Color: Filipinos, Hip-Hop, and the Cultural Politics of Euphemism (Oxford UP, 2020) reveals how the Filipino dancing body has come to be, paradoxically, both globally recognized and indiscernible. The book draws from nearly two decades of ethnography, choreographic analysis, and community engagement with artists, choreographers, and organizers to ask: what does it mean for Filipinos to navigate the violent forces of empire and neoliberalism with street dance and Hip-Hop? Dr. J. Lorenzo Perillo is Assistant Professor of Theatre and Dance and affiliated faculty with the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Center for Philippine Studies, and Center for Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. His work as an interdisciplinary cultural studies scholar is grounded within the indigenous Filipino concept of kapwa which translates imperfectly to ‘self-in-other’ and ‘together with the person’. In this way, he focuses on bridging Dance, Theatre, and Performance Studies with Critical Race, Ethnic, Feminist, and Indigenous Studies, while broadening the types of knowledge established within these fields. Isabel Machado is a cultural historian whose work often crosses national and disciplinary boundaries. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

How does queer life fit into Buddhism and ritual? What role do gay men and trans women play in the practice of spirit mediumship and how do queer spirit mediums mediate between Thailand’s religious fields? How can we understand the increasing numbers of queer spirit mediums across mainland Southeast Asia? Peter A. Jackson and Benjamin Baumann provide important insights into their new book Deities and Divas, Queer Ritual Specialists in Myanmar, Thailand and Beyond (NIAS Press 2021). Deities and Divas is the first book to trace commonalities between queer and religious cultures in Southeast Asia and the West. The book details the very prominent roles that gay men and trans women are playing in the spirit medium cults rapidly growing in Myanmar, Thailand and beyond. Visit the NIAS Press Webshop to find the book. Peter A. Jackson is Emeritus Professor in Thai cultural history at the Australian National University. Over the past four decades, he has written extensively on religion, gender and sexuality in modern Thailand as well as critical approaches to Asian area studies. His ongoing research includes studying media and masculinity in Thai gay cultures and religion and ritual in Thai communities affected by HIV. Benjamin Baumann is an assistant professor at the University of Heidelberg. His ethnographic work examines rural lifeworlds, socio-cultural identities and local language games in Thailand's lower Northeast, focusing on how the ghostly structures the imagination, reproduction of social collectives and communal sentiments of belonging. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Why is the Thai military so deeply embedded in socio-economic development projects, longer after the end of the Cold War? How come serving generals continue to exercise considerable authority over a range of areas that should normally be the domain of civilian governments? What role does the Royal Thai Army play in promoting a range of social organisations that support royalist, conservative political ideologies, while countering progressive and critical voices? And why does this all matter so much for the future of Thai democracy? The Thai military are armed bureaucrats who do not fight wars. In this important book, Puangthong Pawakapan demonstrates just how deeply the Royal Thai Army is engaged in socio-economic and political activities aimed at mobilizing and manipulating Thai citizens, while subordinating civilian actors and agencies to military control. In recent years, the Cold War-era Internal Security Operations Command (ISOC) has re-emerged as a powerful force, exerting an extraordinary degree of authority and initiating an alarming range of troubling schemes. Infiltrating Society: The Thai Military’s Internal Security Affairs (ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, 2021) is essential reading for anyone who needs to understand some of the darker realities of today’s Thailand. Author Puangthong Pawakapan, associate professor of international relations at Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, discusses her book with Thai politics specialist Duncan McCargo, director of the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies.  Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Ice caps are melting, seas are rising, and densely populated cities worldwide are threatened by floodwaters, especially in Southeast Asia. Building on Borrowed Time is a relevant and powerful ethnography of how people in Semarang, Indonesia, on the north coast of Java, are dealing with this existential challenge driven by global warming. In addition to antiflooding infrastructure breaking down, vast areas of cities like Semarang and Jakarta are rapidly sinking, affecting the very foundations of urban life: toxic water oozes through the floors of houses, bridges are submerged, traffic is interrupted. As Lukas Ley shows, the residents of Semarang are constantly engaged in maintaining their homes and streets, trying to live through a slow-motion disaster shaped by the interacting temporalities of infrastructural failure, ecological deterioration, and urban development. He casts this predicament through the temporal lens of a “meantime,” a managerial response that means a constant enduring of the present rather than progress toward a better future—a “chronic present.” Building on Borrowed Time takes us to a place where a flood crisis has already arrived—where everyday residents are not waiting for the effects of climate change but are in fact already living with it—and shows that life in coastal Southeast Asia is defined not by the temporality of climate science but by the lived experience of tidal flooding. Lukas Ley is head of research group at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle. Alize Arıcan is a Postdoctoral Associate at Rutgers University's Center for Cultural Analysis. She is an anthropologist whose research focuses on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration in Istanbul, Turkey. Her work has been featured in Current Anthropology, City & Society, JOTSA, Radical Housing Journal, and entanglements. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Following the 2014 coup in Thailand, in which the Thai military overthrew the caretaker government after 6 months of political crisis, major media outlets suggested that the coup could lead to ethnic tensions—and potentially civil war—between the Isan people of northeastern Thailand and the central Thai government. While this civil war never eventuated, there were genuine tensions between the Isan people and the Thai state. In this episode, Dr Natali Pearson is joined by Associate Professor Jacob Ricks, to discuss why these tensions never escalated into full blown conflict as predicted. Is this a sign that Thailand’s centuries-long effort to integrate diverse ethnic identities has been a success, and what cautionary tales might apply? About Jacob Ricks: Jacob Ricks is Associate Professor of Political Science in the School of Social Sciences at Singapore Management University. He researches development topics as well as nationalism and ethnicity in Southeast Asia, with a focus on Thailand and Indonesia. Recently he has been studying the identity of the Isan people of Northeastern Thailand. He is co-author of the book Ethnicity and Politics in Southeast Asia with Amy Liu. His research has also been published in journals like World Development, Political Behavior, Pacific Affairs, and Journal of Contemporary Asia, among others. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

The Spirit Ambulance: Choreographing the End of Life in Thailand (University of California Press, 2020) is a journey into decision-making at the end of life in Thailand, where families attempt to craft good deaths for their elders in the face of clashing ethical frameworks, from a rapidly developing universal medical system, to national and global human-rights politics, to contemporary movements in Buddhist metaphysics. Scott Stonington’s gripping ethnography documents how Thai families attempt to pay back a “debt of life” to their elders through intensive medical care, followed by a medically assisted rush from the hospital to home to ensure a spiritually advantageous last breath. The result is a powerful exploration of the nature of death and the complexities arising from the globalization of biomedical expertise and ethics around the world. Scott Stonington, MD, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Anthropology, International Studies, and Internal Medicine at the University of Michigan. Armanc Yildiz is a doctoral candidate in Social Anthropology with a secondary field in Studies in Women, Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University. He is also the founder of Academics Write, where he supports scholars in their writing projects as a writing coach and developmental editor. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

What can textiles tell us about histories of genocide and the lived experiences of prisoners? In this episode, Dr. Magali-An Berthon discusses the treatment of prisoners at S-21 and how clothes played a role into their imprisonment and dehumanization. She retraces the formation of the textile collection at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, starting with a large pile of clothes on display in the first years of the museum, which was then moved in 1991, before being removed altogether in 2011, and which was recently recovered. The current content of the collection includes about 3,500 recovered garments, textiles and fragments, that all tell intimate stories of individuals and survival. Dr. Magali-An Berthon is a textile historian focusing on the contemporary history of Southeast Asian dress and textiles. She is a European Union Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Textile Research at the University of Copenhagen. Dr. Terese Gagnon is an environmental anthropologist and Postdoctoral Researcher in the Politics of Climate and Sustainability in Asia at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies and the Department of Political Science at the University of Copenhagen. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

We often neglect the Indian Ocean when we talk about our macro-level models of geopolitics, global economics or grand strategy—often in favor of the Atlantic or the Pacific. Yet the Indian Ocean—along whose coasts live a third of humanity—may be a better vehicle to understand how our world is changing. Globalization first began in the Indian Ocean with traders sailing between the Gulf, South Asia and Southeast Asia, spreading goods, cultures and ideas. And now, with no hegemon and an array of different states, governments, and economies, the world may look more like the Indian Ocean in the future. Beyond Liberal Order: States, Societies and Markets in the Global Indian Ocean (Hurst: 2021 / Oxford University Press: 2022), edited by Harry Verhoeven and Anatol Lieven, studies the countries in the Indian Ocean—nations as as different as Singapore, Pakistan, and Somalia—to look at how our understanding of the post-Cold War world order doesn’t quite align with this part of the world. Harry Verhoeven is a Senior Research Scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy, School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. He is the Convenor of the Oxford University China-Africa Network and a Senior Adviser at the European Institute of Peace. He is the author of Water, Civilisation and Power in Sudan (Cambridge University Press: 2015) and Why Comrades Go To War (Oxford University Press: 2016) and the editor of Environmental Politics in the Middle East (Oxford University Press: 2018) Anatol Lieven is a senior fellow of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft in Washington DC, and was formerly a professor at Georgetown University in Qatar and King's College London. In the 1980s and 1990s he worked as a British journalist in South Asia and the former Soviet Union, and is the author of several books on these regions including Pakistan: A Hard Country (PublicAffairs: 2012). His most recent book, Climate Change and the Nation State, appeared in paperback in 2021. In this interview, the three of us talk about the Indian Ocean—and how it challenges the way we think about international relations and the international system. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Beyond Liberal Order. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In the past few years, youth-led groups such as the Fridays for Future school strike movement have changed the face of climate activism globally. In this interview, Malaysian youth climate advocate Farhana Shukor talks about her experience working on climate change issues in her native country as well as at the international stage as an observer at the COP26 climate conference in November 2021. Farhana discusses the significance of loss and damage in the Malaysian context, her wishes for Southeast Asian collaboration on climate change as well as what Nordic youth activists could learn from the Malaysian climate movement. Farhana Shukor has over 4 years of experience in climate advocacy in both local and international NGOs. She serves as the co-focal point for the Malaysian Youth Delegation for climate change (MYD) and is the co-founder of bumii, a platform for climate action. Farhana was interviewed by Quynh Le Vo, who received a NIAS SUPRA scholarship when working on her master’s thesis about the Asian Development Bank’s climate adaptation projects in Southeast Asia. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Internet-enabled mobilization begins long before there is a call for protest. In the book Internet Use and Protest in Malaysia and other Authoritarian Regimes (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), Kris Ruijgrok examines the case of Bersih – an anti-corruption movement in Malaysia – to track the sequence of events that lead citizens to take part in protest action. Contrary to the impression that social media platforms like Twitter spontaneously spark protests around the world, the book takes a longer and wider view of how the internet challenges information scarcity in authoritarian regimes, which, consequently, creates conditions for citizens to carefully consider their sympathies for a protest movement and defy their fears about state control. In this podcast, Kris discusses the reasons why the Malaysian government is unable to successfully control the digital public sphere in the same way it controlled the information environment of traditional media. He makes a case for going beyond what he considers to be technologically deterministic debate between cyber-pessimists and cyber-optimists. Instead, Kris foregrounds the importance of context – how different social conditions result to different outcomes. Kris Ruijgrok is a lecturer in the Faculty of Law at the University of Amsterdam. Like this interview? You may also be interested in: Aim Sinpeng, Opposing Democracy in the Digital Age: The Yellow Shirts in Thailand (U Michigan Press, 2021)  Nicole Curato is a Professor of Sociology in the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra. She co-hosts the New Books in Southeast Asia Studies channel. This episode was produced in collaboration with Erron C. Medina of the Development Studies Program of Ateneo De Manila University. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Jose Ramos-Horta topped the first round of polling in the 2022 East Timor presidential elections, securing 46.56 per cent of the popular vote on 19 March. Here he speaks to Amber Woortman in a special interview for the Nordic Asia Podcast. During the 24 years he spent in exile, José Ramos-Horta was a strong advocate for the people of Timor-Leste during the brutal Indonesian occupation, and travelled all over the world to bring international attention to the cause of East Timor. In 1996, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, together with Bishop Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo “for their work towards a just and peaceful solution to the conflict in East Timor”. José Ramos-Horta later served as his country’s second president from 2007 until 2012. In the second episode of the short series of the Timor-Leste focused Nordic Asia Podcasts, Amber Woortman, a master’s student in political science at the University of Copenhagen, talks with presidential front-runner José Ramos-Horta about the election, running against incumbent president Francisco Guterres (aka Lu’Olo), the recent constitutional crisis, Timor-Leste’s main political challenges in the post-independence era, the role of history in the daily life of Timorese people, the new generation, and his hopes for the future of Timor-Leste as a member of ASEAN. You can listen to Amber’s first Timor-Leste podcast on the background to the 2022 elections here: https://newbooksnetwork.com/understanding-east-timors-2022-presidential-elections The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

To say that World War II and Southeast Asia: Economy and Society under Japanese Occupation (Cambridge University Press, 2020) is an impressive achievement is a huge understatement. Based on years of research in over two dozen archives on three continents, this book won the Lindart-Williamson prize from the Economic History Association. World War II and Southeast Asia: Economy and Society under Japanese Occupation explores how Japan, as part of its plan to build an East Asian empire and secure oil supplies essential for war in the Pacific, swiftly took control of Southeast Asia. Dr. Huff describes the occupation’s devastating economic impact on the region. Japan imposed country and later regional autarky on Southeast Asia, dictated that the region finance its own occupation, and sent almost no consumer goods. GDP fell by half everywhere in Southeast Asia except Thailand. Famine and forced labor accounted for most of the 4.4 million Southeast Asian civilian deaths under Japanese occupation. World War II and Southeast Asia presents a new understanding of Southeast Asian history and development before, during and after the Pacific War. Gregg is Senior Research Fellow at Pembroke College, University of Oxford. He is the author of The Economic Growth of Singapore: Trade and Development in the Twentieth Century and co-editor of and contributor to World War II Singapore: The Chōsabu Reports on Syonan-to. Gregg has large number of publications in the Journal of Economic History, Economic History Review, Economic Development and Cultural Change, Oxford Economic Papers, Cambridge Journal of Economics, World Development, Modern Asian Studies and Journal of Southeast Asian Studies. Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Cambodia is home to Angkor, one of the most important archaeological sites of Southeast Asia. Greater Angkor, the capital of the Khmer Empire, was a low-density city covered about a 1000 sq km and was the home of between 750,000 to 900,000 people in the 12th century CE. The urban complex was largely abandoned in the 14th and 15th centuries. Its central 300 sq km is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and includes the world-famous temple of Angkor Wat, one of humankind’s largest religious monuments which has continued in use to the present day. In this episode, world-renowned archaeologist Professor Roland Fletcher joins Dr Natali Pearson to examine the structure of Angkor’s social and spatial organisation; the way the urban complex operated in its environment. Reflecting on the metropolis’ demise, Roland argues that archaeological study of Angkor can teach us lessons about the vulnerability of modern-day urbanism in a time of increasing climate risk. About Roland Fletcher: Roland Fletcher is Professor of Theoretical and World Archaeology at the University of Sydney. Roland is also Director of the Greater Angkor Project – a collaboration between the University of Sydney, the Authority for the Protection of the Site and Management of the Region of Angkor (APSARA) in Cambodia, and the École française d'Extrême-Orient (EFEO), that has been ongoing since 1998. He is the author of The Limits of Settlement Growth, published by Cambridge University Press in 1995, and has published extensively on urbanism. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Policymakers worry that "ungoverned spaces" pose dangers to security and development. Why do such spaces exist beyond the authority of the state? Earlier scholarship—which addressed this question with a list of domestic failures—overlooked the crucial role that international politics play. In this shrewd book, Melissa M. Lee argues that foreign subversion undermines state authority and promotes ungoverned space. Enemy governments empower insurgents to destabilize the state and create ungoverned territory. This kind of foreign subversion is a powerful instrument of modern statecraft. But though subversion is less visible and less costly than conventional force, it has insidious effects on governance in the target state. To demonstrate the harmful consequences of foreign subversion for state authority, Crippling Leviathan: How Foreign Subversion Weakens the State (Cornell University Press, 2020) marshals a wealth of evidence and presents in-depth studies of Russia's relations with the post-Soviet states, Malaysian subversion of the Philippines in the 1970s, and Thai subversion of Vietnamese-occupied Cambodia in the 1980s. The evidence presented by Lee is persuasive: foreign subversion weakens the state. She challenges the conventional wisdom on statebuilding, which has long held that conflict promotes the development of strong, territorially consolidated states. Lee argues instead that conflictual international politics prevents state development and degrades state authority. In addition, Crippling Leviathan illuminates the use of subversion as an underappreciated and important feature of modern statecraft. Rather than resort to war, states resort to subversion. Policymakers interested in ameliorating the consequences of ungoverned space must recognize the international roots that sustain weak statehood. Melissa M. Lee is Assistant Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. She studies the international and domestic politics of statebuilding and state development. Lee is the author of Crippling Leviathan: How Foreign Subversion Weakens the State (Cornell University Press, 2020). Her work has received the American Political Science Association’s 2016 Helen Dwight Reid (now Merze Tate) award, APSA’s European Politics and Society Section 2020 Best Article Prize, and Perry World House’s Emerging Scholar Global Policy Prize. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford University. Lamis Abdelaaty is an assistant professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. She is the author of Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees (Oxford University Press, 2021). Email her comments at labdelaa@syr.edu or tweet to @LAbdelaaty. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

“An atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership,” is how UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described the IPCC report published in February 2022. But what did the report have to say about climate impacts, adaptation and vulnerability in Southeast Asian cities? What are the greatest climate risks for the region and where are we in terms of adapting to them? And why are the concepts of maladaptation and climate resilient development important as we focus our attention on urgent climate action? This episode delves into these issues. It also discusses the significance of including references to climate justice, colonialism and indigenous knowledge in the report, to future international climate action. This episode was recorded on 14 March 2022 and covers the IPCC Working Group II contribution to the 6th Assessment Report, published on 28 February 2022. Professor Chow (@winstontlchow) is Associate Professor of Science, Technology and Society at Singapore Management University and an International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Lead Author. His research interests include ​​urban vulnerability to climate change, urban heat island science, impacts and mitigation, and sustainability in urban climatology. Quynh Le Vo (@voquynhle) works as the climate campaign coordinator for Friends of the Earth Finland. She received a NIAS-SUPRA scholarship in 2021 while writing her master’s thesis on the Asian Development Bank’s climate adaptation projects in Southeast Asia. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In popular understandings of the modern history of Vietnam we are familiar with Ho Chi Minh’s anti-imperialism, but we know much less about the anticommunist nationalism of South Vietnam – officially the Republic of Vietnam (RVN). The RVN tends to be viewed as a creation of the French and later a “puppet” of the Americans. But as Nu-Anh Tran shows in her book, Disunion: Anticommunist Nationalism and the Making of the Republic of Vietnam (U Hawaii Press, 2022), the RVN was heir to a revolutionary tradition that developed out of the anti-French resistance, that was quite distinct from the communist one to the north. Although the many different political and religious factions in the south shared a fierce anticommunism, the RVN was plagued by disunity. And ironically, despite the democratic ideals that these groups claimed to advocate, the RVN was subject to authoritarian rule for most of its brief existence. Patrick Jory teaches Southeast Asian History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. He can be reached at: p.jory@uq.edu.au. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Launched in 2013 by Chinese President XI Jinping, China’s Belt and Road initiative has manifested throughout Southeast Asia in the form of multibillion dollar investments in transport infrastructure, industrial estates and other forms of “hard” development. This push for trade and hard infrastructure has been accompanied by a surge in various soft power initiatives, including the use of religion as a cultural resource. Joining Dr Natali Pearson on SSEAC Stories, Dr Gregory Raymond sheds light on the use of religion, in particular Buddhism, within the great geopolitical strategy of China’s Belt and Road Initiative across mainland Southeast Asia. About Gregory Raymond: Gregory Raymond is a lecturer in the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs researching Southeast Asian politics and foreign relations. He is the author of Thai Military Power: A Culture of Strategic Accommodation (NIAS Press 2018) and the lead author of The United States-Thai Alliance: History, Memory and Current Developments (Routledge, 2021). His work has been published in journals including Contemporary Southeast Asia, South East Asia Research and the Journal of Cold War Studies. He convenes the ASEAN Australia Defence Postgraduate Scholarship Program, the Global China Research Spoke for the ANU Centre for China in the World, and is ANU Press editor for the Asia Pacific Security series. He holds a PhD in political science from La Trobe University and an MA in Asian Studies from Monash University. Before joining the Australian National University, Greg was a policy advisor in the Australian Government, including in the strategic and international policy areas of the Department of Defence and the Australian Embassy in Bangkok. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In the first decades after World War II, many newly independent Asian and African countries and established Latin American states pursued a socialist development model. In Ripe for Revolution: Building Socialism in the Third World (Harvard UP, 2022), Jeremy Friedman traces the socialist experiment over forty years through the experience of five countries: Indonesia, Chile, Tanzania, Angola, and Iran. These states sought paths to socialism without formal adherence to the Soviet bloc or the programs that Soviets, East Germans, Cubans, Chinese, and other outsiders tried to promote. Instead, they attempted to forge new models of socialist development through their own trial and error, together with the help of existing socialist countries, demonstrating the flexibility and adaptability of socialism. All five countries would become Cold War battlegrounds and regional models, as new policies in one shaped evolving conceptions of development in another. Lessons from the collapse of democracy in Indonesia were later applied in Chile, just as the challenge of political Islam in Indonesia informed the policies of the left in Iran. Efforts to build agrarian economies in West Africa influenced Tanzania’s approach to socialism, which in turn influenced the trajectory of the Angolan model. Ripe for Revolution shows socialism as more adaptable and pragmatic than often supposed. When we view it through the prism of a Stalinist orthodoxy, we miss its real effects and legacies, both good and bad. To understand how socialism succeeds and fails, and to grasp its evolution and potential horizons, we must do more than read manifestos. We must attend to history. Jeremy Friedman is Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. The former Associate Director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy at Yale University, he is the author of Shadow Cold War: The Sino–Soviet Competition for the Third World. Thomas Kingston is currently a Huayu Enrichment Scholar, studying Mandarin Chinese at National Cheng Kung University, as he finds himself in post MPhil and pre PhD limbo. He holds an MA in Pacific Asian Studies from SOAS, University of London and an MPhil in Philosophy from Renmin University of China. His research interests focus on the political and intellectual histories of nationalism(s), imaginaries and colonialism in the East and Southeast Asian context. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

East Timor is choosing a president. What is the significance of the 2022 presidential elections in Timor Leste? Has Asia’s youngest and newest country become a prisoner of its short but turbulent political part? How do young people view the older generation of former freedom fighters who continue to dominate the political order? What has the atmosphere been like on the ground during the election campaign? In the first of a short series of East Timor-focused Nordic Asia Podcasts, Amber Woortman, a master’s student in political science at the University of Copenhagen, talks to NIAS Director Duncan McCargo from Dili about her observations and her conversations with candidates and voters in Timor Leste over the past couple of weeks. This is a rare opportunity to hear about an election that has received very little mainstream international media coverage. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Vaccines have controlled or even eradicated some of the world’s most serious diseases. Throughout the last century and up until recently with the COVID-19 pandemic, the development of successful vaccines has widely been heralded a triumph to combat devastating virus outbreaks. The success of immunisations, however, has always been limited by issues of public acceptance. Understanding why people are or aren’t vaccinated is crucial to public health responses to diseases like measles and, of course, COVID-19. Many are concerned about the impact of anti-vaccination activism and misinformation on vaccine programs. But is vaccine hesitancy always due to misinformation, and how do we go about measuring it? Joining Dr Natali Pearson on SSEAC Stories, Dr Kerrie Wiley unpacks some of these issues, and discusses the various drivers of vaccine acceptance in Southeast Asia. About Kerrie Wiley: Dr Kerrie Wiley is a Senior Research Fellow with the University of Sydney’s School of Public Health, in the Faculty of Medicine and Health. Kerrie’s research focuses on the social and behavioural aspects of immunisation and other preventive health behaviours, and their implications for policy and practice. Kerrie is a member of the World Health Organization ‘Measuring Behavioural and Social Drivers of Vaccination’ (BeSD) Working Group, and a founding member of the Collaboration of Social Science in Immunisation. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Around five million people across Southeast Asia identify as Shan. Though the Shan people were promised an independent state in the 1947 Union of Burma constitution, successive military governments blocked their liberation. From 1958 onward, insurgency movements, including the Shan United Revolutionary Army, have fought for independence from Myanmar. Refugees numbering in the hundreds of thousands fled to Thailand to escape the conflict, despite struggling against oppressive citizenship laws there. Several decades of continuous rebellion have created a vacuum in which literati and politicians have constructed a virtual Shan state that lives on in popular media, rock music, and Buddhist ritual. In Repossessing Shanland: Myanmar, Thailand, and a Nation-State Deferred (U Wisconsin Press, 2021), Jane M. Ferguson details the origins of these movements and tells the story of the Shan in their own voices. She shows how the Shan have forged a homeland and identity during great upheaval by using state building as an ongoing project of resistance, resilience, and accommodation within both countries. In avoiding a good/bad moral binary and illuminating cultural complexities, Repossessing Shanland offers a fresh perspective on identity formation, transformation, and how people understand and experience borderlands today. Like this interview? If so, you might also be interested in: Nick Enfield, The Languages of Mainland Southeast Asia Anjalee Cohen, Youth Culture and Identity in Northern Thailand: Fitting in and Sticking Out Tanya Jakimow, Susceptibility in Development: Micropolitics of Local Development in India and Indonesia Nicole Curato, Democracy in a Time of Misery: From Spectacular Tragedies to Deliberative Action Professor Michele Ford is the Director of the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, a university-wide multidisciplinary center at the University of Sydney, Australia. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Southeastern Myanmar (Burma). The Myanmar military has carried out arial attacks on villages: targeting schools, libraries, and villagers’ agricultural fields. In the past year, roughly one hundred thousand civilians have been displaced in the Southeast alone. Many have attempted to seek refuge in neighboring Thailand but have not been accepted as refugees. In addition to this ongoing emergency of forced migration, there are currently an additional hundred thousand refugees from Myanmar living in nine refugee camps in Thailand, which have existed for over thirty years. In early 2022, for the first time in years, there were protests in the camps over lack of rights and demanding decreased restrictions for refugees. In this podcast Terese Gagnon speaks with Hayso Thako about the experiences of refugees on the Thai-Myanmar border and what they can tell us about approaches to humanitarianism and development more broadly. Read this co-authored article about the refugee situation on the Thai-Myanmar border by Hayso and Terese here.  Hayso is a PhD candidate at Department of Peacebuilding, Payap University, Thailand. He has been working with the refugee community and community-based organizations along the Thai-Burma border for the last 20 years. He is currently the Education and Livelihood Coordinator of the Karen Refugee Committee, the chair of Refugee Affairs at Karen Peace Support Network and a leading advocate for the Karen Student Network Group. He is also one of the founding members of the relatively new Asian Pacific Network of Refugees. His research interests include refugee and IDPs, ethnic education and border issues in Thailand and Burma. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Why did Restart Thailand, a 2020 student-led pro-democracy movement, sport a red Communist-style logo with a hammer and sickle? Why did a Thai BNK48 singer wear a swastika t-shirt for the band’s 2019 concert rehearsal? And why did the latest Thai junta produce a video of two boys applauding a portrait of Adolf Hitler to promote Thai values? Verita Sriratana, an Associate Professor in Literary Studies at Chulalongkorn University, discusses this deeply troubling Thai infatuation with Nazi and Communist symbolism with Petra Alderman (prev. Desatova), an Associate Researcher at NIAS. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Migration and architecture have emerged as a new topic of research at a global level. Migrant worker dormitories in Singapore, for example, are sites where structural inequities in architecture and legal regulations have had a significant impact on the living conditions of migrant workers, and they hit the headlines in 2020 as sites for the rapid spread of COVID. Dr Jennifer Ferng joins Dr Natali Pearson on SSEAC Stories to talk about the relationship between architecture and labour, arguing that climate change, capital, and power intersect with the forced displacement of migrants to reinforce existing inequalities of ethnicity, class, and citizenship in Singapore. About Jennifer Ferng: Dr Jennifer Ferng is Senior Lecturer in Architecture and Academic Director at the University of Sydney. Her research addresses asylum seekers and refugees, forced displacement, and migration in the built environment of the Asia-Pacific region. Most recently, she was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) at University College London in 2021. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In conversation with Duncan McCargo about her new book Chasing Freedom: The Philippines Long Journey to Democratic Ambivalence (Sussex Academic Press, 2022), Adele Webb offers a spirited defence of what she calls 'democratic ambivalence': the mixed feelings many Filipinos harbour about their own hybrid political system. She argues that Philippine ambivalence towards democracy results from a particular historical experience, and should be embraced rather than deprecated. Adele Webb is a lecturer in the School of Justice at the Queensland University of Technology and an adjunct research fellow at the Griffith Asia Institute, Griffith University, Australia. Duncan McCargo is director of the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies and a professor of political science at the University of Copenhagen. How did Rodrigo Duterte earn the support of large segments of the Philippine middle class, despite imposing arbitrary authority and offering little tolerance for dissent? Has the Filipino middle class, heroes of the 1986 People Power Revolution, given up on democracy? Chasing Freedom retells the history of Philippine democracy, employing a genealogical approach that makes visible the forms of power that have shaped and constrained understandings of democracy. The book traces the attitudes of the Filipino middle class from the beginning of American colonization in 1898, to the present.  Chasing Freedom argues that democracy in the Philippines is lived in an ambivalent way, a result of the contradictions inherent in America's imperial project of democratic tutelage. Humiliation of the colonial past fuels the imperative to search for more authentic self-determination; at the same time, Filipinos are haunted by self-doubt over their capacity to correctly manage the freedom that democracy provides. This simultaneous yes and no has persisted after independence in 1946 until today; it is the masterful mobilization of this democratic ambivalence by authoritarian populists like Rodrigo Duterte that helps to explain the effectiveness of their political narratives for middle-class audiences. The Philippines is a bellwether case, with lessons of global importance in an age when disenchantment with democracy is on the rise. While ambivalence may result in failure to meet a democratic ideal it may, nevertheless, be one of democracy's safeguards. This work is at the forefront of recent debates about middle class-led democratic backsliding. Enjoyed this podcast? You may also like Duncan's 2021 New Books in Southeast Asian Studies conversation with Aim Sinpeng, on why so many middle-class Thais took part in anti-democratic 'yellow shirt' protests between 2006 and 2014. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Analysing three cases of British colonial violence that occurred in the latter half of the 19th century, this book argues that all three share commonalities, including the role of racial prejudices in justifying the perpetration of extreme colonial violence. Exploring the connections and comparisons between the Perak War (1875–76), the 'Hut Tax' Revolt in Sierra Leone (1898–99) and the Anglo-Egyptian War of Reconquest in the Sudan (1896–99), Gordon highlights the significance of decision-making processes, communication between London and the periphery and the influence of individual colonial administrators in outbreaks of violence. Michelle Gordon's book Extreme Violence and the ‘British Way’: Colonial Warfare in Perak, Sierra Leone and Sudan (Bloomsbury, 2020) reveals the ways in which racial prejudices, the advocacy of a British 'civilising mission' and British racial 'superiority' informed colonial administrators' decisions on the ground, as well as the rationalisation of extreme violence. Responding to a neglect of British colonial atrocities within the historiography of colonial violence, this work demonstrates the ways in which Britain was just as willing and able as other European Empires to resort to extreme measures in the face of indigenous resistance or threats to the British imperial project. Siddharth Sridhar is a fourth year PhD Candidate (ABD) in History at the University of Toronto. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Bangkok, as Thailand’s largest and most economically-important cities, attracts migrants from all over the country. Drawn to its economic opportunities, migrants eke a living working in informal jobs, with few protections–yet they build a community among their fellow migrants and workers. The King of Bangkok (University of Toronto Press: 2021), written by Claudio Sopranzetti, illustrated by Sara Fabbri and translated from its original Italian by Chiara Natalucci, tells the story of one such migrant: Nok, who lives through economic upheaval, protest movements and military crackdowns, in a story based on years of research. Claudio Sopranzetti is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the Central European University. He is the author of Owners of the Map: Motorcycle Taxi Drivers, Mobility, and Politics in Bangkok (University of California Press: 2017), winner of the 2019 Margaret Mead Award. Sara Fabbri is an illustrator and editorial designer, currently working as Art Director for Linus, an Italian comics magazine. Claudio and Sara join us to talk about The King of Bangkok, where they cover Nok’s story, and what it tells us about Thailand, Bangkok, and the country’s urban-rural divide. They also talk about the process of making the book itself: a graphic novel, based on a decade of anthropological research. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The King of Bangkok. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

King Vajiravudh ruled over Siam from 1910 to 1925. He is widely known to Thais as a nationalist king who proposed an essential ‘Thainess’ through his myriad of writings. Yet contrary to popular expectations, King Vajiravudh’s attitude towards the West was nothing short of ambivalent. In fact, King Vajiravudh’s dynamic practice of translating works of Western literature into Thai points to strong bonds of affection towards Great Britain and France in particular. To explore this connection, Dr Natali Pearson is joined by Dr Faris Yothasamuth who argues that King Vajiravudh’s fascination with the West and Western discourses heavily influenced his management of the Kingdom of Siam, and in doing so, shaped the country’s national identity. Dr Faris Yothasamuth is a lecturer at the Department of Literature, Kasetsart University, Thailand. He received PhD in International Comparative Literature and Translation Studies from The University of Sydney in 2021. Faris’s research and teaching expertise is Thai literature. His research interests include literature and history, and translation in Thailand’s (semi)colonial contexts. Faris’s current research focuses on representations of the Orient in Western popular novels that were translated into Thai during the colonial era. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In this episode of New Books in Southeast Asian Studies we travel with Craig J. Reynolds to the mid-south of Thailand in the first half of the twentieth century, where we meet with a legendary policeman who trained in martial arts and the occult so as to protect himself in mortal combat with dangerous foes. That policeman was Butr Pantharak, also known as Khun Phan. Though he already has quite a number of biographers in Thai, Reynolds’ Power, Protection and Magic in Thailand: The Cosmos of a Southern Policeman (ANU Press 2019) is the first book to tell the story of Khun Phan’s life and times for English-language readers. It is available for free download from the ANU Press website, where it is accompanied by a series of beautiful videos that build on the contents of each of its chapters, the making of which we discuss in this episode. Thai-language readers might also be interested in Craig Reynold’s new collection of essays, จดหมายจากสุดขอบโลก คิดคำนึงถึงอดีตในปัจจุบัน (Letters from the Edge of the World: Thinking of the Past in the Present, Sayam Press, 2022), which we talk about at the end of the interview. Like this interview? If so you might also be interested in: Thongchai Winichakul, Moments of Silence: The Unforgetting of the October 6, 1976, Massacre in Bangkok Sam van Schaik, Buddhist Magic: Divination, Healing, and Enchantment through the Ages Nick Cheesman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political & Social Change, Australian National University. He hosts the New Books in Interpretive Political & Social Science series and contributes to the New Books in Southeast Asian Studies channel on the New Books Network. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Amidst accelerating environmental change and intense urbanisation, there is growing enthusiasm for building sustainable and ‘natural’ cities. Yet, when a flourishing eco-futuristic urban imaginary is enacted, it is often driven by a specific version of sustainability that is tied to high-tech futurism and persistent economic growth. In a Southeast Asian context, no city or country better encapsulates this than Singapore. But the pursuit of a singular narrative of progress has very specific consequences, particularly when that progress benefits some but not all beings. In this episode, Dr Natali Pearson is joined by Dr Jamie Wang to shed more light on the implications of Singapore’s growth fetish, and its implications for humans and non-humans. About Jamie Wang: Dr Jamie Wang is a Sydney Southeast Asia Centre Writing Fellow, a research affiliate in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney, and an editor of the journal Feminist Review. She has a PhD in Environmental Humanities and Cultural Studies from the University of Sydney. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on the intersections of environmental humanities, urban geography, more-than-human studies and sustainable development in the context of planetary urbanism, climate change and environmental injustice. Jamie’s recent project ‘Reimagining the More-than-Human cities, stories of Singapore’ has explored the multifaceted pressing urban environmental issues, from urban greenery to housing development projects, transportation, water infrastructure, and urban agriculture, with a geographic focus in Singapore. It asks how we might develop ways of re-thinking, re-seeing and re-storying cities through foregrounding their more-than-human worlds. Jamie is also a writer and poet. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Why has Myanmar experienced so many massive street protests recent years? How can we go about studying these sorts of mass demonstrations? What kinds of roles do bystanders perform in these protest movements? Have the protests since February 2021 been significantly different from earlier movements such as those of 1988 or 2007? And how are the most recent protests related to developments elsewhere in the region, including Hong Kong and Thailand? Mai Van Tran, a newly appointed postdoctoral researcher at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) and the Department of Political Science at the University of Copenhagen, discusses her 2020 Cornell University PhD dissertation on Myanmar protests in this conversation with NIAS Director Duncan McCargo. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

For many people Cambodia’s modern history is overshadowed by the devastation and horror of the Khmer Rouge era between 1975 and 1979. Yet arguably the period since the fall of the Khmer Rouge has been much more significant in shaping the Cambodia of today. Perhaps more than any other Southeast Asian country Cambodia’s political leaders have had to deal with much more powerful outsiders: France, Vietnam, Thailand, the US, China, and the “international community”. No-one has been more adept at playing this political game than Cambodia’s remarkable prime minister, Hun Sen, now Southeast Asia’s longest serving political leader. Despite the international community’s best efforts since the early 1990s to fashion Cambodia into a model liberal democracy, Hun Sen and the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) have eliminated all opposition to create a highly authoritarian state. Yet at the same time, and despite huge disparities in wealth, Cambodia is arguably more stable and prosperous than at any time in its traumatic modern history. Sebastian Strangio has documented this remarkable story in his book, Cambodia: From Pol Pot to Hun Sen and Beyond (Yale University Press, 2020). Patrick Jory teaches Southeast Asian History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. He can be reached at: p.jory@uq.edu.au. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Ever tried to cross the road in Hanoi? There’s no point in waiting for a gap. Close your eyes and start walking: the traffic will magically weave around you. While Vietnamese cities were once dominated by bicycles and pedestrians, the growth in motorized mobility over the past decades have been astounding. The speed with which Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City have changed into hostile environments for pedestrians and cyclist is quite remarkable. Yet in mobility terms Vietnamese urban transport somehow works, largely thanks to the continuing dominance of motorbikes. In this episode, Hue-Tam Jamme and Arve Hansen discuss motorbike madness in Vietnam, and what we can learn from the combination of vibrant street life and relatively efficient transport of millions of people on two wheels. Hue-Tam Jamme is an assistant professor at Arizona Sate University. She studies urbanisms in transition from a comparative perspective, using a range of qualitative and quantitative methods, focusing on the lived experience of societal transformations Arve Hansen is a researcher at the Centre for Development and the Environment at the University of Oslo. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

From mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria and dengue to chronic bacterial infections such as yaws, Southeast Asia is home to a wide range of tropical diseases. For a long time, the arrival in the region of these and other dangerous tropical diseases was believed to be connected to the introduction of agriculture. But how long have these diseases really been around for? How are they connected to the region’s fluctuating social and environmental conditions? And how have they impacted the human populations of Southeast Asia over time? Joining Dr Natali Pearson on SSEAC Stories, bioarchaeologist Dr Melandri Vlok sheds light on the complex science of paleoepidemiology and its use of advanced analytical practices such as DNA ancestry, skeletal studies, and teeth calculus to uncover ancient stories of illness and disease. She explains that far from being mere remnants of the past, archaeological human remains can help us understand the evolution and spread of pathogens, and inform strategies to curb the spread of infectious diseases in human populations. About Melandri Vlok: Dr Melandri Vlok is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre. Melandri specialises in palaeopathology/ bioarchaeology and researches the implications for migration and trade on the presence of infectious and nutritional diseases in past populations in Asia. Melandri's work, funded by grant bodies including National Geographic and the Royal Society of New Zealand, has involved the analysis of human skeletal remains from Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, Japan, Mongolia, New Zealand and the Philippines. She is also involved with repatriation efforts focused on returning Māori and Moriori ancestral remains to iwi and imi (tribes) in New Zealand. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

What can years of ethnographic engagement with rural Indonesia teach us about capitalism, development, and resistance? On this episode of Ethnographic Marginalia, our guest is Dr. Tania Li, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. Tania tells us about three decades of research on development programs, local activism, and class formation in rural Indonesia. She talks about her own frustrations as a development practitioner led her to study development programs for the book The Will to Improve. She then describes how research over 20 years on how families’ lives changed with the introduction of capitalist relations in rural Indonesian highlands led to her next book, Land’s End. Finally, she explains the collaborative methodology behind her new book Plantation Life: Corporate Occupation in Indonesia's Oil Palm Zone (Duke UP, 2021), co-authored with Pujo Semedi. She talks about the insights that emerged from their different perspectives and positionality, how they used the project to inspire a whole generation of Indonesian anthropologists, and their joint efforts to avoid a colonial dynamic in their writing process. Alex Diamond is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Texas, Austin. Sneha Annavarapu is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Mainland Southeast Asia is one of the most fascinating and complex cultural and linguistic areas in the world. This book provides a rich and comprehensive survey of the history and core systems and subsystems of the languages of this fascinating region. Drawing on his depth of expertise in mainland Southeast Asia, Enfield includes more than a thousand data examples from over a hundred languages from Cambodia, China, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam, bringing together a wealth of data and analysis that has not previously been available in one place. Chapters cover the many ways in which these languages both resemble each other, and differ from each other, and the diversity of the area's languages is highlighted, with a special emphasis on minority languages, which outnumber the national languages by nearly a hundred to one. The result is an authoritative treatment of a fascinating and important linguistic area. Like this interview? If so, you might also be interested in: Anjalee Cohen, Youth Culture and Identity in Northern Thailand: Fitting in and Sticking Out Tanya Jakimow, Susceptibility in Development: Micropolitics of Local Development in India and Indonesia Nicole Curato, Democracy in a Time of Misery: From Spectacular Tragedies to Deliberative Action Edward Aspinall and Ward Berenschot, Democracy for Sale: Elections, Clientelism, and the State in Indonesia  Professor Michele Ford is the Director of the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, a university-wide multidisciplinary center at the University of Sydney, Australia. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Does ‘citizenship’ exist in a socialist or communist context? If it does, what would this mean in the case of Vietnam? To what extent do the Vietnamese state and Vietnamese citizens perceive citizenship differently? And how are those differences negotiated? Why does the wave of recent popular protests in neighbouring countries concern the Vietnamese government? Two lecturers from the University of Passau, Mirjam Le and Franziska Nicolaisen, share and discuss with Linh Phương Lê their findings on these issues. Mirjam Le is a lecturer and PhD researcher in Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Passau, Germany. Her thesis focuses on small town urbanization and the production of urban space in Vietnam. Her research interests involve urbanization and state-society relations in Vietnam, especially processes of self-organization and citizenship. Franziska S. Nicolaisen is a lecturer and research assistant for the chair of Development Economics at the University of Passau in Germany. Her work focuses on sustainable urban mobility in Vietnam. Other research interests include heritage tourism, health governance and social movements in the context of Southeast Asia. This episode is a discussion of their chapter of the same title, published in Vietnam at the Vanguard: New Perspectives Across Time, Space, and Community, edited by Jamie Gillen, Liam Kelley and Phan Le Ha (Springer 2021). Linh Phương Lê is a PhD Researcher at the Institute for Media Studies, KU Leuven University in Belgium. Her work explores the media representation of Vietnamese female migrants to China and Taiwan. A former NIAS-SUPRA scholarship receiver, Linh’s regional focus is on Vietnam and East Asia. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In 2021, a team of divers led by renowned maritime archaeologist Dr Michael Flecker and sponsored by the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute surveyed two historic shipwrecks discovered in the Singapore Strait, working for several months to bring their submerged cargos to the surface. Chinese trade ceramics found in these cargos date their demise to the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries – pivotal moments in the history of the globe-spanning China Trade. The most intriguing aspect of this salvage operation, however, is the discovery in the remains of the older vessel of the most substantial cargo of Yuan-dynasty blue-and-white porcelain yet found in Southeast Asian waters. Joining Dr Natali Pearson on SSEAC Stories, Dr Alex Burchmore argues that these discoveries provide valuable insights into the complex interactions between China and Southeast Asia, allowing us to reposition Southeast Asia at the centre of historic trade narratives. Through the international trade of Chinese ceramics, Dr Burchmore invites us to reimagine the past, rethinking traditional narratives of Chineseness across the region, as well as Australia’s identity in the Asia-Pacific. About Alex Burchmore: Dr Alex Burchmore is an art historian specialising in the study of Chinese and Southeast Asian art, past and present, with a particular focus on ceramics, trade and exchange, and the interweaving of the personal and material. Alex received his PhD from the Australian National University in 2019 and joined the University of Sydney’s Museum and Heritage Studies department in 2021. His first book, New Export China: Translations Across Time and Place in Contemporary Chinese Porcelain Art (University of California Press, 2023), traces the extent to which artists within and beyond China have used porcelain to shape their personal, historical, and cultural identities, from the 1990s to the present. His recent publications include a study of the ‘material Chineseness’ of ink and porcelain in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art and a chapter dedicated to the ‘fugitive luxury’ of contemporary Chinese ceramics in The Allure of Matter: Materiality Across Chinese Art (University of Chicago Press, 2021). For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Quyền Văn Minh (b. 1954) is not only a jazz saxophonist and lecturer at the prestigious Vietnam National Academy of Music, but he is also one of the most preeminent jazz musicians in Vietnam. Considered a pioneer in the country, Minh is often publicly recognized as the “godfather of Vietnamese jazz.” Playing Jazz in Socialist Vietnam: Quyền Văn Minh and Jazz in Hà Nội (UP of Mississippi, 2021) tells the story of the music as it intertwined with Minh’s own narrative. Stan BH Tan-Tangbau details Minh’s life story, telling how Minh pioneered jazz as an original genre even while navigating the trials and tribulations of a fervent socialist revolution, of the ideological battle that was the Cold War, of Vietnam’s war against the United States, and of the political changes during the Đổi Mới period between the mid-1980s and the 1990s. Minh worked tirelessly and delivered two breakthrough solo recitals in 1988 and 1989, marking the first time jazz was performed in the public sphere in the socialist state. To gain jazz acceptance as a mainstream musical art form, Minh founded Minh Jazz Club. With the release of his debut album of original compositions in 2000, Minh shaped the nascent genre of Vietnamese jazz. Minh’s endeavors kickstarted the momentum, from his performing jazz in public, teaching jazz both formally and informally, and contributing to the shaping of an original Vietnamese voice to stand out among the many styles in the jazz world. Most importantly, Minh generated a public space for musicians to play and for the Vietnamese to listen. His work eventually helped to gain jazz the credibility necessary at the national conservatoire to offer instruction in a professional music education program. Adam Bobeck is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His PhD is entitled “Object-Oriented Azadari: Shi’i Muslim Rituals and Ontology”. For more about his work, see www.adambobeck.com. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Why did leading historians in both Indonesia and the Philippines become involved in projects to write national histories during the 1970s? How far were these projects essentially political undertakings to legitimate the Suharto and Marcos regimes respectively? In conversation with Duncan McCargo, Rommel Curaming discusses how he managed to interview key protagonists behind these controversial history-writing endeavors, many of whom were initially rather reluctant to talk about their roles. Examining two state-sponsored history writing projects in Indonesia and the Philippines in the 1970s, Power and Knowledge in Southeast Asia: State and Scholars in Indonesia and the Philippines (Routledge, 2019) illuminates the contents and contexts of the two projects and, more importantly, provides a nuanced characterization of the relationship between embodiments of power (state, dictators, government officials) and knowledge (intellectuals, historians, history). Known respectively as Sejarah Nasional Indonesia (SNI) and the Tadhana Project, these projects were initiated by the Suharto and Marcos authoritarian regimes against the backdrop of rising and competing nationalisms, as well as the regimes' efforts at political consolidation. The dialectics between actors and the politico-academic contexts determine whether scholarship and politics would clash, mutually support, or co-exist parallel with one another. Rather than one side manipulating or co-opting the other, this study shows the mutual need or partnership between scholars and political actors in these projects. This book proposes the need to embrace rather than deny the entwined power/knowledge if the idea is for scholarship to realize its truly progressive visions. Analyzing the dynamics of state-scholars relations in the two countries, the book will be of interest to academics in the fields on Southeast Asian history and politics, nationalism, historiography, intellectual history and the sociology of knowledge. Rommel A. Curaming is Senior Assistant Professor at the Universiti Brunei Darussalam (UBD). His areas of research include comparative historiography, history and memory of violence, historical theory, and knowledge politics in Southeast Asia, mainly Indonesia and the Philippines.  Eighteen books have appeared to date in the Routledge Rethinking Southeast Asia series, which was launched in 2000. The series includes a number of ground-breaking monographs by scholars including Bob Hadiwinata, Jun Honna, Michael Connors, David Streckfuss and Jess Melvin.  Duncan McCargo is an eclectic, internationalist political scientist and literature buff: his day job is directing the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Learn more here, here, here, and here. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Aro Velmet's Pasteur's Empire: Bacteriology in France, Its Colonies, and the World (Oxford UP, 2020) is a complex history of the Pasteur Institutes, a network of scientific laboratories established in France and throughout the French empire, beginning in the last decade of the nineteenth century. The book examines the crucial roles Pastorians and Pasteurization played in the imperial project in and between different locations, particularly in Southeast Asia and Africa. Participating in the "civilizing mission," helping to establish and maintain industrial monopolies, and the control of colonial bodies through public health regulation and disease management, the institutes had a tremendous political impact.   Attentive to the experiences and perspectives of the Vietnamese and African peoples in the sites the book focuses on, Pasteur's Empire examines a range of scientific responses and measures, from the study and containment of infectious and epidemic disease to the microbiological aspects of industry. The book's chapters move from "Indochina" to North and West Africa, tracing the way that Pastorians and Pasteurization worked with(in) and sometimes pushed against colonial structures and assumptions. French modernity and the "civilizing mission" had profound and practical biological dimensions. A history that pursues ideas about modernity and the meanings of scientific and other forms of mobility, Pasteur's Empire moves from the local to the global while bringing together science, medicine, and politics. Enjoy the episode! Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (panchasi@sfu.ca). Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In Empires of Vice: The Rise of Opium Prohibition across Southeast Asia (Princeton University Press, 2020) Diana Kim situates the regulation of vice at the heart of colonial state building. Through a layered comparison of opium prohibition in Burma, Malaya and Vietnam she shows how petty bureaucrats told stories to one another about opium that incrementally transformed into official problems, which those same bureaucrats and their successors had to solve. Prohibition did not come through grand decisions and decisive moments in old European metropoles and new international organizations so much as it did via accumulated observations and interpretations by thousands of “bad ethnographers” in the British and French imperial civil services. Empires of Vice won the Giovanni Sartori Best Book Award, Qualitative Methods Section of the American Political Science Association, and got honourable mentions from the committees for the Charles Taylor Book Award, Interpretive Methodologies and Methods section of APSA, and the Allan Sharlin Memorial Award, Social Science History Association. This is the fifth episode of New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science to featuring an exemplary monograph in interpretive political or social science. The others are Natasha Behl on Gendered Citizenship, Lisa Wedeen on Authoritarian Apprehensions, James Scott on Against the Grain, and Sarah Wiebe on Everyday Exposure. To download or stream episodes in the series, please subscribe to our host channel: New Books in Political Science. Nick Cheesman is an associate professor in the Department of Political and Social Change, Australian National University. He is a committee member of the Interpretive Methodologies and Methods group and co-convenes the Interpretation, Method, Critique network. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

One of the first members of Albert Samaha’s family introduced in his memoir Concepcion: An Immigrant Family’s Fortunes (Riverhead Books, 2021) is his uncle Spanky: a baggage handler in San Francisco’s airport. Spanky emigrated to the United States from his home country, the Philippines, where he lived a very different life as a rockstar: one of the founding members of VST & Co., one of the country’s most famous bands. That’s merely one of the family members Albert Samaha profiles in Concepcion which traces the lives of generations of Filipinos, and Filipino-Americans, trying to find a better life for themselves and navigating the ups-and-downs of American society and politics. Albert Samaha is an investigative journalist and inequality editor at BuzzFeed News whose work has appeared in The New York Times, the Village Voice, San Francisco Weekly, and the Riverfront Times, among other outlets. A Whiting Foundation Creative Nonfiction Grant recipient, he is also the author of Never Ran, Never Will: Boyhood and Football in a Changing American Inner City (PublicAffairs: 2018), which was a finalist for the 2019 PEN/ESPN Literary Sports Writing Award and winner of the New York Society Library’s 2019 Hornblower Award. We’re also joined by Helen Li. Helen is a freelance journalist originally based in Asia, and has since relocated to the United States. She joined us previously for our interview with Amish Mulmi on All Roads Lead North. The three of us talk about immigration, U.S.-Filipino relations, class and how that all relates to the immigrant experience: both in general, and regarding the many members of Albert’s family. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Concepcion. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Today, oral histories of everyday Singaporeans are more widely circulated in the nation’s mediascape than ever before. At first glance, storytelling in Singapore appears to have lost its monolithic quality, becoming diffuse and diversified. But as Dr Cheng Nien Yuan argues, Singapore has become a Storytelling State, marketing bite-sized pieces of consumable lives as authentic windows to the private self. The result is the use of personal stories within the neoliberal public sphere, mirroring a growing global phenomenon. To tell this story, Dr Natali Pearson is joined by Dr Cheng Nien Yuan to discuss her award-winning research that charts Singapore’s development into a storytelling state over the last decade. About Cheng Nien Yuan: Cheng Nien Yuan is an Honorary Associate at the University of Sydney’s School of Literature, Art and Media, as well as the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre. Her research centres around the politics and poetics of storytelling in Singapore. She obtained her PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies in 2020 at Sydney University. Her thesis titled ‘The Storytelling State: Performing Life Histories in Singapore’ was awarded the 2020 John Legge Best Thesis in Asian Studies Prize by the Asian Studies Association of Australia. She has published in the journals Studies in Theatre and Performance (2021), Performance Paradigm (2018), and the Oral History Review (2017). She is also a dramaturg and performance-maker. Cheng is currently based in the Intercultural Theatre Institute in Singapore, where she researches their pedagogy and practice. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Raj Balkaran has a candid conversation with seasoned scholar Dr. Vasudha Narayanan about her academic journey, the current state of Hindu Studies and her ground-breaking work on Hindu temples and traditions in Cambodia. Dr. Narayanan is Distinguished Professor, Department of Religion, at the University of Florida, Director for the Centre for the Study of Hinduism and former President of the American Academy of Religion. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Instruments of Empire: Filipino Musicians, Black Soldiers, and Military Band Music during US Colonization of the Philippines published in 2021 by the University Press of Mississippi by Mary Talusan focuses on the Philippine Constabulary band, a military band organized in 1902 that served the colonial government in the Philippines until World War II. Founded and led for most of its history by Walter Loving, a Black soldier in the American military, the band visited the United States four times between 1904 and 1939 and it is these visits that Talusan examines in Instruments of Empire. Listening with what Talusan calls the imperial ear, American commentators understood the group’s command of the standard band repertory of the period not as a result of the Filipino musician’s training and skill, but as evidence of their so-called natural musical ability which had been tamed by the allegedly civilizing influence of American colonial rule. Tracing the band’s reception over time, Talusan analyzes the cultural, political, and social causes and byproducts of American imperial ambitions. Kristen M. Turner is a lecturer in the music and honors departments at North Carolina State University. Her research centers on race and class in American popular entertainment at the turn of the twentieth century. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Why was there a large flow of overseas remittances into Vietnam after 1975, and how were they channelled? Why was there so little public discussion of the financial role played by the Vietnamese diaspora? What was the Vietnamese state’s attitude towards these remittances, and how much did they help transform the Vietnamese economy? In this podcast, Linh Phương Lê talks to Hoàng Minh Vũ, a diplomatic historian of twentieth-century Vietnam and the Asia-Pacific, about the significance of remittances from the Vietnamese overseas community in reducing hyperinflation and stabilising the national economy during after the Đổi Mới period. This episode of the Nordic Asia Podcast offers a snapshot of Vietnam’s recent economic history that has far-reaching implications. Hoàng Minh Vũ completed his PhD on the Third Indochina War at Cornell in 2020. He is currently a faculty member in history at Fulbright University in Vietnam – see here for his profile and recent publications: https://fulbright.edu.vn/our-team/vu-minh-hoang/ Linh Phương Lê is a PhD student at the Institute for Media Studies, KU Leuven University, Belgium. Her work explores the media representation of Vietnamese female migrants to China and Taiwan. A 2020 NIAS SUPRA Fellow, Linh works on media systems, journalism practices and gender (in)equality in the media in Vietnam. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, Asianettverket at the University of Oslo, and the Stockholm Centre for Global Asia at Stockholm University. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

December 2021 marks the 80th anniversary of Pearl Harbor and the American entry into the Second World War. In fact, this interview was recorded on December 12th: the 80th anniversary of Japanese troops landing on the Philippine island of Luzon. That invasion marked the four-year war over the Philippines: the surrender of American forces on May 8th, 1942; the invasion of Leyte by MacArthur on October 20th, 1944; and the surrender of Japan on August 15th, 1945. But what happens in between these major dates? How did Filipinos live their lives under the occupation—and how did some choose to fight back? What did resistance, whether carried out by Americans who stayed behind, or Filipinos seizing their country’s future for themselves, look like? War and Resistance in the Philippines, 1942–1944 (Naval Institute Press: 2021) by James Kelly Morningstar is one of the first attempts to repair our understanding of the war in the Philippines, showing how American, Filipino and Japanese actions influenced each other. James Kelly Morningstar is a retired U.S. Army armor officer and decorated combat veteran with degrees from West Point and Kansas State University, a master's degree from Georgetown University, and a PhD from the University of Maryland. He currently teaches military history at Georgetown. He is also the author of Patton’s Way: A Radical Theory of War (Naval Institute Press: 2017). Today, we talk about the Philippines: the Japanese invasion and occupation, the nature of resistance, and American grand strategy. We’ll also discuss what makes the resistance movement important to our understanding of today’s geopolitics. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of War and Resistance in the Philippines: 1942-1944. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

The United States is the world's largest donor of foreign aid, and in this profound analysis, Salvador Santino F. Regilme Jr. demonstrates the links between human rights protections and the provision of US strategic aid in recipient countries. In Aid Imperium: United States Foreign Policy and Human Rights in Post-Cold War Southeast Asia (University of Michigan Press, 2021), Professor Regilme puts forward a "theory of interest convergence" which draws out the way that shared strategic interests between donor and recipient countries have the power to strengthen the legitimacy of domestic recipient governments, but not necessarily in ways that protect physical integrity rights of citizens. Presenting two case studies from The Phillipines and Thailand during the post-cold-war period and also during the global war on terror periods, the book provides a richly researched, intricate understanding of the way that authoritarian governments have continued to benefit from the provision of US aid, while not necessarily improving their human rights records. Salvador Santino F. Regilme Jr. is a Tenured University Lecturer of International Relations at Leiden University, The Netherlands. Find him on twitter @santinoregilme, check out his latest book @AidImperium Jane Richards is a doctoral student at the University of Hong Kong. You can find her on twitter where she follows all things related to human rights and Hong Kong politics @JaneRichardsHK Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In April 2021, three months into Myanmar’s most recent and increasingly more violent coup d’état, local residents managed to obstruct the junta by refusing to cooperate with military appointed officials. The junta had attempted to replace all local level administrators with those loyal to the military. But in one town in Shan State, the junta-appointed administrators were socially ostracized by the community to the point of resigning. With no one daring to take their place, every ward administrator position in town went unfilled. Across the country, Myanmar residents supported each other, and striking civil servants, by setting up donations of basic foodstuffs such as rice, oil, and onions. In this episode, Dr Natali Pearson is joined by Dr Jayde Lin Roberts to discuss how these locally initiated direct actions are part and parcel of the ordinary practices of everyday life in Myanmar. In providing a space for informal, intimate, and relational economies, nalehmu not only fosters community-building, says Dr Roberts, but it also has the power to disrupt conventional power structures. About Jayde Roberts: Dr Jayde Lin Roberts is a senior lecturer in the School of Built Environment at UNSW Sydney and an interdisciplinary scholar of Urban Studies and Southeast Asian Studies. Her research on Myanmar focuses on urban informality, heritage-making, and the influence of transnational networks. Her monograph, Mapping Chinese Rangoon: Place and Nation among the Sino-Burmese was published by the University of Washington Press in 2016. She was a Fulbright US Scholar in Yangon, Myanmar between 2016-2018. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Investigating the communicative practices of indigenous Santali speakers in eastern India, this book examines the overlooked role of script in regional movements for autonomy to provide one of the first comprehensive theoretical and ethnographical accounts of 'graphic politics'. Based on extensive fieldwork in the villages of southwestern West Bengal, Nishaant Choksi explores the deployment of Santali scripts, including a newly created script called Ol Chiki, in Bengali-dominated local markets, the education system and in the circulation of print media. He shows how manipulating the linguistic landscape and challenging the idea of a vernacular enables Santali speakers to delineate their own political domains and scale their language on local, regional and national levels. In doing so, they contest Bengali-speaking upper castes' hegemony over public spaces and institutions, as well as the administrative demarcations of the contemporary Indian nation-state. Combining semiotic theory with ethnographically grounded investigation, Graphic Politics in Eastern India: Script and the Quest for Autonomy (Bloomsbury, 2021) offers a new framework for understanding writing and literacy practices among ethnic minorities and points to future directions for interdisciplinary research on indigenous autonomy in South Asia. Amir Lehman is an MA student in linguistics at UCL. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

COP26 was billed as the make or break event in the fight against climate change. In conversation with Quynh Le Vo, Sharon Seah, coordinator of the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute’s Climate Change in Southeast Asia Programme, discusses Southeast Asian countries’ key priorities going into the conference and the commitments they made in Glasgow, including climate finance, exit from coal and ending deforestation. She also reveals some insights from the annual Southeast Asia Climate Survey reports, such as perceptions in the region of the US as a climate leader and the (dis)connects between climate action and COVID-19 responses. Sharon Seah is Senior Fellow and Coordinator at the ASEAN Studies Centre and the Climate Change in Southeast Asia Programme at the ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute. She co-edited 50 Years of ASEAN and Singapore (World Scientific: 2017) and Building a New Legal Order for the Oceans (NUS Press: 2019). Prior to academia, Ms Seah worked at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Singapore and the National Environment Agency for fifteen years. She may be reached at climatechange@iseas.edu.sg. Quynh Le Vo is a master's student in environmental change and global sustainability at the University of Helsinki. Previously, she has worked at the LSE Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre and at the Permanent Mission of Finland to the UN. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, Asianettverket at the University of Oslo, and the Stockholm Centre for Global Asia at Stockholm University. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Several months ago, Saskia Wieringa joined her co-authors Jess Melvin and Annie Pohlman on the show to talk about their edited volume The International People's Tribunal for 1965 and the Indonesian Genocide.   This time, Wieringa is on the show to talk about another co-edited volume.  Propaganda and the Genocide in Indonesia (Routledge, 2018) is a kind of companion volume to the first study. Wieringa and Katjusungkana focus here on the way in which propaganda set the stage for, encouraged participation in and offered explanations for the genocide. This campaign portrayed communists as enemies of the Indonesian nation. But more than that, the propaganda leveraged already existing political and gender stereotypes, presenting communists as atheists, hypersexualized and amoral. This propaganda was and remains widely accepted in Indonesia, enabling mass violence in the 1960s and political persecution in the decades since. But the book expands at time from its core focus on propaganda, shedding new light on the events of 30 September and, in particular, on the impacts of the violence on contemporary Indonesian society. Scholars and casual readers will find much of interest in the book. Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In this interview, I speak with Till F. Paasche and James D. Sidaway about their new book, Transecting Securityscapes: Dispatches from Cambodia, Iraq, and Mozambique (University of Georgia Press, 2021). In addition to the book's methodological and theoretical contributions, we also discussed the extensive field research and important personal experiences informing this project. This is an innovative book on the everyday life of security, told via an examination of three sites: Cambodia, the Kurdistan region of Iraq, and Mozambique. The authors' study of how security is enacted differently in these three sites, taking account of the rich layers of context and culture, enables comparative reflections on diversity and commonality in "securityscapes." The book puts into practice a diverse and contextual approach to security that contrasts with the aerial, big-picture view taken by many geopolitics scholars. In applying this grounded approach, Paasche and Sidaway develop a method of urban and territorial transects, combined with other methods and modes of encounter. The book draws on a broad range of traditions, but it speaks mostly to political geography, urban studies, and international relations research on geopolitics, stressing the need for ethnographic, embodied, affective, and place-based approaches to conflict. The result is a sustained theoretical critique of abstract research on geopolitical conflict and security-mainstream as well as academic-that pretends to be able to know and analyze conflict "from above." Please note: the second half of this podcast includes discussion of combat, death and loss. Till F. Paasche is Associate Professor of political geography at Soran University. James D. Sidaway is Professor of political geography at the National University of Singapore. Catriona Gold is a PhD candidate in Geography at University College London, researching security, subjectivity and mobility in the 20-21st century United States. Her current work concerns the US Passport Office; she has previously published on US Africa Command and the 2013-16 Ebola epidemic. She can be reached by email or on Twitter. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

When people think of the “Vietnam War” they usually think of the hugely devastating and divisive conflict between North Vietnam and a United States-backed South Vietnam that finally ended in 1975. We know much less about the earlier conflict, often referred to as the “First Indochina War”, from 1946 to 1954, which ended almost a century of French colonial rule and brought about the division of the country into North and South Vietnam. In his new book, The First Vietnam War: Sovereignty and the Fracture of the South, 1945-1956 (Cambridge UP, 2021), Shawn McHale examines this earlier conflict, focussing on the complex and diverse society of south Vietnam. The book begins with a provocative question: why did the communist-led resistance against French colonial rule in Vietnam fail in the south? This is an exhaustively researched book which does a lot to change our understanding of how south Vietnam became independent, and helps explain what came after the end of the “first Vietnam War”. Patrick Jory teaches Southeast Asian History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. He can be reached at: p.jory@uq.edu.au. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Southeast Asia is the most tectonically and geologically active region on Earth. These processes have enriched the mountains and basins with world-famous mineral and energy resources, fresh water, and highly productive soils. However, the same geological processes are responsible for incredible destruction – from the 1991 Mount Pinatubo volcanic eruption in the Philippines to the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. These natural hazards, coupled with the effects of human-induced climate change, are driving significant change. To talk us through these changes, Dr Sabin Zahirovic joins Dr Natali Pearson on SSEAC Stories, exposing how climate change is amplifying existing vulnerabilities in Southeast Asia. He explains how understanding past and current geological process can help us reduce risks from natural hazards like earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis, but also address the huge challenges faced by growing populations and increased vulnerabilities resulting from climate change. About Sabin Zahirovic: Dr Sabin Zahirovic is a Robinson Fellow in the School of Geosciences at the University of Sydney. Sabin's research focuses on global plate tectonics and mantle evolution, and particularly for the Tethyan and Asian regions. He completed his PhD titled “Post-Pangea global plate kinematics and geodynamic implications for Southeast Asia” at the University of Sydney in 2015. From 2015 to 2020, he led the Papua New Guinea research stream of the ARC ITRH Basin GENESIS Hub at the University of Sydney. He now leads the Tectonics and Geodynamics stream of a collaborative industry project with BHP. In 2020, Sabin was awarded an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) to explore the rise and demise of massive reefs and carbonate platforms on Australian continental margins. Sabin is a past recipient of the GSA Voisey Medal, the Deep Carbon Observatory Emerging Leader Award, and the AIPS NSW Tall Poppy award. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

What does a cup of coffee tell us about Thailand’s intricate power relations? Where does the country’s monarchy come into this? And why does it matter? Prominent political scientist and NIAS director Duncan McCargo joins Petra Desatova to revisit his famous ‘network monarchy’ concept and explain why Thailand should not be seen as a ‘Deep State.’ Duncan McCargo is a Professor of Political Science and Director of the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Duncan is well-known for publishing a dozen books and over 100 articles and chapters on Asian politics. His latest books are Fighting for Virtue: Justice and Politics in Thailand (Cornell 2019) and (with Anyarat Chattharakul) Future Forward: The Rise and Fall of a Thai Political Party (NIAS Press, 2020). His 2005 Pacific Review article on Thailand’s ‘network monarchy,’ which is the subject of this episode alongside his 2021 Pacific Affairs article that revisits this concept, has been extremely influential. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, Asianettverket at the University of Oslo, and the Stockholm Centre for Global Asia at Stockholm University. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

“The Europeans raise all the cattle, but the Chinese get all the milk.” This joke, told in colonial Singapore, was indicative of the importance of the Chinese diaspora throughout Southeast Asia. Chinese migrants were miners, laborers, merchants and traders: the foundation of many colonial cities throughout Asia--while also making sure that their own communities back home benefited. Distant Shores: Colonial Encounters on China's Maritime Frontier (Princeton University Press: 2021), written by Professor Melissa Macauley, looks at one particular community within the Chinese diaspora: the Chaozhou people--also known as the “Chiu Chow” people--hailing from the Shantou--also known as Swatou--area in Eastern Guangdong Province. The Chouzhouese traveled far and wide, engaging in trade, commerce and business--a history that survives to this day, with many Southern Chinese and Southeast Asian business tycoons having ties to this migrant community. Professor Melissa Macauley is a Professor at Northwestern University, where she specializes in late imperial and modern Chinese history from 1500 to 1958. Her research focuses on such topics as the interrelated history of southeastern China and Southeast Asia; colonialism and imperialism in East and Southeast Asia; and legal culture in Chinese social history. Her first book, Social Power and Legal Culture: Litigation Masters in Late Imperial China (Stanford University Press: 1998) We’re joined in this interview by fellow NBN host Sarah Bramao-Ramos. Sarah is a PHD candidate at Harvard University that studies Qing China. Today, the three of us talk about the Chouzhouese people, and how their trading efforts throughout the region challenges the way we think about “empire” and “colonialism”. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Distant Shores. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Why do so many Cambodian small landholders live in fear? How did the issuance of official land titles contribute to growing indebtedness in rural areas? Why did the government send thousands of university students to the countryside to help with the land titling process? And why did international donors eventually become so disllusioned? In this podcast, Alice Beban, senior lecturer in development sociology at Massey University, discusses her new book Unwritten Rule: State Building Through Land Reform in Cambodia (Cornell 2021) with Duncan McCargo, Director of the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Unwritten Rule draws on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork to paint a disturbing picture of how an ambitious land reform project, generously funded by leading donors, largely failed to deliver the benefits it promised. In 2012, Cambodia—an epicenter of violent land grabbing—announced a bold new initiative to develop land redistribution efforts inside agribusiness concessions. Alice Beban's Unwritten Rule focuses on this land reform to understand the larger nature of democracy in Cambodia. Beban contends that the national land-titling program, the so-called leopard skin land reform, was first and foremost a political campaign orchestrated by the world's longest-serving prime minister, Hun Sen. The reform aimed to secure the loyalty of rural voters, produce "modern" farmers, and wrest control over land distribution from local officials. Through ambiguous legal directives and unwritten rules guiding the allocation of land, the government fostered uncertainty and fear within local communities. Unwritten Rule gives pause both to celebratory claims that land reform will enable land tenure security, and to critical claims that land reform will enmesh rural people more tightly in state bureaucracies and create a fiscally legible landscape. Instead, Beban argues that the extension of formal property rights strengthened the very patronage-based politics that Western development agencies hope to subvert. If you liked this podcast, you may also enjoy two other podcasts, hosted by Duncan McCargo on related topics, here and here.  Duncan McCargo is an eclectic, internationalist political scientist and literature buff: his day job is directing the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Learn more here, here, here, and here. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

On 16 August 2021, Muhyiddin Yaseen resigned as Prime Minister of Malaysia, with Ismail Sabri Yaakub sworn in as the new Prime Minister a week later, making him Malaysia’s third Prime Minister in two years. This marked the return to power of UMNO, or the United Malays National Organisation, and the graft-tainted coalition that had been ousted from power in 2018. Meanwhile, another former Prime Minister, Najib Razak, is eyeing a return to Parliament, notwithstanding a conviction and 12-year prison sentence for abuse of power and ongoing trials for corruption. His wife Rosmah Mansur is also now facing three corruption charges. Associate Professor Salim Farrar joins Dr Natali Pearson on SSEAC Stories to talk about corruption and the politics of public prosecution in Malaysia, surveying the landscape of law and justice in Malaysia now and beyond, through a re-evaluation of Vision 2020. About Salim Farrar: Salim Farrar is Director of Islamic Law, an Associate Director of the Centre for Asian and Pacific Law at the University of Sydney and an Associate Professor in the Sydney Law School. He researches in Comparative and Islamic Laws, with focuses on law and development in predominantly Muslim states, the legal accommodation of Muslim minorities and the Malaysian legal system (especially in criminal justice). His most recent published research explores law and justice in Malaysia post the 2018 GE14. He is the joint editor (with Paul Subramaniam) of ‘Law and Justice in Malaysia: 2020 and Beyond’ (2021, Thomson Reuters), editor of ‘Law and Development in the Islamic World’ Law and Development Review (Special Edition), Vol 13 (2) (2020) and joint author (with Ghena Krayem) of ‘Accommodating Muslims under Common Law’ (2017, 2018, Routledge). For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In his new book In Search of New Social Democracy: Insights from the South - Implications for the North (Zed-Bloomsbury), Olle Törnquist has returned to findings from fifty years of research on democracy and social rights movements in especially Indonesia, India and the Philippines, to address the major puzzle of our time: why the vision about development based on social justice by democratic means has lost ground, and if there are openings. In this episode of the Nordic Asia Podcast Kenneth Bo Nielsen is joined by Olle Törnquist to discuss the main results and arguments in what he calls his endbook. Olle Törnquist is a Swedish global historian and Professor Emeritus of Politics and Development at the University of Oslo, Norway. He has written widely on radical politics, development and democratisation. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, Asianettverket at the University of Oslo, and the Stockholm Centre for Global Asia at Stockholm University. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Don F. Selby’s Human Rights in Thailand (U Pennsylvania Press, 2018) is a rich anthropological study of the emergence of human rights in Thailand at a national scale following the adoption of the 1997 “People’s Constitution” and establishment of the Human Rights Commission of Thailand. The book argues that what gave emergent human rights in Thailand their shape, force, and trajectories are the ways that advocates engaged, contested, or reworked debates around Buddhism in its relationship to rule and social structure; political struggle in relation to a narrative of Thai democracy that disavowed egalitarian movements; and traditional standards of social stratification and face-saving practices. In this way, human rights ideals in Thailand emerge less from global-local translation and more as a matter of negotiation within everyday forms of sociality, morality, and politics. Nicholas Bequelin is a human rights professional with a PhD in history and a scholarly bend. He has worked about 20 years for Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, most recently as Regional director for Asia. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Who are the Wa of Myanmar and how, in three decades, have they built a force that is now the largest non-state military actor in Asia-Pacific? How does China’s economic, political, and military support for the Wa factor into the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative? What role might the Wa play in the unfolding political crisis in the wake of the February 1, 2021 coup in Myanmar, and Covid-19 pandemic? In this episode, Bertil Lintner discusses these topics and more, related to his recent book The Wa of Myanmar and China’s Quest For Global Dominance from NIAS Press (2021). Bertil is Swedish journalist who has lived permanently in Thailand since 1979. He is a full-time correspondent for Asia Pacific Media Services and writes regularly for Asia Times, The Irrawaddy and other publications. He has written 20 books on Asian politics and history. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, Asianettverket at the University of Oslo, and the Stockholm Centre for Global Asia at Stockholm University. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In Affect, Narratives and Politics of Southeast Asian Migration (Routledge, 2021), Carlos M. Piocos explores the politics of gendered labor migration in Southeast Asia through the stories and perspectives of Indonesian and Filipina women presented in films, fiction, and performance to show how the emotionality of these texts contribute to the emergence and vitality of women's social movements in Southeast Asia. By placing literary and filmic narratives of Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers in Hong Kong and Singapore within existing conversations concerning migration policies, he offers an innovative approach towards examining contemporary issues of Asian migration. Furthermore, through rich ethnographic accounts, the book unpacks themes of belonging and displacement, shame and desire, victimhood and resistance, sacrifice, and grief to show that the stories of Filipina and Indonesian migrant women don't just depict their everyday lives and practices but also reveal how they mediate and make sense of the fraught politics of gendered labor diaspora and globalization. Contributing to the "affective turn" of feminist and transnational scholarship, the book draws insight from the importance and centrality of affect, emotions, and feelings in shaping discourses on women's subjectivity, labor, and mobility. In addition, the book demonstrates the issues of vulnerability and agency inherent in debates on social exclusion, human rights, development, and nation-building in Southeast Asia. Offering an innovative and multidisciplinary approach to analyses of Asian migration, this book will be of interest to academics in the fields of Asian Studies, literary and cultural studies, film studies, gender and women's studies, and migration studies. Carlos M. Piocos III is a professor in the Literature Department at De La Salle University. He has published widely on gender and transnationalism in international peer-reviewed journals and his monograph, Narratives, Affect and Politics of Southeast Asian Migration, was published in 2021. Clara Iwasaki is an assistant professor in the East Asian Studies department at the University of Alberta. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Youth Culture and Identity in Northern Thailand (Routledge, 2020) examines how young people in urban Chiang Mai construct an identity at the intersection of global capitalism, state ideologies, and local culture. Drawing on over 15 years of ethnographic research, the book explores the impact of rapid urbanisation and modernisation on contemporary Thai youth, focusing on conspicuous youth subcultures, drug use (especially methamphetamine use), and violent youth gangs. Anjalee Cohen shows how young Thai people construct a specific youth identity through consumerism and symbolic boundaries – in particular through enduring rural/urban distinctions. The suggestion is that the formation of subcultures and “deviant” youth practices, such as drug use and violence, are not necessarily forms of resistance against the dominant culture, nor a pathological response to dramatic social change, as typically understood in academic and public discourse. Rather, Cohen argues that such practices are attempts to “fit in and stick out” in an anonymous urban environment. Like this interview? If so you might also be interested in: Tanya Jakimow, Susceptibility in Development: Micropolitics of Local Development in India and Indonesia Nicole Curato, Democracy in a Time of Misery: From Spectacular Tragedies to Deliberative Action Edward Aspinall and Ward Berenschot, Democracy for Sale: Elections, Clientelism, and the State in Indonesia  Professor Michele Ford is the Director of the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, a university-wide multidisciplinary center at the University of Sydney, Australia. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

How is childhood experienced in the slums of Bangkok and how does it relate to socio-political processes in Thailand? What role do mothers play in the leadership of the slums? And how can we understand recent mass protests in Thailand through the lens of children’s activism? Giuseppe Bolotta gives insights into his recently published book Belittled Citizens: The Cultural Politics of Childhood on Bangkok’s Margins (NIAS Press, 2021). This study explores the daily lives, constraints and social worlds of children born in the slums of Bangkok. It examines how slum children define themselves – and are defined by others – in relation to a range of governing technologies, state and non-state actors, and broad cultural politics. To learn more about the book, visit the NIAS Press website. Giuseppe Bolotta is Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian and North African Studies at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and Research Associate at the National University of Singapore’s Asia Research Institute. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, Asianettverket at the University of Oslo, and the Stockholm Centre for Global Asia at Stockholm University. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Cambodia’s Tonle Sap is the largest inland lake in Southeast Asia. Each year, during the monsoon, this freshwater lake experiences an incredible hydrological phenomenon, in which it is inundated with swelling waters from the Mekong River, causing it to rise by up to tenfold in some places, before returning to its pre-monsoon level as the dry season returns. But Tonle Sap is facing a triple environmental threat: climate change, the damming of the Mekong River, and over-fishing, with devastating impact not only on the wildlife, but also on local floating village communities. To share more, Dr Josephine Gillespie joins Dr Natali Pearson on SSEAC Stories and invites us to rethink global environmental protection regimes in Southeast Asia. Taking Cambodia’s Tonle Sap Lake as a case-study, she argues that in order to maintain the ecological, cultural, and economic integrity of the most important river and delta system in the world, environmental management projects and policies must take into account people-place dynamics and local livelihoods. About Josephine Gillespie: Dr Josephine Gillespie is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Geosciences, Faculty of Science at the University of Sydney. She researches environmental regulation and people-place dynamics across the region, with a particular focus on Cambodia. Jo’s research projects have focused on protected areas, especially the management of world heritage places and wetlands. She is the author of Protected Areas: A Legal Geography Approach (2020) and a co-editor of Legal Geography: Perspectives and Methods (2020). Jo has published widely about environmental management in the Asia-Pacific. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

The massacre of student protestors at Thammasat University on 6 October 1976 is one of the most infamous incidents in modern Thai political history. It is also among the most problematic for historians, who have struggled with the silences and ambiguities enveloping events of that day, not to mention survivors and families of the victims, who have had to carry on with their lives or grieve for lost loved ones without acknowledgement of what happened back then, let alone why it happened. Now a remarkable new book, by one who has thought and felt about October 6 as both an historian and a survivor, comes to terms with the massacre and with the “unforgetting” that followed it. The book is Moments of Silence: The Unforgetting of the October 6, 1976 Massacre in Bangkok (University of Hawai’i Press, 2020). Its author, Thongchai Winichakul, joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies for a very special episode on the power of neither remembering nor forgetting. Thai-language readers can visit the Documentation of October 6 website to browse the online archive on the massacre mentioned in the interview. Like this interview? If so you might also be interested in: Duncan McCargo, Fighting for Virtue: Justice and Politics in Thailand Tyrell Haberkorn, In Plain Sight: Impunity and Human Rights in Thailand Nick Cheesman is a Fellow in the Department of Political & Social Change, Australian National University. He hosts the New Books in Interpretive Political & Social Science series and is an occasional contributor to the New Books in Southeast Asian Studies channel and on the New Books Network. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In this episode I chatted with Leslie Barnes and Joseph Mai, two scholars of film, about their new anthology The Cinema of Rithy Panh: Everything Has a Soul out with Rutgers University Press, 2021. As a child Rithy Panh survived the Khmer Rouge regime yet lost his immediate family during those awful years. He was fortunate enough to emigrate to France where he studied film and became a prolific director. Rithy Panh is now the most important film maker in Cambodia and in the Khmer diaspora. Committed to mentoring a new generation of Cambodian storytellers, he helped found the Bophana Audiovisual Resource Center which trains young Khmer film makers. The essays in The Cinema of Rithy Panh: Everything Has a Soul cover his diverse offerings but focus on the memory of the disaster of the Khmer Rouge years, as well as the 1976-1975 civil war and the Vietnamese occupation of the 1980s. Rithy Panh also engages the history of French colonialism and the explores social difficulties of workers caught in neo-liberal development projects. Leslie Barnes is a Senior Lecturer in French Studies in the School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics at Australian National University. Dr. Barnes has written Vietnam and the Colonial Condition of French Literature (University of Nebraska Press, 2014). Joseph Mai is an Associate Professor of French at Clemson University. Dr. Mai has published Robert Gay dig e on Guédiguian (Manchester University Press, 2017) and Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (University of Illinois Press, 2010). Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Why do Southeast Asia specialists get tired of explaining that the politics of the region cannot be reduced to a zero-sum game of Chinese-US great power rivalries? How do relatively small Southeast Asian states negotiate their relations with these major powers in an increasingly antagonistic environment? And why has the idea of the Indo-Pacific become so popular in recent years, and where does that leave the region most of us still call ‘Asia’? Prominent Singaporean political scientist Joseph Liow Chin Yong discusses these and other questions in conversation with NIAS Director Duncan McCargo. Joseph Liow Chin Yong, is the Tan Kah Kee Chair in Comparative and International Politics at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University, where he also serves as Dean of the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences. Joseph is well-known for his work on the politics and international relations of Southeast Asia. He is the author of several books, the most recent of which are Ambivalent Engagement: The United States and Regional Security in Southeast Asia after the Cold War (Brookings 2017) and Religion and Nationalism in Southeast Asia (Cambridge University Press 2016). The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, Asianettverket at the University of Oslo, and the Stockholm Centre for Global Asia at Stockholm University. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Why do Southeast Asia specialists get tired of explaining that the politics of the region cannot be reduced to a zero-sum game of Chinese-US great power rivalries? How do relatively small Southeast Asian states negotiate their relations with these major powers in an increasingly antagonistic environment? And why has the idea of the Indo-Pacific become so popular in recent years, and where does that leave the region most of us still call ‘Asia’? Prominent Singaporean political scientist Joseph Liow Chin Yong discusses these and other questions in conversation with NIAS Director Duncan McCargo. Joseph Liow Chin Yong, is the Tan Kah Kee Chair in Comparative and International Politics at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University, where he also serves as Dean of the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences. Joseph is well-known for his work on the politics and international relations of Southeast Asia. He is the author of several books, the most recent of which are Ambivalent Engagement: The United States and Regional Security in Southeast Asia after the Cold War (Brookings 2017) and Religion and Nationalism in Southeast Asia (Cambridge University Press 2016). The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, Asianettverket at the University of Oslo, and the Stockholm Centre for Global Asia at Stockholm University. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In September-October 2021, SSEAC Stories will be hosting a mini-series of podcasts exploring the role that research plays in understanding and advocating for human rights in Southeast Asia. For the final episode in the series, Dr Thushara Dibley is joined by Emeritus Professor Peter Windsor who brings to light how research improving animal health and production is intrinsically linked to human rights issues. Reflecting on his extensive field-based research on transboundary livestock disease in the Greater Mekong Region, he argues that through training on biosecurity practices, animal vaccination programs and nutritional interventions, rural households were able to prevent disease transmission and increase their livestock productivity, making farm production more sustainable. With higher income levels, local families’ livelihoods were improved. This enables better access to human rights, such as access to safe housing, access to healthcare, and access to knowledge and education, amongst others. About Peter Windsor: Peter Windsor is Professor Emeritus in the University of Sydney’s School of Veterinary Science since 2014. Peter worked extensively for NSW Agriculture in several roles including diagnostic pathology and livestock disease research and management. In 1998, he undertook a 19-month appointment to the Food Agriculture Organisation in Naga City, in the Bicol region of the Philippines, that eventually led to the successful eradication of Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD). Peter joined the University of Sydney in 2002, where he had a diverse range of teaching, research and administrative roles. His current research portfolio includes applied field-based projects on ruminant health and production problems in Southeast Asia that aim to assist FMD control. He continues his field studies on improving food security in developing countries and animal welfare in production systems, as well as reproductive, congenital, neurological and genetic disease research. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Mirjam Lücking's Indonesians and Their Arab World: Guided Mobility Among Labor Migrants and Mecca Pilgrims (Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2021) explores the ways contemporary Indonesians understand their relationship to the Arab world. Despite being home to the largest Muslim population in the world, Indonesia exists on the periphery of an Islamic world centered around the Arabian Peninsula. Mirjam Lücking approaches the problem of interpreting the current conservative turn in Indonesian Islam by considering the ways personal relationships, public discourse, and matters of religious self-understanding guide two groups of Indonesians who actually travel to the Arabian Peninsula--labor migrants and Mecca pilgrims--in becoming physically mobile and making their mobility meaningful. This concept, which Lücking calls guided mobility, reveals that changes in Indonesian Islamic traditions are grounded in domestic social constellations and calls claims of outward Arab influence in Indonesia into question. With three levels of comparison (urban and rural areas, Madura and Central Java, and migrants and pilgrims), this ethnographic case study foregrounds how different regional and socioeconomic contexts determine Indonesians' various engagements with the Arab world. Irene Promodh is a PhD student in socio-cultural anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and a Graduate Fellow at the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies in Michigan. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

How can we best understand ethnic armed organizations on the borderlands of Myanmar? Why did the Karen embrace the military-initiated peace process in 2012, shortly after the Kachin had rejected ceasefire proposals? How can ethnographic fieldwork inform studies of insurgent movements? And what does the February 2021 military coup mean for the future of ethnic conflicts in Myanmar In this wide-ranging conversation, David Brenner – a lecturer in global insecurities at the University of Sussex – discusses these questions with Duncan McCargo, director of the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies and professor of political science at the University of Copenhagen. He makes the case for an understanding of insurgent groups based on their specific internal political dynamics, which cannot be readily reduced to rational, economics-related incentives and obstacles. Rebel Politics: A Political Sociology of Armed Struggle in Myanmar's Borderlands (Cornell UP, 2019) analyzes the changing dynamics of the civil war in Myanmar, one of the most entrenched armed conflicts in the world. Since 2011, a national peace process has gone hand-in-hand with escalating ethnic conflict. The Karen National Union (KNU), previously known for its uncompromising stance against the central government of Myanmar, became a leader in the peace process after it signed a ceasefire in 2012. Meanwhile, the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO) returned to the trenches in 2011 after its own seventeen-year-long ceasefire broke down. To understand these puzzling changes, Brenner conducted ethnographic fieldwork among the KNU and KIO, analyzing the relations between rebel leaders, their rank-and-file, and local communities in the context of wider political and geopolitical transformations. Drawing on political sociology perspectives, Rebel Politics explains how revolutionary elites capture and lose legitimacy within their own movements and how these internal contestations drive the strategies of rebellion in unforeseen ways. Brenner presents a novel perspective that contributes to our understanding of contemporary politics in Southeast Asia, and to the study of conflict, peace and security, by highlighting the hidden social dynamics and everyday practices of political violence, ethnic conflict, rebel governance and borderland politics. Interested in this topic? You might also like these recent NBN podcasts: Karen Sanctuaries: Memory, Biodiversity and Political Sovereignty Ruth Streicher, "Uneasy Military Encounters: The Imperial Politics of Counterinsurgency in Southern Thailand" (Cornell UP, 2020) Duncan McCargo is an eclectic, internationalist political scientist and literature buff: his day job is directing the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Learn more here, here, here, and here. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Everyone looks to Singapore as a role model for what they want their country to be. Several countries from China to Rwanda hope to emulate its high administrative competence, standard of living, and “social harmony.” Post-Brexit Britain wants to copy the city-state’s assertive and independent position in the world economy and its aggressive support for international business. Housing policy advocates look to Singapore and its 90% home ownership rate. But these are all simplistic views of the city-state, that miss its history, its opportunities, and its challenges. Jeevan Vasagar’s Lion City: Singapore and the Invention of Modern Asia (Pegasus Books: 2022), delves into those more complicated details, giving a better portrayal of the city and the choices it’s made as it tries to navigate a more complicated global environment. In this interview, Jeevan and I talk about, well, Singapore: its history, its leadership, and its policies. We’ll talk about how its administration is trying to chart a future for the country—and whether that might be successful. Jeevan Vasagar is the Environment Editor for the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, and was formerly the Financial Times Correspondent for Singapore and Malaysia. He can be followed on Twitter at @jeevanvasagar. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Lion City. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Indonesia’s corruption eradication commission, known as the KPK has widely been considered one of the most powerful and successful anti-corruption agencies in the region, if not in the entire world. Yet over the past years, it has been systematically undermined from above. One of the most devastating developments was a revision of the law on the KPK. The law effectively stripped the KPK of autonomy in important investigative functions and in its human resources management. It culminated earlier this summer, when a number of key investigators were purged from the KPK. Kenneth Bo Nielsen (coordinator of the Norwegian Network for Asian Studies) is joined by Sofie Schütte - senior researcher at the U4 Anti-corruption Resource Centre at Christian Michelsen Institute in Norway, to discuss the turbulence and controversies surrounding the KPK, her experience with academic work on anti-corruption and the future of anti-corruption in Indonesia. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, Asianettverket at the University of Oslo, and the Stockholm Centre for Global Asia at Stockholm University. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In September-October 2021, SSEAC Stories will be hosting a mini-series of podcasts exploring the role that research plays in understanding and advocating for human rights in Southeast Asia. Maternal and child health is the cornerstone of a life lived healthily. Healthy women grow healthy children, who then go on to have healthy children themselves. In resource poor settings, healthy families can influence the wider community. In this episode, Dr Thushara Dibley is joined by Associate Professor Camille Raynes-Greenow to discuss how research focussed on interventions in the (mostly) perinatal period can improve outcomes for women and children. Focusing primarily on Myanmar, Associate Professor Raynes-Greenow highlights the universal appeal of research that aims to improve maternal and newborn health, but also reveals that it can encounter challenges in contexts of severe wealth inequalities and political censorship. About Camille Raynes-Greenow: Camille is a perinatal epidemiologist, at The Sydney School of Public Health, University of Sydney. Her research aims to reduce the burden of perinatal morbidity and mortality and improve the health of women and babies particularly of those most vulnerable. Camille was part of the research team that first identified the risk of maternal supine sleeping for stillbirth in Australia. The project funded through the CRE that Camille is working on, is aiming to improve health literacy around reducing stillbirth risk for women not born in Australia. Camille is also leading a large cluster randomised controlled trial in Bangladesh of an intervention to reduce household air pollution to assess the effect on pregnancy outcomes, particularly stillbirth and neonatal mortality. Camille is Director of the Masters of Global Health program, and co-leads the Global Health and Nutrition Research Collaboration in the Sydney School of Public Health at The University of Sydney. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

How important is Islam to Indonesia’s identity? How different is Salafism from a more mainstream Sunni Islam? Why is it popular with mostly young Indonesian Muslims? And what effect does it have on Indonesian identity and democracy? In this episode, Chris Chaplin joins Petra Desatova to discuss his new book Salafism and the State: Islamic Activism and National Identity in Contemporary Indonesia (NIAS Press 2021). Focusing on the nexus between religion, the nation, citizenship and political identity, the book is the first comprehensive ethnographic study of the Salafi Islamic movement in Indonesia. It explores the role of Islamic activism among Indonesian youth and how it has transformed the country’s religious and political discourse. To learn more about Chris’ upcoming book launch on 23 September 2021, visit the official event page. Chris Chaplin is an Assistant Professorial Research Fellow at the Religion and Global Society Research Unit at the London School of Economics and Political Science as well as a Visiting Fellow at the Department of Political and Social Change, Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, Australian National University. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, Asianettverket at the University of Oslo, and the Stockholm Centre for Global Asia at Stockholm University. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In September-October 2021, SSEAC Stories will be hosting a mini-series of podcasts exploring the role that research plays in understanding and advocating for human rights in Southeast Asia. In the second episode, Dr Thushara Dibley talks with Professor Nick Enfield about how the field of linguistics intersects with human rights. They discuss some of the impacts that major hydro-electric dam projects in Laos have had on local communities, not just in changing day-to-day life, but in decreasing interethnic interactions, thereby eroding multiculturalism and multilingualism. In disrupting local indigenous exchanges, Professor Enfield argues that large development projects risk impeding the transmission of significant cultural knowledge, including traditional knowledge of biodiversity and environmental sustainability. The study of languages thus becomes a tool for understanding a broader set of human rights, from cultural to environmental rights. About Nick Enfield: Nick Enfield is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sydney and director of the Sydney Social Sciences and Humanities Advanced Research Centre, and the Sydney Centre for Language Research. He is head of a Research Excellence Initiative on The Crisis of Post-Truth Discourse. His research on language, culture, cognition and social life is based on long term field work in mainland Southeast Asia, especially Laos. His recent books include The Languages of Mainland Southeast Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and Mainland Southeast Asian Languages: A Concise Typological Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2019). Nick has published widely in linguistics, anthropology, and cognitive science venues, and has written for The Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement, the Wall Street Journal, and Science. He is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, the Royal Society of New South Wales, and the Australian Academy of the Humanities. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Language Ungoverned: Indonesia's Chinese Print Entrepreneurs, 1911–1949 (Cornell UP, 2021) explores a fascinating archive of Sino-Malay texts – writings produced by the Chinese community in the Malay language – in Indonesia. It demonstrates the myriad ways in which the ethnic Chinese in Indonesia resorted to the press for their education, legal and medical advice, conflict resolution, and entertainment. Deftly depicting the linguistic choices made by these print entrepreneurs, Tom G. Hoogervorst paints a rich portrait of the social life of this community as well as the articulation of their aspirations, anxieties and concerns that were expressed in creative use of multiple languages. This vernacular press brought Chinese-inflected Malay to the fore as the language of popular culture and everyday life, subverting the official Malay of the Dutch authorities. Through his readings of Sino-Malay print culture published between the 1910s and 1940s, Hoogervorst highlights the inherent value of this vernacular Malay as a language of the people. In this episode, we discuss the joys of reading for its own sake, distinctions between vernacular and standardized Malay, migrant experiences in language use and the importance of asking good questions when tackling corpuses of texts in the digital humanities.  Tom G. Hoogervorst is a researcher at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV). He is a historical linguist whose interests center on the Indian Ocean World and the author of Southeast Asia in the Ancient Indian Ocean World. Faizah Zakaria is assistant professor of history at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. You can find her website at www.faizahzak.com or reach her on Twitter @laurelinarien. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

What is image-based abuse? Why has it been on the rise in Asia, especially amid the Covid-19 pandemic? What has been done to tackle the issue? Raquel Carvalho, Asia Correspondent for the South China Morning Post, shares the story of how a group of journalists across some Asian newsrooms collaborated in a months-long investigation and uncover the stories inside the online groups spreading stolen sexual images of women and children, how the victims are struggling to have such content removed from online platforms, and how sextortion syndicates in Asia and Africa are raking in millions from targets around the world. In a conversation with Joanne Kuai, a visiting PhD Candidate at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, the Portuguese journalist currently based in Hong Kong tells about why the cases of women threatened with the release of their intimate photos or videos have increased in recent years, how this type of abuse tears the victims’ lives apart, and how ill-equipped authorities are struggling to deal with the cases. Advocates and survivors say too little is being done to stop the abuse. While the cases proliferated in countries such as Singapore, Malaysia, and South Korea, some women – and a few men – have decided to take action. The SCMP’s series of stories on image-based abuse is supported by the Judith Neilson Institute’s Asian Stories project, in collaboration with The Korea Times, Indonesia’s Tempo magazine, the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, and Manila-based ABS-CBN. Most of Raquel Carvalho’s investigative and in-depth stories have been focused on human rights, cross-border security, illicit trade and corruption. She was previously the chief reporter at a Portuguese daily newspaper in Macau, where she moved to from Europe in 2008. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, Asianettverket at the University of Oslo, and the Stockholm Centre for Global Asia at Stockholm University. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

For the next four weeks, SSEAC Stories will be hosting a mini-series of podcasts exploring the role that research plays in understanding and advocating for human rights in Southeast Asia. To kick off the series, Dr Thushara Dibley is joined by Human Rights Watch Australia Director Elaine Pearson to discuss the interactions and tensions between academic research and investigation of human rights abuses conducted by human rights advocacy groups such as Human Rights Watch. Elaine Pearson gives an insight into some of the work conducted by Human Rights Watch across the region, highlighting the core role of research not just in understanding the problem, but in informing their advocacy approach to maximise impact. Together they reflect upon the different goals, methodological approaches, and challenges encountered by researchers, and delve into the ways that advocacy groups can break silos between academic research and real-world problems to progress human rights. About Elaine Pearson: Elaine Pearson is the Australia Director at Human Rights Watch, based in Sydney. She established Human Rights Watch’s Australia office in 2013 and works to influence Australian foreign and domestic policies in order to give them a human rights dimension. Pearson writes frequently for a range of publications and her articles have appeared in the Guardian, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Australian, Foreign Policy and the Washington Post. From 2007 to 2012 she was the Deputy Director of Human Rights Watch's Asia Division based in New York. She has conducted numerous human rights investigations in Australia and around the world. Prior to joining Human Rights Watch, Pearson worked for the United Nations and various non-governmental organizations in Bangkok, Hong Kong, Kathmandu and London. She is an adjunct lecturer in law at the University of New South Wales, on the advisory committee of UNSW’s Australian Human Rights Institute and on the board of the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women. Pearson holds degrees in law and arts from Murdoch University and obtained her Master's degree in public policy at Princeton University's School of Public and International Affairs. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In this episode, Camilla T.N. Sørensen joins Andreas Bøje Forsby from NIAS for a conversation about the Indo-Pacific region as seen from a Danish and broader European perspective. Camilla was recently tasked by the Danish government to provide an assessment of current development trends in the Indo-Pacific ahead of a forthcoming new Danish foreign and security policy. Apart from discussing the scope, character, and drivers of Denmark/Europe’s growing interest in the Indo-Pacific, she offers an insightful account of China’s increasingly prominent role in the region. Camilla TN Sørensen is an associate professor at the Danish Royal Defense Academy in Copenhagen, at the Institute for Strategy and War Studies. Apart from being one of the leading China specialists in Denmark, Camilla covers a wide array of research areas, including Danish foreign and security policy, great power relations, and the Arctic and Indo-Pacific regions. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, Asianettverket at the University of Oslo, and the Stockholm Centre for Global Asia at Stockholm University. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In the extreme north of Laos, in Phongsali Province, lies a tiny village home to around 24 households. Until recently it was a monoethnic Khmu village. The Khmu have had a historically ambivalent relationship to the national majority in contemporary Laos. It’s also home to the Akha, another ethnic group that have been described as state evaders seeking to avoid lowland politics and who migrated to northern Laos in recent decades. This small hamlet is a window into Laos’ march into a particular type of post-colonial modernity, where massive infrastructure projects, interethnic tensions, spirit beliefs and animistic practices coexist and collide. Dr Paul-David Lutz joined Dr Natali Pearson on SSEAC Stories to share the stories of this hamlet, and reflect on the importance of “animist” beliefs and practices in shaping a culturally-specific sense of modernity in the uplands of far-north Laos. About Dr Paul-David Lutz: Dr Paul-David Lutz recently received his PhD from the University of Sydney’s Department of Anthropology. He is a SSEAC Writing Fellow, and an Honorary Associate at the University of Sydney’s School of Social and Political Sciences. Prior to his PhD, Paul-David Lutz worked for several years as a rural development advisor in Laos and Vietnam. His thesis “Sert Has Gone” gives a ‘once-removed’ ethnographic history of the ethnic Khmu and Akha village of ‘Sanjing’ in Phongsali, northernmost Laos. His research brings development studies into conversation with both history’s interest in locally-specific ways of relating to the past, and anthropology’s burgeoning focus on ‘future-making’ and ‘more-than-human lifeworlds.’ For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Tuberculosis: The Singapore Experience, 1867-2018 (Routledge, 2021), co-written by Dr. Loh, a historian and Dr. Hsu Li Yang, a medical doctor offers an inter-disciplinary analysis of the way in the which the disease was managed from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. This book charts the relationship between disease, society and the state, outlining the struggles of colonial and post-colonial governments to cope with infectious disease and to establish effective public health programmes and institutions. British colonial administrators initially viewed tuberculosis as a racial problem linked to the poverty, housing and insanitary habits of the Chinese working class. After the Second World War, ambitious medical and urban improvement initiatives were instituted by the returning British colonial government with considerable success. These schemes in the post-colonial period set the tone for continuous biopolitical intervention by the post-colonial Singapore state whose struggle against infectious disease in a densely populated city never really ended. The focus on infections makes this book an apt one to discuss when Singapore – and the world- is still struggling against Covid-19 and its multiple variants. Dr. Loh Kah Seng a historian of Singapore and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia. He is interested in urban history and social history of cities. He currently runs Chronicles Research and Education, a research consultancy on Singapore heritage. Faizah Zakaria is assistant professor of history at Nanyang Technological University. You can find her website at www.faizahzak.com and on Twitter @laurelinarien. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Seeds, plants and food can act as repositories of memory and identity, thus countering the alienation caused by displacement. How does this manifest in the case of Karen refugee communities across the world holding on to a connection to their homeland in Myanmar? And how is the Karen people’s struggle for political sovereignty connected to global biodiversity and climate change issues? Terese Gagnon discusses these questions, as well as the role of the Karen territory as a biodiversity and political refuge, and how this has changed since the military coup in Myanmar in February 2021. Terese Gagnon is an incoming Postdoctoral Fellow on "Climate and Sustainability in Asia" at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies. She holds a PhD in anthropology from Syracuse University. Her dissertation is about Karen food, seed, and political sovereignty across landscapes of home and exile. She is co-editor of the book Movable Gardens: Itineraries and Sanctuaries of Memory. Terese is in conversation with Quynh Le Vo, a master's student in environmental change and global sustainability at the University of Helsinki, who has recently spent a month in virtual residency at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies. Previously, she has worked at the LSE Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre and at the Permanent Mission of Finland to the UN covering environmental and development questions. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, Asianettverket at the University of Oslo, and the Stockholm Centre for Global Asia at Stockholm University. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

The Philippines is one of the most natural hazard-prone countries in the world. With the social and economic cost of disasters in the country increasing due to population growth, migration, unplanned urbanisation, environmental degradation and global climate change, disaster resilience and management are more important than ever. In 2020, Dr Aaron Opdyke spoke with Dr Natali Pearson about his work in disaster risk reduction and humanitarian response in the Philippines. About Aaron Opdyke: Aaron is a Lecturer in Humanitarian Engineering in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Sydney and the Philippines Country Coordinator for the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre. His research seeks to strengthen preparedness for and recovery after disaster and conflict, through the lens of safe and equitable shelter and housing. He has worked for nearly a decade on disaster risk reduction and humanitarian response programmes in the Philippines, both in practice and research. Aaron was named as one of the American Society of Civil Engineers' 2021 New Faces of Civil Engineering. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

What happened to the Filipinas who migrated to Denmark to staff iconic new international hotels in the 1960s and 1970s? Why did the Philippine government encourage so many talented people to leave the country? How did Danes react to this influx of lively Southeast Asians? What was the impact on the Danish labor movement? And why did so many lives change forever? In this conversation with NIAS Director Duncan McCargo, Danish journalist and researcher Nina Trige Andersen discusses both the socio-economic context for the influx of Philippine workers in postwar Denmark, and the individual stories she chronicles in her meticulously-researched book Labor Pioneers: Economy, Labor, and Migration in Filipino-Danish Relations, 1950-2015 (Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2019). The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, Asianettverket at the University of Oslo, and the Stockholm Centre for Global Asia at Stockholm University. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Since 2004 the Malay-Muslim majority provinces in the border region of southern Thailand have been wracked by a violent insurgency. Over 7000 people have been killed and many thousands more injured. Currently 60,000 Thai security personnel are stationed in the region to conduct counter-insurgency operations. Another 80,000 people have been organized into a “volunteer defense force”. Ruth Streicher spent time researching this troubled region talking to local civilians, activists, journalists, academics, as well as military conscripts and senior officers. The result is Uneasy Military Encounters: The Imperial Politics of Counterinsurgency in Southern Thailand (Cornell UP, 2020). The book is a theoretically adventurous exploration of the conflict in Thailand’s deep south in which the author weaves the themes of empire, policing, gender, history, and religion. Patrick Jory teaches Southeast Asian History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. He can be reached at: p.jory@uq.edu.au. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

What Is Religious Authority?: Cultivating Islamic Communities in Indonesia (Princeton UP, 2021) by Ismail Fajrie Alatas draws on groundbreaking anthropological insights to provide a new understanding of Islamic religious authority, showing how religious leaders unite diverse aspects of life and contest differing Muslim perspectives to create distinctly Muslim communities. Taking readers from the eighteenth century to today, Alatas traces the movements of Muslim saints and scholars from Yemen to Indonesia and looks at how they traversed complex cultural settings while opening new channels for the transmission of Islamic teachings. He describes the rise to prominence of Indonesia’s leading Sufi master, Habib Luthfi, and his rivalries with competing religious leaders, revealing why some Muslim voices become authoritative while others don’t. Alatas examines how Habib Luthfi has used the infrastructures of the Sufi order and the Indonesian state to build a durable religious community, while deploying genealogy and hagiography to present himself as a successor of the Prophet Muḥammad. Challenging prevailing conceptions of what it means to be Muslim, What Is Religious Authority? demonstrates how the concrete and sustained labors of translation, mobilization, collaboration, and competition are the very dynamics that give Islam its power and diversity. Ismail Fajrie Alatas is an assistant professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, and History at New York University.  Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

This is an important, revisionist account of the origins of the British Empire in Asia in the early modern period. In The Origins of the British Empire in Asia, 1600-1750 (Cambridge University Press, 2020), David Veevers uncovers a hidden world of transcultural interactions between servants of the English East India Company and the Asian communities and states they came into contact with, revealing how it was this integration of Europeans into non-European economies, states and societies which was central to British imperial and commercial success rather than national or mercantilist enterprise. As their servants skillfully adapted to this rich and complex environment, the East India Company became enfranchised by the eighteenth century with a breadth of privileges and rights – from governing sprawling metropolises to trading customs-free. In emphasizing the Asian genesis of the British Empire, this book sheds new light on the foreign frameworks of power which fueled the expansion of Global Britain in the early modern world. David Veevers is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Queen Mary University of London. He has published articles in the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History and the Journal of Global History, and won the Royal Historical Society's Alexander Prize in 2014. He is co-editor of The Corporation as a Protagonist in Global History, c.1550 to 1750 (2018). Samee Siddiqui is a PhD Candidate at the Department of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His dissertation explores discussions relating to religion, race, and empire between South Asian and Japanese figures in Tokyo from 1905 until 1945. You can find him on twitter @ssiddiqui83 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In 2017, Myanmar's military launched a campaign of widespread targeted violence against its Rohingya minority. The horrific atrocities was later described by United Nations experts as genocide. This had been building since 2012, when earlier ethnic violence erupted between Buddhists and Muslims in Western Myanmar. These very grave incidents leading to the deaths and also the flight of thousands of Rohingya to neighbouring Bangladesh was the most concentrated exodus of people since the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. In Myanmar's Enemy Within: Buddhist Violence and the Making of the Muslim 'Other' (Zed Books, 2017, 2019), Francis Wade identifies the underlying causes which flamed division, segregation and resulted in a horrific loss of life and violence. Wade explores how the manipulations by a ruling elite turned prompted neighbours to take up arms against neighbour, by politicising ethnic identity.  The crisis is contextualised in the legacy of British colonialism which calcified the previously fluid dynamics of cultural groups across the country.The military junta is shown to have exploited these divisions in its campaign which targeted the Rohingya minority. In the period of extreme violence, Wade draws out how the U.N., and more broadly, how Western backers of the apparent political transition to democratisation contemporaneously ignored the unfolding situation. Through his on-the-ground accounts, Wade explores how citizens experiencing rights and freedoms unseen for half a century, under a much lauded civilian leaders such as Aung San Suu Kyi, became complicit in this humanitarian catastrophe.  Francis Wade is a journalist specialising in Myanmar and Southeast Asia. He began reporting on Myanmar in 2009 and went on to cover in-depth the transition from military rule and the violence which accompanied it. He has reported for The Guardian, The London Review of Books, TIME, New York Review of Books and more.  Jane Richards is a doctoral student at the University of Hong Kong. You can find her on twitter where she follows all things related to human rights and Hong Kong politics @JaneRichardsHK Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

What influence can online and visual activism have on protest movements? With a wave of anti-establishment protests sweeping over East and Southeast Asia over the past couple of years, the online phenomenon of the #MilkTeaAlliance has gained increasing international recognition. In this episode of the Nordic Asia Podcast Chiara Elisabeth Pecorari is joined by Wasana Wongsurawat and Mai Corlin Fredriksen to discuss the Milk Tea Alliance. Departing from the Thai and Hong Kong contexts, they explore what role this alliance plays in the broader political context, and what future it may have. Wasana Wongsurawat is an associate professor at the Department of History at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand. Her research has focused on the Chinese diaspora and Thai nationalism. Mai Corlin Fredriksen is a Carlsberg Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. Her current work focuses on the role of protest walls and the use of visual material in the 2019 Hong Kong protests. Chiara Elisabeth Pecorari is a student of social anthropology at the University of Bergen in Norway. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, Asianettverket at the University of Oslo, and the Stockholm Centre for Global Asia at Stockholm University. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

With two megacities and strong economic growth, Indonesia has seen dramatic rates of rural-urban migrations. According to the World Bank, nearly 70 percent of Indonesia's population are expected to live in cities by 2045. While this transition has undoubtedly boosted the country's economic growth, it has also brought to the fore all the challenges that come with rapid and uncontrolled urbanisation. From traffic congestion to informal settlements, lack of clean water and waste management services, and widespread flooding, Indonesia's cities suffer significant human and economic costs, and are now highly vulnerable to the impact of climate change. In 2020, Dr Sophie Webber spoke with Dr Natali Pearson about urban governance, and how urban resilience is being rolled out as a policy solution for cities such as Jakarta and Semarang in Indonesia, that are trying to adapt to the many shocks and stresses associated with urbanisation and climate change. About Sophie Webber: Dr Sophie Webber is a human geographer, who conducts research about the political economies of climate change and international development assistance, principally in Southeast Asia and the Pacific region. In particular, Sophie studies how 'truth' (knowledge claims and expertise), 'capital' (financial flows and investments), and policy packages structure relations between the minority and majority worlds. Methodologically, this research requires relational fieldwork, examining how climatological and developmental crises and problems are interpreted, storied, and managed, both by local and governmental authorities, as well as by distant international experts such as the World Bank. In 2020, Sophie was awarded a prestigious Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) to investigate the social, economic and environmental impacts of large-scale sand and water extraction to build protective infrastructure in vulnerable cities. Through a qualitative study of climate change hotspots in Indonesia and Fiji, this project will generate new knowledge about the potentials and limits of urban resilience infrastructure to protect cities against climate change. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Exploring Southeast Asia is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Jacques Bertrand, Professor of Political Science and Director of the Collaborative Master’s Program in Contemporary East and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Toronto. This conversation explores Jacques Bertrand’s extensive research on the politics and political changes in Southeast Asia and provides detailed insights into this extensive and complex region which consists of countries with remarkably diverse histories and cultures. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Why is Vietnam's modern history so closely associated with a place that lies only just within the country's borders? What was at stake in the contest for the mountainous Black River region that culminated in the legendary French defeat of 1954? How did the different ethnic groups living around Điện Biên Phủ position themselves, when forced to choose between France and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam? Why did some groups in the region dream of greater autonomy, under a just king, following the pivotal battle? How come women played such a crucial role in this conflict? In what ways has the Vietnamese state deployed "lessons" from Điện Biên Phủ, for nation-building purposes? And how far does what happened there force us to rethink our understandings of notions of territory, and how "ethnic minorities" are constructed and imagined? Christian C. Lentz, Associate Professor of Geography at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, discusses his ground-breaking book Contested Territory Ðien Biên Phu and the Making of Northwest Vietnam (Yale 2019) with Duncan McCargo, Professor of Political Science at the University of Copenhagen.  Contested Territory is the winner of the 2021 Harry J. Benda Prize, awarded by the Association for Asian Studies for the best first book in Southeast Asian Studies.  Read more here: https://www.asianstudies.org/a... Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Early 20th century Southeast Asia was arguably home to the once of the most vibrant and diverse caldrons of revolutionary ferment in world history. Revolts against Western imperialism and traditional socio-economic structures developed into a range of utopian experiments. In Republicanism, Communism, Islam: Cosmopolitan Origins of Revolution in Southeast Asia (Cornell UP, 2021), John T. Sidel argues that in order to understand these revolutions we must denationalize, internationalize, and transnationalism our analysis. Multiple forms of cosmopolitanism produced the Filipino revolt against Spanish rule, the Indonesian struggle from independence from the Dutch, and the Vietnamese fight against the French empire and for a Marxist utopia. Sidel highlights Southeast Asia’s often surprising global connections. Professor Sidel received his BA and MA from Yale University and his PhD from Cornell University and was fortunate enough to have been mentored by both James C. Scott and Benedict Anderson. He is the author of Capital, Coercion, and Crime: Bossism in the Philippines (Stanford University Press, 1999), Riots, Pogroms, Jihad: Religious Violence in Indonesia (Cornell University Press, 2006), and The Islamist Threat in Southeast Asia: A Reassessment (East-West Center, 2007). He has also co-authored Philippine Politics and Society in the Twentieth Century: Colonial Legacies, Postcolonial Trajectories and Thinking and Working Politically in Development: Coalitions for Change in the Philippines. Dr. Sidel was previously at the School of Oriental and African Studies but since 2004 has held the Sir Patrick Gillam Chair in International and Comparative Politics in the Departments of Government and International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California. Follow Mike on Twitter: @MichaelGVann. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Why are land rights so bitterly contested in Indonesia, even after the end of Suharto’s New Order in 1998? What methods have grassroots movements used to re-possess – or to occupy – lands that have been seized by powerful entities? How come small-scale Indonesian farmers and marginalized communities crave legal recognition from the state? How did the Free Aceh Movement make the post-conflict land rights situation there worse than before? And why does Christian Lund insist that his new book is not primarily a book about Indonesia? And above all, why is “What is to be done?” the wrong question to ask about the problem of land dispossession? In this wide-ranging conversation with NIAS Director Duncan McCargo, Christian Lund – a professor in the Department of Food and Resource Economics at the University of Copenhagen – talks about his ground-breaking new book, Nine-Tenths of the Law: Enduring Dispossession in Indonesia (Yale UP, 2021). Christian explains how he switched from studying Ghana to working on ‘bedazzling’ Indonesia; and what he discovered during a long, collaborative journey of deep ethnographic immersion, during which he focused on troublesome and intractable questions of land rights, in cases drawn from North Sumatra, West Java and Aceh. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, Asianettverket at the University of Oslo, and the Stockholm Centre for Global Asia at Stockholm University. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Improper pest management has led to significant yield loss in rice and other crop harvests in Cambodia, causing economic losses to farmers and environmental disruption through ill-informed chemical use. The use of broad-spectrum pesticides as a solution to all observed pests is commonplace in the rice and mung bean fields of lowland Cambodia and can be linked to unsuitable sources of agricultural information. In 2020, Professor Daniel Tan caught up with Dr Natali Pearson over Zoom to chat about his lifelong work supporting sustainable farming practices in Cambodia, including through targeted capacity-building programs and the development of image-rich mobile phone applications to assist Cambodian farmers with insect pest identification and crop management. About Daniel Tan: Daniel is Professor in the School of Life and Environmental Sciences at the University of Sydney. He is also the Country Coordinator for Cambodia at the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, and a member of the Sydney Institute of Agriculture, the Sydney Nano Institute, and the Charles Perkins Centre. Daniel’s research focuses on crop agronomy, specifically abiotic stress. He has conducted extensive research in Southeast Asia, including a very successful program that aimed to improve smallholder farmer livelihoods in Cambodia, with funding from the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR). Daniel currently has collaborative research links at CSIRO Plant Industry (Narrabri), the University of Oxford, NSW Department of Agriculture, Applied Horticultural Research (Sydney), Texas A&M University (USA) the United States Department of Agriculture (Lubbock, Texas, USA) and ICRISAT, India. Daniel has been a member of the Australian Institute of Agricultural Science and Technology (AIAST) since 1991. He is also on the Editorial Boards of the 'Journal of Science of Food and Agriculture' and 'Frontiers of Plant Science'. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Nicole Curato's Democracy in a Time of Misery: From Spectacular Tragedies to Deliberative Action (Oxford UP, 2019)  investigates how democratic politics can unfold in creative and unexpected of ways even at the most trying of times. Drawing on three years of fieldwork in disaster-affected communities in Tacloban City, Philippines, this book presents ethnographic portraits of how typhoon survivors actively perform their suffering to secure political gains. Each chapter traces how victims are transformed to 'publics' that gain voice and visibility in the global public sphere through disruptive protests, collaborative projects, and political campaigns that elected the strongman Rodrigo Duterte to presidency. It also examines the micropolitics of silencing that lead communities to withdraw and lose interest in politics. These ethnographic descriptions come together in a theoretical project that makes a case for a multimodal view of deliberative action. It underscores the embodied, visual, performative and subtle ways in which affective political claims are constructed and received. It concludes by arguing that while emotions play a role in amplifying marginalized political claims, it also creates hierarchies of misery that renders some forms of suffering more deserving of compassion than others. The book invites readers to reflect on challenging ethical issues when examining political contexts defined by widespread depravity and dispossession, and the democratic ethos demanded of global publics in responding to others' suffering. Professor Michele Ford is the Director of the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, a university-wide multidisciplinary center at the University of Sydney, Australia. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Southeast Asia was home to many of the hot battles of the Cold War. Even after the fall of the Soviet Union the region has been beset by legacies of political violence. Cambodia, Vietnam, and Indonesia serve as the most obvious examples here. In addition to these ideological conflicts, ethnic conflicts have exploded into ethnic cleansing and genocide. Meanwhile, in the Philippines and Thailand, politicians have used violence as a technique of governance. Throughout Southeast Asia we can find patterns of necropolitical solutions to social, economic, and ethnic conflicts. In this podcast I talk to Eve Zucker and Ben Kiernan about their anthology Political Violence in Southeast Asia since 1945: Case Studies from Six Countries, published in 2021 as part of Routledge’s series “Mass Violence in Modern History”. The anthology contains 17 essays from scholars in various stages of their careers and a variety of disciplines, but they all specialize in some aspect of the history of political violence in Southeast Asia. Dr. Eve Zucker is an anthropologist at Yale who studies remembrance and recovery after mass violence. Her previous books include Forrest of Struggle: Moralities of Remembrance in Upland Cambodia; Mass Violence and Memory in the Digital Age: Memorialization Unmoored; and Coexistence in the Aftermath of Mass Violence: Imagination, Empathy, and Resilience. Dr. Ben Kiernan, also at Yale, is the A. Whitney Griswold Professor of History and the founding director of Yale’s Genocide Studies Program. His numerous books include How Pol Pot Came to Power, The Pol Pot Regime, Blood and Soil (which is a world history of genocide), Genocide and Resistance in Southeast Asia, and survey of some 2,000 years of Vietnamese history. Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Former Philippine President Noynoy Aquino (in office from 2010 to 2016) recently passed away at the age of just 61. How should we assess the legacy of this “accidental” president, the scion of a prominent political dynasty whose strong sense of duty made up for his complete lack of flamboyance? Prominent Philippine journalist and public intellectual Sheila Coronel argues in this special Nordic Asia Podcast that “there's now sort of a wave of nostalgia for a president who was honest, sincere, didn't curse and didn't kill, and who took governance seriously”. NIAS Director Duncan McCargo discusses Aquino’s legacy and the prospects for Philippine politics with Sheila Coronel, Toni Stabile Professor of Professional Practice in Investigative Journalism at Columbia Journalism School, Columbia University in the City of New York, and co-founder of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism. For Duncan’s recent Asia Times op-ed about the challenges of moderating President Aquino’s 2014 World Leaders Forum speech at Columbia University, see “Just the Facts: Noynoy Aquino and Me.”  Sheila Coronel highly recommends “The Impossible Dreamer”, some reflections on Noynoy by his former speech writer Manual L. Quezon III. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, Asianettverket at the University of Oslo, and the Stockholm Centre for Global Asia at Stockholm University. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In this episode of the Nordic Asia Podcast Kenneth Bo Nielsen of the Norwegian Network for Asian Studies is joined by Htwe Htwe Thein (Curtin University in Western Australia), Michael Gillan (University of Western Australia, UWA Business School) and Kristian Stokke (University of Oslo) to analyse how international governments and businesses have responded to the Myanmar military coup. At first glance, many of the current responses from these international actors seem familiar: some actors – the US, UK and EU impose sanctions; others such as ASEAN advocate ‘constructive engagement’; while international businesses has to navigate familiar ethical dilemmas, operational challenges and motives when deliberating whether to ‘stay or go’. However, this time the responses are shaped in significant ways by a new condition within Myanmar: the existence of a robust pro-democracy social movement, the formation of an alternative ‘National Unity Government’, and the associated legitimacy crisis of the military regime. In other words, this time around not everything about the international response has been business as usual. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies (CEAS) at the University of Turku, Asianettverket at the University of Oslo, and the Forum for Asian Studies at Stockholm University. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Indonesia is the world’s largest archipelagic state, its waters home to hundreds, if not thousands, of shipwrecks. As maritime neighbours with both a common boundary and a shared history, protecting and preserving this maritime heritage is an important element of the Australia-Indonesia relationship. In recent years, government agencies from both countries have cooperated to manage the wreck of HMAS Perth (I), an Australian warship sunk off the coast of Java in World War II. However, efforts to engage the next generation have been limited. For this special episode, Dr Natali Pearson jumps on the other side of the mic and chats with Dr Thushara Dibley about her recent work building links between Indonesia and Australia to increase cooperation for the preservation of underwater cultural heritage. She notably discusses her recent initiative coordinating a capacity-building course in Indonesian maritime archaeology with funding from the Australia Indonesia Institute. Delivered through online learning modules and field site visits, the course brought together students from across the archipelago to learn more about the challenges and opportunities of managing and interpreting underwater cultural heritage in an Indonesian context, and paved the way for future cooperation across the seas to preserve the nation’s wealth of maritime histories. About Dr Natali Pearson: Natali is Curriculum Coordinator at the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre at the University of Sydney, where she is affiliated with the School of Languages and Cultures. Her research focuses on the protection, management and interpretation of underwater cultural heritage in Southeast Asia. Natali is co-editor of Perspectives on the Past at New Mandala and a regular contributor to The Conversation and Inside Indonesia. Natali holds a PhD in Museum Studies (2019, USYD). Her new book, Belitung; The Afterlives of a Shipwreck, will be published by University of Hawai’i Press in 2022. You can follow Natali on Twitter @sea_greeny. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Does Southeast Asia face a stark choice between aligning with China or the United States? Can we understand domestic developments in the region as driven by wider geopolitics? Can the lacklustre regional organization ASEAN play a central role in mediating these dynamics, or are individual Southeast Asian countries locked into deeply unequal bilateral linkages? Is China a largely benevolent force in the region, or an untrustworthy would-be hegemon? In this session, we meet the authors of two recent books on interactions between China and Southeast Asia: Sebastian Strangio and Murray Hiebert. Both authors are veteran foreign correspondents who lived in Southeast Asia for many years. Sebastian Strangio’s book In the Dragon’s Shadow (Yale 2020) and Murray Hiebert’s Under Beijing’s Shadow (Rowman and Littlefield 2020) address closely related topics: how does Southeast Asia navigate relations with a much larger neighbour that has become increasingly powerful in recent decades, economically, politically and indeed militarily? Both books discuss regional relationships as well as bilateral ties between China and individual Southeast Asian nations. Wasana Wongsuwarat (Associate Professor of History, Chulalongkorn University, Thailand) and Petra Desatova (NIAS postdoctoral researcher) discuss the two books with their respective authors, in a conversation moderated by Duncan McCargo, Director of NIAS. This podcast is taken from a session at the Fourteen Annual Nordic NIAS Council Conference ‘China’s Rise/Asia’s Responses’ (https://www2.helsinki.fi/en/conferences/chinas-riseasias-responses) held on 10-11 June 2021 in collaboration with the Nordic Association for China Studies and the University of Helsinki. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, Asianettverket at the University of Oslo, and the Stockholm Centre for Global Asia at Stockholm University. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

February 2021 witnessed yet another military coup in Myanmar. Whether it was unexpected or entirely predictable is, perhaps, a matter of debate. But what is without a doubt different this time around is the way the population of Myanmar has responded, with younger generations in particular taking to social media to call for change, in a bid to avoid the suffering of their parents’ generation. Among those actors pressing for change are members of the diaspora, many of whom spent years in refugee camps and who continue to live proximate to Myanmar. On World Refugee Day, Dr Susan Banki joins Dr Natali Pearson on SSEAC Stories to discuss the political mobilisation of refugee and migrant populations from Myanmar seeking to enact change in their home country, arguing that the physical proximity of these diaspora communities is key to their empowerment, but has, until now, been relatively unexplored. About Dr Susan Banki: Susan Banki is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Sydney. Her current research examines the ways in which refugee and migrant populations mobilise for change in their home countries, with a particular focus on refugees from Myanmar and Bhutan. She has recently completed a manuscript about the political mobilisation of Bhutanese refugees in Nepal. In the wake of the coup in Myanmar, she has been writing and speaking about the coup and its aftermath for a range of media outlets, including the Sydney Morning Herald, the Conversation, ABC National Radio’s Late Night Live, and ABC’s the News Hour. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Why did hundreds of thousands of Thai people rise up in opposition to elected governments in 2006, 2008 and 2013-14? What were the ideological underpinnings of the yellow shirt movement? How did the original People’s Alliance for Democracy differ from the later People’s Democratic Reform Committee? Were the yellow shirts simply trying to provoke military coups against administrations linked to the controversial former premier Thaksin Shinawatra? And why did the rise of satellite TV and digital media apparently undermine rather than enrich Thai democracy? In this lively conversation, Aim Sinpeng – senior lecturer in comparative politics at the University of Sydney – discusses these topics with Duncan McCargo, director of the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies and professor of political science at the University of Copenhagen. She explains how many of her family, friends and neighbours took part in the yellow shirt protests, and argues for a more nuanced understanding of these movements, one that goes beyond the caricature of conservative royalists blinded by their overweening faith in monarchy. Aim Sinpeng is a prolific scholar of Thailand’s politics, who has been at the forefront of recent work on the growing salience on online political participation in Southeast Asia. She is the author of Opposing Democracy in the Digital Age: The Yellow Shirts in Thailand (U Michigan Press, 2021). Sinpeng tweets at @aimsinpeng. For Aim’s latest (Open Access) Critical Asian Studies article on Thailand’s 2020 student protests, see here. Like this interview? If so, you might be interested in an earlier Nordic Asia podcast with Aim on the Future Forward Party here. Or some recent Southeast Asian Studies channel podcasts on Thai politics here and here.  Duncan McCargo is an eclectic, internationalist political scientist and literature buff: his day job is directing the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Learn more here, here, here, and here. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

What do startling photographic images of state violence from events such as the 6 October 1976 massacre at Thammasat University tell us about the nature of human rights in Thailand? In conversation with NIAS Director Duncan McCargo, Karin Zackari of Lund University discusses some of the key themes that emerge from her doctoral thesis, the first study to view egregious episodes of human rights violations in Thailand through a photographic lens. Karin talks about some of the iconic images she studied, the challenges of tracking down archival sources, and how a recent online project is now making some of these important materials more accessible (see https://doct6.com/). Karin Zackari defended her PhD thesis entitled Framing the Subject: Human Rights and Photography in Contemporary Thai History at Lund University in September 2020. You can download her thesis here. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, Asianettverket at the University of Oslo, and the Stockholm Centre for Global Asia at Stockholm University. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

More than anywhere else in the world, Asia is experiencing an infrastructure boom. Although it is driven by both internal and external factors, this boom has accelerated noticeably as a result of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which seeks to extends port, railway and other connections throughout and across Southeast Asia. But what is the cost of this aggressive infrastructure development? What do we know about the people and places that are negatively impacted by these large-scale projects? In Laos, the government has placed enormous emphasis on infrastructure expansion as a mechanism for driving economic growth and poverty alleviation. Yet this infrastructure rollout has come at severe social and environmental costs. Dr Kearrin Sims joins Dr Natali Pearson on SSEAC Stories to discuss how these large-scale infrastructure projects have led to increased political oppression and the repeated displacement of local communities in Laos. About Dr Kearrin Sims: Kearrin Sims is a lecturer in development studies at James Cook University. He researches regional connectivity and South-South cooperation within Mainland Southeast Asia, with a focus on ethical development. His recent work examines the intersectional violence of large-scale infrastructures, political oppression, and development geopolitics. Kearrin is the author of numerous academic and media publications, and lead editor of a forthcoming Routledge Handbook of Global Development. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Since 2000, there has been a boom in Indonesian popular novels and films set overseas, showing young Indonesians living in foreign countries and having life changing adventures there. In the last 20 years, there have been at least 150 such novels and films released – many more than in the first 55 years of Indonesian independence. In this episode, Associate Professor David Reeve speaks to Dr Natali Pearson about his latest project looking at Indonesian romance novels and films set overseas, discussing the reasons behind the rise of this literary genre and how it conflicts with the lived experiences of many in the Indonesian diaspora. About Associate Professor David Reeve: Associate Professor David Reeve has been visiting Indonesia for over 50 years as a diplomat, researcher, historian, lecturer, language teacher and project manager. He was a founding figure in Australian Studies at Universitas Indonesia in the 1980s and was Resident Director of the ACICIS program in Yogyakarta in the late 1990s. He has worked in eight Indonesian universities and several in Australia. He is retired from UNSW and is now completing a biography of Indonesian historian Onghokham, to be published in January 2022. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Thailand has been in a deep political crisis since the royalist-military coup against the Thaksin government in 2006. A second coup, in 2014, ushered in a hard-line military dictatorship. The passing of King Bhumibol Adulyadej in 2016 and accession to the throne of his son and heir, King Vajiralongkorn, has further transformed Thailand’s political landscape. When the military junta organized new elections in 2019, most Thais expected the military to engineer the military-backed party into government. What no-one expected was the remarkable electoral success of a new, liberal, progressive political party, Future Forward. But within two years the Constitutional Court had dissolved the party and banned its leadership from politics for ten years. Duncan McCargo and Anyarat Chattharakul have analysed the stunning rise and fall of this party in their co-authored book, Future Forward: The Rise and Fall of a Thai Political Party (NIAS Press, 2020). Patrick Jory teaches Southeast Asian History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. He can be reached at: p.jory@uq.edu.au. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Why has the military junta that seized power in Myanmar on February 1 failed to gain popular support and legitimacy? How credible are attempts by the opposition to form an alternative government in exile? Have strikes and civil disobedience run their course? Why are those opposed to the military turning towards violent resistance? And what future scenarios might we expect to unfold in the months ahead? In this conversation with NIAS Director Duncan McCargo, from a recent event co-hosted by the Danish Institute for International Studies and the New York Southeast Asia Network, four experts with extensive field experience in Myanmar share their views on the country’s current political quandary. Speakers: Ardeth Maung Thawnghmung, Professor and Chair of Political Science, University of Massachusetts, Lowell. Myat The Thitsar, PhD candidate, University of Massachusetts, Lowell. Liv Stoltze Gaborit, Postdoctoral researcher, Lund University and co-founder of Myanmar Action Group Denmark Helene Maria Kyed, Senior researcher and head of research unit, Danish Institute for International Studies You might also like these earlier Nordic Asia Podcasts on Myanmar here and here. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, Asianettverket at the University of Oslo, and the Stockholm Centre for Global Asia at Stockholm University. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

How could we turn the tables on the military junta who held power in Thailand between 2014 and 2019, by using legal mechanisms to challenge the culture of impunity under which the regime operated? Like previous military coups in Thailand, the May 2014 coup was completely illegal – yet the National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO), as the regime called itself, did not hesitate to deploy the full force of the Thai legal and judicial system to suppress dissent and crush opposition. In conversation with NIAS Director Duncan McCargo, Tyrell Haberkorn of the University of Wisconsin, Madison explains how her new Guggenheim fellowship is supporting her work to craft a legal indictment of the NCPO. She also plans to re-write the judgements issued in a number of landmark legal cases against junta opponents, as a means of showing how genuine justice might instead be done. Tyrell Haberkorn is professor of Southeast Asian studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. https://alc.wisc.edu/staff/tyrell-haberkorn-2/ She is the author of Revolution Interrupted: Farmers, Students, Law and Violence in Northern Thailand (2011) and In Plain Sight: Impunity and Human Rights in Thailand (2018), both from University of Wisconsin Press. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, Asianettverket at the University of Oslo, and the Stockholm Centre for Global Asia at Stockholm University. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Since the decline of piracy off the coast of the Horn of Africa, Southeast Asia has re-emerged as the world’s hotspot for maritime piracy, with 85 reported attacks in the region in 2020 alone. Unlike much of the rest of the world, Southeast Asia has also seen a resurgence of sophisticated maritime piracy, beyond just simple robberies. Yet this recent upsurge in maritime piracy is no coincidence. Professor Justin Hastings spoke to Dr Natali Pearson about Southeast Asia’s long history of maritime piracy, highlighting how the region’s archipelagic geography, legacies from colonial rule, trade integration, contested maritime boundaries, political unrest, and weak governance have all contributed to the rise of maritime piracy, and explaining the many strategies pirates have adopted over time to respond to state crackdowns. Justin Hastings is Professor of International Relations and Comparative Politics at the University of Sydney. He researches the geography and political economy of clandestine groups, including maritime pirates, organized criminals, terrorists, insurgents, nuclear traffickers, and black and gray markets, with a focus on Southeast Asia, Northeast Asia, and the Indian Ocean Region. He is the author of No Man’s Land: Globalization, Territory, and Clandestine Groups in Southeast Asia (2010) and A Most Enterprising Country: North Korea in the Global Economy (2016). For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

The COVID-19 virus has brought the spotlight to respiratory health. Over the past year, we have become more aware than ever of cough and cold-like symptoms, fevers, feeling tired, shortness of breath and any other indicators that our immune system is fighting off an infection. But COVID-19 is not the only health condition to affect the respiratory system. Tuberculosis is one of many infectious bacterial diseases that share a number of symptoms with COVID-19, and can also result in death. Professor Gregory Fox talked to Dr Natali Pearson about his work on infectious lung disease in Vietnam, and how his research is contributing to better respiratory health outcomes throughout the country. Disclaimer: This podcast was recorded in February 201 and the COVID-19 situation in Vietnam has since changed. About Professor Gregory Fox: Greg is a respiratory physician, epidemiologist and clinical trialist committed to using research to improve health care among disadvantaged populations. He is clinical Academic Lead (Research) for the Faculty of Medicine and Health at Cumberland Campus. Greg's research interests include the epidemiology of infectious disease in resource-limited setting, cluster randomised trials, clinical trials and digital technologies to support health care. He also has interests in systematic reviews and meta-analyses, translation of evidence into policy, decision analysis and capacity building in research. You can follow Greg on Twitter @foxsimile. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

There has been a resurgent global interest in the origins and formation of authoritarian regimes as many states around the world drift away from liberal democracy. Indonesia’s experiences with such an authoritarian turn in the 1950s and 1960s offers many lessons from history. In Authoritarian Modernization in Indonesia’s Early Independence Period (Brill, 2020), Farabi Fakih offers a historical analysis of the foundational years leading to Indonesia’s New Order state (1966-1998) during the early independence period. The study looks into the structural and ideological state formation during the so-called Liberal Democracy (1950-1957) and Sukarno’s Guided Democracy (1957-1965). In particular, it analyses how the international technical aid network and the dominant managerialist ideology of the period legitimized a new managerial elite. The book discusses the development of managerial education in the civil and military sectors in Indonesia. The study gives a strongly backed argument that Sukarno’s constitutional reform during the Guided Democracy period inadvertently provided a strong technocratic blueprint for the New Order developmentalist state. In this podcast, we discuss the concept and range of authoritarian modernization, Sukarno’s Guided Democracy as a revolution, the formation of a military elite and the connection between Cold War technical aid and democratic decline. Farabi Fakih is a lecturer at the History Department at Gadjah Madah University in Indonesia and the head of the department’s graduate program. He received his PhD from Leiden University in 2014. His research interests center on Indonesian urban history and the political economy of the Indonesian state. Faizah Zakaria is an assistant professor of history at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. You can find her website here or on Twitter @laurelinarien Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Australia has always been multilingual. Yet English language sources have dominated political and popular discourses over the last few centuries, overshadowing the significant contribution made by other languages and cultures in shaping Australian history and identity. Professor Adrian Vickers spoke to Dr Natali Pearson about his work as part of an ambitious new Australian Research Council Discovery Project that seeks to investigate and document how speakers of (mainly non-Indigenous) languages apart from English have recorded and represented Australia. As Professor Vickers explains, these languages include Indonesian, in which he specialises, as well as many other Asian and European languages. In examining Australia’s history from non-English perspectives, the project challenges dominant narratives of what being Australian means and asks how language both shapes and reflects notions of belonging in an Australian context. In this podcast, Professor Adrian Vickers delves into Australia’s migrant and settler history to highlight the importance of language diversity, narrating countless tales of cross-cultural exchanges and how they have informed the Australian past. About Professor Adrian Vickers: Adrian researches and publishes on the cultural history of Southeast Asia. He has held a series of Australian Research Council grants (Discovery and Linkage), the most recent looking at modern and contemporary Indonesian art, Cold War history, and labour and industry in Southeast Asia. As part of a linkage grant on the history of Balinese painting, he created a virtual museum, continuing previous pioneering work in eResearch and teaching. His books include the highly popular Bali: A Paradise Created (2012), The Pearl Frontier: Indonesian Labor and Indigenous Encounters in Australia's Northern Trading Network (2015, with Associate Professor Julia Martínez, funded by an ARC Discovery Project Grant), A History of Modern Indonesia (2013) and Balinese Art: Paintings and Drawings of Bali, 1800-2010 (2012). Adrian is frequently asked to comment on Indonesia and Australian-Indonesian relations for national and international media. You can follow Adrian on Twitter: @AdrianVickers5. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Fungal infections are amongst the leading infectious disease killers globally. They result in more deaths than malaria, and almost as many as tuberculosis. However, they are often overlooked, and receive less research attention and funding than viral or bacterial infections. Over the past decade, this has started to change as the emergence of resistance in fungal pathogens has caused global alarm. New, resistant organisms have emerged, and old familiar ones have become harder to treat - agricultural antifungal use is thought to be driving these trends. Dr Justin Beardsley spoke to Dr Natali Pearson about the problem of resistant fungal infections in Vietnam, describing how agricultural practices are contributing, and what can be done to mitigate the risks. Justin is a New Zealand trained infectious disease specialist and clinical researcher. From 2012 to 2017, he was based in the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit in Ho Chi Minh City, where he was focused on fungal infections. There, he conducted a multinational randomised clinical trial into adjunctive steroid therapy for Cryptococcal Meningitis in Southeast Asia and Africa, alongside other work on the epidemiology of fungal infections, immune responses in Cryptococcal Meningitis, pharmacokinetics of anti-fungal drugs in the central nervous system, and temporal trends in cryptococcal drug susceptibility. His current research focuses on the emergence of anti-fungal drug resistance, especially in Southeast Asia. You can follow Justin on Twitter: @_jbeardsley_. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In this episode Astrid Norén-Nilsson of Lund University discusses her latest research about the Cambodian online news outlet Fresh News with Duncan McCargo, the Director of NIAS. Fresh News has become an indispensable source of information for Cambodia’s political and bureaucratic elite – but just how independent is the platform from the ruling Cambodian People’s Party? How can we classify the role that such new media platforms perform in a hybrid authoritarian political system? Astrid is an associate professor at Lund University’s Centre for East and Southeast Asian Studies and a leading expert on Cambodian politics. Her article “Fresh News, innovative news: popularizing Cambodia’s authoritarian turn” appeared in the journal Critical Asian Studies in November 2020. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies (CEAS) at the University of Turku, Asianettverket at the University of Oslo, and the Forum for Asian Studies at Stockholm University. About NIAS: https://www.nias.ku.dk/ Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: https://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In post-Suharto Indonesian politics the exchange of patronage for political support is commonplace. Clientelism saturates the political system through everyday practices of vote buying, influence peddling, manipulating government programs, and skimming money from government projects. In this episode of New Books in Southeast Asian Studies, Professor Michele Ford spoke with Professors Edward Aspinall and Ward Berenschot about their upcoming book, Democracy for Sale: Elections, Clientelism, and the State in Indonesia (Cornell University Press, 2019). Democracy for Sale is an on-the-ground account of Indonesian democracy, analysing its election campaigns and behind-the-scenes machinations. With comparative leverage from political practices in India and Argentina, Edward Aspinall and Ward Berenschot provide compelling evidence of the importance of informal networks and personal relationships that shape access to power and privilege in the messy political environment of contemporary Indonesia. Edward Aspinall is a Professor in the Department of Political and Social Change, Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, Australian National University. He researches politics in Southeast Asia, especially Indonesia, with interests in democratisation, ethnicity, and clientelism, among other topics. Ward Berenschot is a Professor of Comparative Political Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam, and a senior researcher at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV), studying contemporary politics in Indonesia and India. His work focuses on the role of money and informality in election campaigns, while a second field of research concerns the character of civil society and citizenship in democratising countries. He has also been involved in efforts to promote legal aid in Indonesia, particularly in relation to land conflicts sparked by palm oil expansion. Professor Michele Ford is the Director of the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, a university-wide multidisciplinary center at the University of Sydney, Australia. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

On 13 January 2020, Thailand confirmed the first known case of COVID-19 outside of China. As one of the world's most popular tourism destinations, with the majority of its travellers coming from China, this news came as no surprise. One year on, COVID-19 cases and related deaths have remained remarkably low in Thailand, and the country’s management of the pandemic has been hailed as a striking success. So what's the secret behind Thailand's COVID-19 response? Dr Anjalee Cohen joined Dr Natali Pearson to explore the many factors that have contributed to Thailand’s success in managing COVID-19 thus far, including the country’s long history of public healthcare, the overturning of medical elitism, the influence of certain cultural practices, and the critical role played by Thailand’s village health volunteers. Anjalee Cohen is a senior lecturer in the anthropology department at the University of Sydney. She joined the department in 2010 following research positions at the Brain and Mind Centre, University of Sydney, and the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre, University of New South Wales. She specialises in medical anthropology and Northern Thailand. She has published on youth mental healthcare experiences in Australia, methamphetamine use among northern Thai youth, as well as northern Thai youth subcultures, including violent youth gangs. She is author of Youth Culture and Identity in Northern Thailand: Fitting in and sticking out (Routledge 2020), which explores how young people in urban Chiang Mai construct a sense of community and identity at the intersection of global capitalism, national ideologies and local culture. Her current research focuses on the role and success of Thailand’s village health volunteers in preventing and controlling the COVID-19 pandemic. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

From drugs, communism and terrorism, and now the COVID-19 pandemic, the Philippines under Duterte can been characterised as a rolling series of security threats. To manage these threats, the Duterte administration has relied heavily on the military. So what is the role of the military in Philippine politics under Duterte? How does it compare with the role of the military in other Southeast Asian countries? And what does it mean for democracy in the Philippines? Professor Aries Arugay joined Dr Natali Pearson on SSEAC Stories to discuss civil-military relations and the erosion of democracy in the Philippines under the Duterte presidency. Aries A. Arugay is Professor of Political Science and Associate Dean for Research, Extension, and Publications in the College of Social Sciences and Philosophy from the University of the Philippines in Diliman. He is also Editor-in-Chief of Asian Politics & Policy, an academic journal published by Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of the Policy Studies Organization. His main research interests are comparative democratization, civil-military relations, ASEAN regionalism, and Philippine foreign and security policy. Since 2014, he has also been a regular lecturer and trainer of military and police officials of the Philippines in institutions such as the National Defense College, Command and General Staff College, and the Philippine Public Safety College. You can follow Aries on Twitter @ariesarugay. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

For the next five weeks, SSEAC Stories will be hosting a mini-series of podcasts on research partnerships in Southeast Asia. In the context of COVID-19, it has become clear that working in partnership is a critical part of being able to do research in Southeast Asia. Through interviews with University of Sydney academics working across all disciplines and at all stages in their careers, this mini-series will highlight strategies that our members have used to build and sustain partnerships with collaborators in Southeast Asia. In our final episode in this mini-series, Dr Thushara Dibley speaks with Dr Elisabeth Kramer about her collaboration with Indonesian partners on tobacco control in Indonesia, the challenges she encountered as an Early Career Researchers, and how she shifted her approach to academic research to focus on positive impact on real-world problems in Southeast Asia. Disclaimer: This interview was recorded in December 2020. Some of the data mentioned may not be up to date. Dr Elisabeth Kramer is Deputy Director at the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre at the University of Sydney. Her research focuses on the intersection between discourse, identity and politics in Indonesia. Current research interests include corruption, the tobacco industry and political empowerment for people with disabilities. You can follow Elisabeth on Twitter @liskramer. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

How did Indonesia’s labour movement go from being small and divided at the demise of the New Order regime in 1998 to play lead parts in politics some two decades later? What lessons have labour organizers learned along the way? And what lessons can we draw from Indonesia relevant to industrial organizing elsewhere? Informed by over a decade of multi-method research in selected sites across the west of the archipelago, Teri Caraway and Michele Ford address these and other questions in their Labor and Politics in Indonesia (Cambridge University Press, 2020), our featured title for this episode of New Books in Southeast Asian Studies. Tracking how labour unions found resources and identified opportunity structures by sequentially coupling contentious street politics with strategic targeting of executive offices and legislative contests, Caraway and Ford show that Indonesian unions and their allies have succeeded not only in greatly elevating wages and improving workplace conditions but also have built an identifiable working-class constituency. This constituency has given organized labour political clout far beyond what was or what seemed possible a couple of decades ago. And it has made for a more democratic Indonesia, one in which workers not only have participated in but at times taken the lead in local and national political struggles. Like this interview? If so you might also be interested in: Ben Bland, Man of Contradictions: Joko Widodo and the Struggle to Remake Indonesia Dan Slater, Ordering Power: Contentious Politics and Authoritarian Leviathans in Southeast Asia Nick Cheesman is a Fellow in the Department of Political & Social Change, Australian National University. He co-hosts the New Books in Southeast Asian Studies channel and hosts the New Books in Interpretive Political & Social Science series on the New Books Network. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Empire of Convicts: Indian Penal Labor in Colonial Southeast Asia (University of California Press, 2021) (University of California Press, 2021) focuses on male and female Indians incarcerated in Southeast Asia for criminal and political offenses committed in colonial South Asia. From the seventeenth century onward, penal transportation was a key strategy of British imperial rule, exemplified by deportations first to the Americas and later to Australia. Case studies from the insular prisons of Bengkulu, Penang, and Singapore illuminate another carceral regime in the Indian Ocean World that brought South Asia and Southeast Asia together through a global system of forced migration and coerced labor. A major contribution to histories of crime and punishment, prisons, law, labor, transportation, migration, colonialism, and the Indian Ocean World, Empire of Convicts narrates the experiences of Indian bandwars (convicts) and shows how they exercised agency in difficult situations, fashioning their own worlds and even becoming “their own warders.” Anand A. Yang brings long journeys across kala pani (black waters) to life in a deeply researched and engrossing account that moves fluidly between local and global contexts. Anand A. Yang is the Walker Family Endowed Professor in History and Professor of International Studies at the University of Washington. His monographs include the books The Limited Raj: Agrarian Relations in Colonial India; Bazaar India: Peasants, Traders, Markets and the Colonial State in Gangetic Bihar; and the edited volumes Crime and Criminality in British India and Interactions: Transregional Perspectives on World History. Kelvin Ng hosted the episode. He is a Ph.D. student at Yale University, History Department. His research interests broadly lie in the history of imperialism and anti-imperialism in the early-twentieth-century Indian Ocean circuit. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

How can Sociology be nudged away from its traditional parochialism to embrace empirical work that focuses on the global south? Marco Garrido (assistant professor of sociology at the University of Chicago) and Victoria Reyes (assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Riverside) are the editors of a recent special issue of Contexts magazine, New Ethnographies of the Global South, that brings together scholars doing fieldwork outside of the US and Europe. Marco and Victoria tell us about how they came to do ethnographic research on the Philippines and describe how the special issue emerged as part of a broader shift towards studying the Global South. We also talk with them about why and how there are pressures against overseas scholarship from within graduate programs and academic journals, how Global South ethnographers must translate their work for US audiences, and how younger scholars can pursue their interests while also positioning themselves for success. Victoria Reyes is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Riverside. Reyes studies culture, borders, and empire. Her work is driven by the question of how to understand territoriality in the 21stcentury. Her work has been published in Social Forces, Ethnography, Theory and Society, City & Community, Poetics, and International Journal of Comparative Sociology and she is the author of Global Borderlands: Fantasy, Violence, and Empire. Marco Garrido is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago. Garrido's work has focused on the relationship between the urban poor and middle class in Manila as located in slums and upper- and middle-class enclaves. His work has appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Qualitative Sociology, and the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research and he is the author of The Patchwork City: Class, Space, and Politics in Metro Manila. Alex Diamond is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Texas, Austin. Sneha Annavarapu is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. Dr. Sneha Annavarapu is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

For the next five weeks, SSEAC Stories will be hosting a mini-series of podcasts on research partnerships in Southeast Asia. In the context of COVID-19, it has become clear that working in partnership is a critical part of being able to do research in Southeast Asia. Through interviews with University of Sydney academics working across all disciplines and at all stages in their careers, this mini-series will highlight strategies that our members have used to build and sustain partnerships with collaborators in Southeast Asia. For our fourth episode in this mini-series, Dr Thushara Dibley speaks with Dr Fiona Lee about a unique research project she's been managing on cultural archives in Malaysia, where her research partner is also the subject of her research. In the podcast, Fiona mentioned that the ad was published in the mid-20th century; however, the correct date is 1934, as can be seen on the Malaysia Design Archive website: https://www.malaysiadesignarchive.org/advertisement-tiger-beer/. Dr Fiona Lee is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Sydney. She researches and teaches in the fields of postcolonial studies, 20th and 21st-century literature, and cultural studies. Her research explores the history of decolonisation and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, with a particular interest in Malaysia and Singapore, through the prisms of literature and the arts. She earned her PhD in English and a Women’s Studies Certificate at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY) in 2014. At CUNY, she taught literature and writing courses, as well as participated in various digital teaching and learning initiatives. From 2014-2016, she held a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Cultural Studies at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Fleeting Agencies: A Social History of Indian Coolie Women in British Malaya (Cambridge UP, 2021) disrupts the male-dominated narratives by focusing on gendered patterns of migration and showing how South Asian women labour migrants engaged with the process of migration, interacted with other migrants and negotiated colonial laws. This is the first study of Indian coolie women in British Malaya to date. In exploring the politicization of labour migration trends and gender relations in the colonial plantation society in British Malaya, the author foregrounds how the migrant Indian 'coolie' women manipulated colonial legal and administrative perceptions of Indian women; their gender-prescriptive roles, relations within patriarchal marriage institutions, and even the emerging Indian national independence movement in India and Malaya. All this, to ensure their survival, escape from unfavourable relations and situations, and improve their lives. The book also introduces the concept of situational or fleeting agency, which contributes to further a nuanced understanding of agency in the lives of Indian coolie women. Arunima Datta is a historian of South and Southeast Asia and the British Empire. Her main area of research interest focuses on the transnational mobility of South Asians in the colonial period (nineteenth and twentieth century) across different parts of the British Empire. Much of Dr. Datta’s research has simultaneously also focused on themes of labor history, transnational Indian nationalism, women’s and gender history. In addition to Fleeting Agencies, she has also published a number of articles and chapters, concerning South Asian labor, migration and women’s histories. Her current research project is centered around the migration and mobility of Indian Travelling Ayahs (travelling nannies) across the British Empire in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Dr. Datta also serves as a member of the editorial board for the journal Gender & History, Journal of Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society and Asian Journal of Social Science Studies. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

For the next five weeks, SSEAC Stories will be hosting a mini-series of podcasts on research partnerships in Southeast Asia. In the context of COVID-19, it has become clear that working in partnership is a critical part of being able to do research in Southeast Asia. Through interviews with University of Sydney academics working across all disciplines and at all stages in their careers, this mini-series will highlight strategies that our members have used to build and sustain partnerships with collaborators in Southeast Asia. In the third episode in this mini-series, Dr Thushara Dibley interviewed Associate Professor Jeffrey Neilson about a new collaborative project investigating sustainable agricultural production in Vietnam. He talks about the challenges of building relationships with partners you’ve never met before, beyond language barriers and closed international borders, and how this has had unexpectedly positive consequences for the project. Jeff's research focuses on economic geography, environmental governance and rural development in Southeast Asia, with specific area expertise on Indonesia. Jeff’s research interests are diverse and include issues of food security and food sovereignty, the global coffee industry, the global cocoa-chocolate industry, agrarian reform movements, sustainable livelihoods and alternative measures of well-being, agroecology, and environmental governance. He is currently leading a five-year research project examining the livelihood impacts of farmer engagement in value chain interventions across Indonesia. This research is contributing to cutting-edge international debates on the development effects of sustainability and certification programs, Geographical Indications and direct trade initiatives. Jeff is a fluent Indonesian language speaker and has conducted extended periods of ethnographic field research in the Toraja region of Sulawesi, where he pursues research in cultural change, landscape history, the ceremonial economy and oral poetic traditions. You can follow Jeffrey on Twitter @JeffreySydney. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Angkarn Kallayanapong (1926-2012) was arguably Thailand’s most famous poet of the modern period. His career spanned the era from the 1940s to the 1980s when Thai society was fundamentally transformed by rapid economic development and the process of globalization. His poetry is a testament to the massive disruption, dislocation, and alienation caused by these changes, and a lament for cultural loss. As Arnika Fuhrmann argues in her new book, Teardrops of Time: Buddhist Aesthetics in the Poetry of Angkarn Kallayanapong (SUNY Press, 2020), Angkarn employed a distinctly Buddhist aesthetics to express these ideas. But Angkarn also has a claim to being a poet of global significance. The famous American “beat poet”, Allen Ginsberg - whose poetry was also influenced by Buddhism - once met Angkarn and translated and published three of his poems. Patrick Jory teaches Southeast Asian History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. He can be reached at: p.jory@uq.edu.au. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

For the next five weeks, SSEAC Stories will be hosting a mini-series of podcasts on research partnerships in Southeast Asia. In the context of COVID-19, it has become clear that working in partnership is a critical part of being able to do research in Southeast Asia. Through interviews with University of Sydney academics working across all disciplines and at all stages in their careers, this mini-series will highlight strategies that our members have used to build and sustain partnerships with collaborators in Southeast Asia. In the second episode in this mini-series, Dr Thushara Dibley interviewed Professor Michael Dibley about a collaborative project looking at food security and malnutrition in Myanmar - a country he had previously never worked in before, and where he had to rely on local partners to navigate an array of complex challenges. Michael Dibley is a Professor in Global Public Health Nutrition and an internationally renowned nutritional epidemiologist with major research outputs and translation over the past 30 years. Professor Dibley is Co-Director of the Global Health & Nutrition Research Collaboration (GHNRC) at the Sydney School of Public Health and the founding member of The South Asia Infant Feeding Research Network (SAIFRN). Professor Dibley’s contributions have illuminated the double burden of under and over-nutrition prevalent in many countries across the Asia-Pacific. He has conducted many large multi-centre trials and has in-depth knowledge of the conduct and analysis of large-scale community-based cluster RCTs. He has also directed research assessing the magnitude of childhood and adolescent obesity, micronutrient deficiencies in women and children, infant and young child feeding practices, and a wide range of associated environmental, social and behavioural risks factors and their effects on health in South and Southeast Asia and Africa. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

For the next five weeks, SSEAC Stories will be hosting a mini-series of podcasts on research partnerships in Southeast Asia. In the context of COVID-19, it has become clear that working in partnership is a critical part of being able to do research in Southeast Asia. Through interviews with University of Sydney academics working across all disciplines and at all stages in their careers, this mini-series will highlight strategies that our members have used to build and sustain partnerships with collaborators in Southeast Asia. In our first episode, Dr Thushara Dibley speaks with Associate Professor Jenny-Ann Toribio about a ten-year long research collaboration that she’s developed with the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries in Timor-Leste to combat animal diseases. Jenny-Ann is Associate Professor in Epidemiology at the University of Sydney. Jenny-Ann has conducted extensive applied research focused on biosecurity, emergency animal diseases and zoonoses in Australia, Indonesia, Philippines and Timor-Leste. Recent research of note in Australia includes evaluation of avian influenza risk for commercial chicken farms in New South Wales and risk awareness and risk mitigation practices among horse owners in relation to Hendra virus. Further afield, she has led collaborative research in eastern Indonesia on the evaluation of the risk for highly pathogenic avian influenza and classical swine fever with poultry and pig movement respectively; in Timor Leste on smallholder pig production and health; and in Fiji on evaluation of zoonotic tuberculosis risk for dairy farmers. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation (Duke University Press, 2018) presents a multi-species ethnography of orangutans and humans that probes the shared susceptibilities of both species in the face of future extinction. In a series of provocative chapters, the book interweaves intimate entanglements in the workings of an orangutan rehabilitation centre with reflection on the work of care that draws on queer theory and feminist conceptions of welfare. By centralizing such rehabilitation efforts, the book reveals the contradictions inherent in such a system. The practice of rehabilitation, it shows, is underpinned by violence. Parreñas demonstrates the colonial origins of such an approach to conservation biology and how care within enclosures traps both humans and endangered primates alike. As such, we should urgently question how we could divest ourselves from the need for security that is dependent on cruelty and seek instead a decolonial era of co-existence which welcomes and finds joy in our moments of brief, mutual vulnerability. In this conversation, we discuss models of orangutan care, coerced copulations, the concept of “arrested autonomy” and how we as a species could love better. Juno Salazar Parreñas is an assistant professor at the Department of Science & Technology Studies at Cornell University. Her research interests centre on human-animal relations and the institution of environmental justice. This book received the 2019 Michelle Z. Rosaldo Prize, biennially awarded by the Association for Feminist Anthropology for a first book as well as honourable mentions for the 2019 New Millennium Prize, the 2019 Diana Forsythe Prize and the 2020 Harry Benda Prize from the Association for Asian Studies. For more on orangutans in Borneo, check out the following: SSEAC Interview with conservation scholar Dr. June Rubis here. NBN Interview with historian Prof. Robert Cribb here. Faizah Zakaria is an assistant professor of Southeast Asian history at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. You can find her website at www.faizahzak.com or Twitter @laurelinarien. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

What exactly is an archive? Who and what are involved in the making and naming of memory projects as archives? What kinds of stories become told through archives, and what stories are muted? Dr Beth Yahp chats with Dr Thushara Dibley about her work with Malaysia Design Archive, exploring the inner workings of the archive-making process, and inviting us to pay closer attention to the everyday stories of objects around us. This conversation is based on Beth’s participation in a series of Living Archives workshops developed in collaboration with Dr Fiona Lee from the Department of English and Ezrena Marwan and jac sm kee from Malaysia Design Archive. Originally from Malaysia, Beth Yahp is an award-winning author of fiction and non-fiction, whose work has been published in Australia and internationally. Her novel The Crocodile Fury was translated into several languages and her libretto, Moon Spirit Feasting, for composer Liza Lim, won the APRA Award for Best Classical Composition in 2003. Beth was the presenter of ‘Elsewhere’, a program for travellers on ABC Radio National (2010-2011). Her latest publication is a collection of short stories, The Red Pearl and Other Stories (Vagabond Press, 2017). Her travel memoir Eat First, Talk Later (Penguin Random House, 2015) was shortlisted for the 2018 Adelaide Festival Award for Literature (Non-Fiction). Beth teaches Creative Writing at the University of Sydney. Find out more about Malaysia Design Archive on their website: www.malaysiadesignarchive.org/ For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: sydney.edu.au/sseac. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Following a decade of U.S. bombing campaigns that obliterated northern Vietnam, East Germany helped Vietnam rebuild in an act of socialist solidarity. In Building Socialism: The Afterlife of East German Architecture in Urban Vietnam (Duke UP, 2020) Christina Schwenkel examines the utopian visions of an expert group of Vietnamese and East German urban planners who sought to transform the devastated industrial town of Vinh into a model socialist city. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research in Vietnam and Germany with architects, engineers, construction workers, and tenants in Vinh’s mass housing complex, Schwenkel explores the material and affective dimensions of urban possibility and the quick fall of Vinh’s new built environment into unplanned obsolescence. She analyzes the tensions between aspirational infrastructure and postwar uncertainty to show how design models and practices that circulated between the socialist North and the decolonizing South underwent significant modification to accommodate alternative cultural logics and ideas about urban futurity. By documenting the building of Vietnam’s first planned city and its aftermath of decay and repurposing, Schwenkel argues that underlying the ambivalent and often unpredictable responses to modernist architectural forms were anxieties about modernity and the future of socialism itself. This interview is part of an NBN special series on “Mobilities and Methods.” Christina Schwenkel is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Riverside, and author of The American War in Contemporary Vietnam: Transnational Remembrance and Representation. Alize Arıcan is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research focuses on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration in Istanbul, Turkey. Her work has been featured in Current Anthropology, City & Society, Radical Housing Journal, and entanglements: experiments in multimodal ethnography. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Jean DeBernardi, professor of anthropology at the University of Alberta, has written an outstanding account of the evolution of evangelical protestantism in south-east Aisa. Christian Circulations: Global Christianity and the Local Church in Penang and Singapore, 1819-2000 (NUS Press, 2020) her third book from the National University of Singapore Press, reconstructs the complex relationships between European and south-east Asian influences on Christian religion in two multi-cultural contexts. DeBernardi demonstrates the agency of local Christians, and the benefits of an historical approach that looks beyond linear denominational narratives to seek to understand the circulation of religious ideas. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

After decades of economic and political isolation, Myanmar’s rural economy is rapidly shifting from a narrow reliance on low-productivity agriculture, to a more diverse array of farm and non-farm activities. This transition poses urgent policy and scholarly questions for the analysis of inequality, livelihood patterns and food security among the country's rural population. Despite some gains, poverty, landlessness, access to non-farm job opportunities, and food insecurity remain significant challenges for rural Myanmar. Assistant Professor Mark Vicol caught up with Dr Thushara Dibley to discuss his work investigating the changing relationships between livelihood patterns, land, poverty and food security in Myanmar, arguing that in order to create impactful change, we need to rethink food and nutrition security and adapt to the local context. Mark Vicol is Assistant Professor in the Rural Sociology Group at Wageningen University, and an honorary associate of the School of Geosciences, University of Sydney. Mark is a human geographer by training and his research focuses on the intersections between rural livelihoods, smallholder agriculture and patterns of agrarian change in South and Southeast Asia. You can follow Mark on Twitter @markvicol. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: sydney.edu.au/sseac. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Alan Klima’s Ethnography #9 (Duke University Press, 2019) was co-written by a ghost. And that’s just the start of what’s going on in this eerie, singular book. It’s a discussion of finance in post-crash Thailand, a study of non-material histories, and an examination of the limits of anthropological writing. It’s also at once a complex and textured challenge to ethnographic realism and a compelling story about the life and death (and etc) of a young girl.  The book was a co-winner of 2020’s Gregory Bateson Prize and is available open access here. In today’s conversation, I do my best to ask Professor Klima about the status of ghosts in anthropology, tensions between narrative and theory, and how anthropologists can get weird with their writing. Alan Klima is Professor of Anthropology at UC Davis, his previous works include the book The Funeral Casino (Princeton University Press 2002) and the film Ghosts and Numbers (2010). Lachlan Summers is an eccentric billionaire and PhD candidate in cultural anthropology at UC Santa Cruz, where he researches Mexico City’s repeating earthquakes. He is a Contributing Editor at Cultural Anthropology, a member of the Emergent Futures CoLab, and can be found on Twitter. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Anyone who has taken any interest in the politics of Thailand at all in the last two decades could not help but have noticed the part that the country’s judiciary has played in them. Whereas before the 2000s the courts had at best a peripheral role in political life there, in recent years judges have at times weighed in dramatically on high-stakes conflicts. The causes and consequences of these judicial interventions are the subjects of a new book by Duncan McCargo, Fighting for Virtue: Justice and Politics in Thailand (Cornell University Press, 2019). McCargo sets as his task to explain who Thai judges are, how their minds work, and why they became so invested in politics from 2006 onwards. He critiques the courts in Thailand as suffering from what he calls hyperlegalism, while also offering sympathetic portraits of judges he met and observed at work. His abiding concern is with the relationship of the bench to the crown, and with how by taking a virtuous position in defence of the monarchy judges lost opportunities to contribute to a more progressive and just society. Duncan McCargo has also recently published Future Forward: The Rise and Fall of a Thai Political Party (NIAS Press, 2020), with Anyarat Chattarakul. Like this interview? If so you might also be interested in: Tyrell Haberkorn, In Plain Sight: Impunity and Human Rights in Thailand Samson Lim, Siam’s New Detectives: Visualizing Crime and Conspiracy in Modern Thailand Nick Cheesman is a Fellow in the Department of Political & Social Change, Australian National University. He co-hosts the New Books in Southeast Asian Studies channel and hosts the New Books in Interpretive Political & Social Science series on the New Books Network. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

As a Thai-Australian woman artist, Phaptawan Suwannakudt has long battled prejudice and discrimination relating to her gender. This disappointment with society’s dictates features at the heart of Phaptawan’s artistic practice. Spanning more than four decades, Phaptawan’s rich body of work includes paintings, sculptures and installations, informed by Buddhism, women’s issues and cross-cultural dialogue. Now her talents are on display on the global stage once again, in ‘The National 2021: New Australian Art’ from 26 March to 5 September 2021. In this episode of SSEAC Stories, Phaptawan Suwannakudt chats to Dr Natali Pearson about identity, power, and placemaking in the space in-between, recounting how she overcame hurdles to her artistic education and practice in what was once a male-dominated art scene, to become one of Australia’s and Thailand’s most prominent female artists. Phaptawan Suwannakudt (born in Thailand, 1959), is an internationally acclaimed Thai contemporary artist. She trained as a mural painter with her father, the late master Paiboon Suwannakudt, and subsequently led a team of painters that worked extensively in Buddhist temples throughout Thailand in the 1980s-90s. She was also involved in the women artists group ‘Tradisexion’ in 1995, and later in ‘Womanifesto’. Phaptawan relocated to Australia in 1996 where she completed a Master of Visual Arts at the Sydney College of the Arts. She has exhibited extensively in Australia, Thailand and internationally. Most recently, her work was featured in 'Beyond Bliss', the Inaugural Bangkok Art Biennale in 2018-2019, as well as in the 2020 Asia-Pacific Triennial of Performing Arts in Melbourne, Australia. Many of her works are held in public and private collections locally and overseas, including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the National Gallery of Thailand, the National Gallery Singapore, and the Thai Embassy in Paris, among others. You can find more information about Phaptawan Suwannakudt on her website: phaptawansuwannakudt.com/. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: sydney.edu.au/sseac. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Around the world, orangutans are widely recognised as an iconic species for environmental and wildlife conservation efforts. The rainforest in the Malaysian state of Sarawak is one of last remaining habitats of the nearly extinct Bornean orangutan. While conservation efforts have made the region a top priority for protecting orangutans, these efforts often sideline the indigenous peoples who live along the great apes. Dr June Rubis speaks with Dr Natali Pearson about her lifelong work in orangutan conservation, and reflects on mainstream conservation narratives, politics, and power relations around orangutan conservation in Sarawak and elsewhere in Borneo. In describing the more-than-human relations that link the indigenous Iban people and endangered orangutans, Dr Rubis encourages us to rethink our relationship to the environment, and to learn from indigenous knowledge to decolonise conservation and land management practices. June Rubis is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Indigenous Environmental Studies of the Sydney Environmental Institute at the University of Sydney. She researches Indigenous conservation and land management practices from a decolonial perspective, with a particular focus on Malaysian Borneo. Her recent project has focused on the human-environment and human-animal relationships within the multi-scalar forces of conservation in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo. She is a former conservation biologist, with twelve years of conservation fieldwork and Indigenous rights issues in Borneo (both Malaysian and Indonesian Borneo), and was born and raised in Sarawak. She is currently the co-chair of "Documenting Territories of Life" programme with the ICCA (Indigenous Communities Conserved Areas) consortium. You can follow June on Twitter @JuneRubis. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website here. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

The Politics of Love in Myanmar: LGBT Mobilization and Human Rights as a Way of Life (Stanford UP, 2018) offers an intimate ethnographic account of a group of LGBT activists before, during, and after Myanmar's post-2011 political transition. Lynette J. Chua explores how these activists devoted themselves to, and fell in love with, the practice of human rights and how they were able to empower queer Burmese to accept themselves, gain social belonging, and reform discriminatory legislation and law enforcement. Informed by interviews with activists from all walks of life—city dwellers, villagers, political dissidents, children of military families, wage laborers, shopkeepers, beauticians, spirit mediums, lawyers, students—Chua details the vivid particulars of the LGBT activist experience founding a movement first among exiles and migrants and then in Myanmar's cities, towns, and countryside. A distinct political and emotional culture of activism took shape, fusing shared emotions and cultural bearings with legal and political ideas about human rights. For this network of activists, human rights moved hearts and minds and crafted a transformative web of friendship, fellowship, and affection among queer Burmese. Chua's investigation provides crucial insights into the intersection of emotions and interpersonal relationships with law, rights, and social movements. Lynette J. Chua is Associate Professor of Law at the National University of Singapore. Her first book, Mobilizing Gay Singapore: Rights & Resistance in an Authoritarian State (2014), received the Distinguished Book Award from the American Sociology Association's Sociology of Law Section. Professor Michele Ford is the Director of the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, a university-wide multidisciplinary center at the University of Sydney, Australia. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Since it first arrived in Asia in 2018, African swine fever virus has caused a devastating pandemic resulting in more than a quarter of the global pig population being killed by this disease. As there is currently no vaccine or treatment for this disease, which has a nearly 100% mortality rate in infected pigs, a strong focus has been placed on preventative biosecurity measures. But this strategy has proved particularly challenging in Timor-Leste, where pigs often roam freely around villages. In this episode, Associate Professor Paul Hick speaks to Dr Thushara Dibley about his work reducing the impact of African swine fever and other animal diseases on local livelihoods in Timor-Leste. Paul Hick is an Associate Professor in veterinary virology at the Sydney School of Veterinary Science. Paul’s skills in field epidemiology and laboratory tests for animal disease are used to provide better understanding of complex multifactorial diseases across a range of farming systems. The goal is to reduce the burden of disease and promote ethical and sustainable animal production. Paul has 10 years’ experience studying disease in aquaculture in Indonesia where he aimed to help adapt to a food secure future through improved health, welfare and production of aquatic animals. Recently he has embarked on the new challenge of improving disease surveillance in Timor-Leste. A focus of these activities will be capacity building of the veterinary service to support diagnosis of disease and provide preventative advice for improved health, welfare and production. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website here. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In Miracles and Material Life: Rice, Ore, Traps and Guns in Islamic Malaya (Cambridge UP, 2020), Teren Sevea reveals the economic, environmental and religious significance of Islamic miracle workers (pawangs) in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Malay world. Through close textual analysis of hitherto overlooked manuscripts and personal interaction with modern pawangs readers are introduced to a universe of miracle workers that existed both in the past and in the present, uncovering connections between miracles and material life. Sevea demonstrates how societies in which the production and extraction of natural resources, as well as the uses of technology, were intertwined with the knowledge of charismatic religious figures, and locates the role of the pawangs in the spiritual economy of the Indian Ocean world, across maritime connections and Sufi networks, and on the frontier of the British Empire. Teren Sevea is a scholar of Islam and Muslim societies in South and Southeast Asia, and received his PhD in History from the University of California, Los Angeles. Before joining Harvard Divinity School, he served as Assistant Professor of South Asia Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Sevea is the author of Miracles and Material Life: Rice, Ore, Traps and Guns in Islamic Malaya (Cambridge University Press, 2020), and co-edited Islamic Connections: Muslim Societies in South and Southeast Asia (ISEAS, 2009). He is currently working on a forthcoming book entitled Singapore Islam: The Prophet's Port and Sufism across the Oceans. Kelvin Ng hosted the episode. He is a Ph.D. student at Yale University, History Department. His research interests broadly lie in the history of imperialism and anti-imperialism in the early-twentieth-century Indian Ocean circuit. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Financial inclusion has been one of the most prominent issues on the international development agenda in recent years, as access to payments, remittances, credit, savings and insurance services have been shown to improve economic resilience and livelihoods. While bank account access remains low in many developing countries, widespread access to mobile phones is providing a platform to push financial access even into remote areas. The Covid-19 pandemic has only reinforced the importance of digital finance, which provides a safe, socially-distanced means to transact, including for distribution of social assistance transfers. In this episode, Dr Russell Toth spoke to Dr Thushara Dibley about his work on digital finance schemes and how owning a mobile phone can help lift people out of poverty in Myanmar. Russell Toth is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Economics at the University of Sydney. He is a development microeconomist, focusing on the development of the private sector in Southeast Asia and the Pacific, on topics such as financial systems, digitisation, agricultural value chains, and small and medium enterprises. His research often involves partnering with private and public sector organisations to evaluate programs intended to improve private sector development outcomes. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from Cornell University. You can follow Russell on Twitter @russell_toth. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website here. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

We are familiar with the history of the division of Vietnam in 1954 into two states, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the north and the Republic of Vietnam in the south. What started out essentially as a civil war turned into one of the bloodiest conflicts of the Cold War. Much of the scholarly, and indeed popular interest in the history of this period has been about the bitter and divisive American experience of the war. But beyond the military conflict we are much less familiar with the everyday live of the youth in the two opposing states. Olga Dror's Making Two Vietnams: War and Youth Identities, 1965-1975 (Cambridge UP, 2020) is a rich and fascinating study of how Vietnamese youth in the two states experienced this tumultuous period in very different ways. Dror also argues that much maligned South Vietnam deserves fairer treatment in the history of the Vietnam War. Patrick Jory teaches Southeast Asian History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. He can be reached at: p.jory@uq.edu.au. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

There are many Orientalist stereotypes about Thailand. Known as the “Land of Smiles” to foreign tourists, they often comment on the calm and pleasant demeanor of a people seemingly averse to conflict. However, these are superficial remarks coming from observers who fail to understand the country’s language, culture, and deep social, cultural, and political tensions. Since the bloodless end of the absolute monarchy in 1932, there have been a dozen successful coups, a few more unsuccessful efforts, and the spilling of blood in several massacres. From the Cold War to well into the 21st century, Thailand has wavered between democracy and military rule, with the Chakri Dynasty’s kings ruling over the political pendulum. Pavin Chachavalpongpun’s edited volume Coup King Crisis: A Critical Interregnum in Thailand out in 2021 with Yale University Southeast Asia Studies is a collection of essays on the 2014 coup. The authors explore the complex relationship between the monarchy, the military, and democracy. The volume does an excellent job of giving larger context to Thai politics. Dr. Pavin Chachavalpongpun, a native of Bangkok, studied at Chulalongkorn University before earning his doctorate at SOAS. Before becoming an academic and an activist, he served as a diplomat in the Thai Ministry of Foreign Affairs for 13 years. He is currently an Associate Professor at Kyoto University’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies, where he edits the Kyoto Review of Southeast Asian Studies. Pavin Chachavalpongpun is arguably the most internationally prominent Thai dissident, penning critiques of the Thai junta for the world’s leading newspapers. He is the author or editor of a number of books on Thai politics. Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

How do you hold a government accountable for crimes it refuses to acknowledge?  Today's book, The International People's Tribunal for 1965 and the Indonesian Genocide (Routledge, 2019) emerges out of the International People's Tribunal for 1965. Rooted in a longer tradition of People's Tribunals, the IPT was an effort to remind civil society of the mass violence in Indonesia beginning in 1965 and to exert pressure on the Indonesian government and military to acknowledge the violence, hold perpetrators accountable and provide redress for victims. Today's guests played a prominent role in organizing and supporting the IPT. Their book serves as something of a history of the IPT and a summary of the evidence provided. But it also serves as kind of survey of the field at a critical moment in the study of the violence. In the interview, we talk about the IPT and its origin, organization and outcomes. We also try to situate the IPT in the broader context of scholarship about mass violence in Indonesia. And we talk about the interesting role of academics as public intellectuals and activists. Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Reforms in Myanmar (formerly Burma) have eased restrictions on citizens' political activities. Yet for most Burmese, Ardeth Maung Thawnghmung shows in Everyday Economic Survival in Myanmar (U Wisconsin Press, 2019), eking out a living from day to day leaves little time for civic engagement. Citizens have coped with extreme hardship through great resourcefulness. But by making bad situations more tolerable in the short term, these coping strategies may hinder the emergence of the democratic values needed to sustain the country's transition to a more open political environment. Thawnghmung conducted in-depth interviews and surveys of 372 individuals from all walks of life and across geographical locations in Myanmar between 2008 and 2015. To frame her analysis, she provides context from countries with comparable political and economic situations. Her findings will be welcomed by political scientists and policy analysts, as well by journalists and humanitarian activists looking for substantive, reliable information about everyday life in a country that remains largely in the shadows. Anyone interested in political economy, development, or culture in Myanmar or more generally will find Everyday Economic Survival in Myanmar an insightful and intellectually provocative read. John W. Traphagan, Ph.D. is Professor and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also a professor in the Program in Human Dimensions of Organizations. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Cambodia’s troubled history has often been depicted in terms of conflict, trauma and tussles between great powers. In Disturbed Forests, Fragmented Memories: Jarai and Other Lives in the Cambodian Highlands (U Washington Press, 2020), Jonathan Padwe assembles this history from narrative pieces by and of the Jarai, an ethnic minority living in the country’s highlands. Demonstrating how landscapes and social formations simultaneously changed each other, the book takes a reader through the various historical conjunctures - the Jarai’s agency in opening up pre-capitalist resources frontiers; the colonial state’s attempted rationalization of the landscape through rubber enterprises; trauma and displacement during the Vietnam War and the Khmer Rouge regime and re-diversification of the scarred land in recent years. In the process of accessing these histories, the book analyzes forest biota and agricultural practices, enabling a new approach to conceptualizing landscapes that melds representation, materiality and ecology. In this episode, we discuss how to approach ethnography in inaccessible places, conceptualizations of nature-culture, ecological de-diversification and re-diversification and how bombs could be remembered as flowers falling from the sky. Jonathan Padwe is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. His research interests center on social and environmental change in mainland Southeast Asian uplands, issues of equity and equality in development and indigenous identities. Faizah Zakaria is assistant professor of history at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. You can find her website at www.faizahzak.com or reach her on Twitter @laurelinarien. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Since 1990 public political criticism has evolved into a prominent feature of Vietnam's political landscape. Over the last three decades, such criticism has become widespread around four main clusters of issues: factory workers demanding better wages and living standards; villagers demonstrating and petitioning against corruption and land confiscations; citizens opposing China's encroachment into Vietnam and criticizing China-Vietnam relations; and dissidents objecting to the party-state regime and pressing for democratisation. In this episode of New Books in Southeast Asian Studies, Professor Michele Ford hosted Emeritus Professor Benedict Kerkvliet to discuss his book, Speaking Out in Vietnam: Public Political Criticism in a Communist Party–Ruled Nation (Cornell University Press, 2019). In his analysis of Communist Party–ruled Vietnam, Benedict Kerkvliet assesses the rise and diversity of these public displays of disagreement, showing that it has morphed from family whispers to large-scale use of electronic media, and argues that although we may think that the party-state represses public criticism, in fact Vietnamese authorities often tolerate and respond positively to such public and open protests. Benedict Kerkvliet is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Political and Social Change at the Australian National University. Fascinated with how ordinary people deal with big pressures on their lives, Ben has emphasized research on agrarian politics in Southeast Asia. Closely related is his study of interactions between ordinary people and authorities or other elites. He is currently researching local reactions to major recent national policies in the Philippines and Vietnam. Professor Michele Ford is the Director of the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, a university-wide multidisciplinary center at the University of Sydney, Australia. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

This edited volume is the first book-length study of Buddhist tourism in contemporary Asia in the English language. Featuring chapters from diverse contributors from religious studies, anthropology, and art history, Buddhist Tourism in Asia (University of Hawaii Press, 2020) explores themes of Buddhist imaginaries, place-making, secularization, and commodification in three parts. The first part, Buddhist Imaginaries and Place-Making features four interesting chapters on how Buddhism is marketed and promoted to domestic and international tourists, as well as how these imaginaries “sediments” over time. The chapters in Part II, Secularizing the Sacred, reveal interestingly that Buddhist tourism tends to create alliances with secular forces as strategies to promote their traditions and sacred sites. Part III of the volume shifts to discussions of commodification in Buddhism and its consequences. Here, contributors show that commodification is not necessarily at odds with Buddhism nor is it a new phenomenon. Covering a wide range of Buddhist sites across Asia and their multi-layered participants in Buddhist tourism, this book uses the unique lens of tourism to offer fresh perspectives on Buddhist spaces, identities, and practices. Courtney Bruntz is Assistant Professor, Philosophy & Religious Studies, at Doane University Brooke Schedneck is Assistant Professor, Religious Studies, at Rhodes College Daigengna Duoer is a PhD student at the Religious Studies Department, University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation researches on transnational and transregional Buddhist networks connecting twentieth-century Inner Mongolia, Manchuria, Republican China, Tibet, and the Japanese Empire. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Asymmetrical Neighbors: Borderland State-Building Between China and Southeast Asia (Oxford UP, 2019) explains the variations in state building across the borderland area between China, Myanmar, and Thailand. It presents a comparative historical account of the state and nation-building processes in the ethnically diverse and geographically rugged borderland area where China meets Southeast Asia. It argues the failure of the Myanmar state to consolidate its control over its borderland area is partly due to the political and military meddling by its two more powerful neighbors during the Cold War. Furthermore, both China and Thailand, being more economically advanced than Myanmar, have exerted heavy economic influence on the borderland area at the cost of Myanmar’s economic sovereignty.  The book provides a historical account of the borderland that traces the pattern of relations between valley states and upland people before the mid-twentieth century. Then it discusses the implications of the Chinese nationalist KMT troops in Burma and Thailand and Burmese and Thai communist insurgencies since the mid-1960s on attempts by the three states to consolidate their respective borderland areas. The book also portrays the dynamics of the borderland economy and the dominance of both China and Thailand on Myanmar’s borderland territory in the post-Cold War period. It further discusses the comparative nation-building processes among the three states and the implications for the ethnic minority groups in the borderland area and their national identity contestations. Finally, the book provides an updated account of the current ethnic conflicts along Myanmar’s restive borderland and its ongoing peace negotiation process. Enze Han is an Associate professor in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at University of Hong Kong. Victoria Lupașcu is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at University of Montréal. Her areas of interest include medical humanities, visual art, 20th and 21st Chinese literature and Global South studies. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Joko Widodo, or “Jokowi”, as he is popularly known, famously rose from a riverside shack to become president of Indonesia in 2014. In a country better known for decades of authoritarian rule, Jokowi’s story has captured the imagination of observers of Indonesia hopeful for the country’s full transition to democracy. Ben Bland’s Man of Contradiction: Joko Widodo and the Struggle to Remake Indonesia (Penguin, 2021) is the first political biography of Indonesia’s president in the English language. His book goes behind this remarkable story to try to understand who Jokowi really is. He argues that the contradictions apparent in Jokowi the politician, reflect the deep contradictions of the Indonesia nation. Jokowi represents both the potential of Indonesia, as well as its limitations. Patrick Jory teaches Southeast Asian History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. He can be reached at: p.jory@uq.edu.au. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

COVID-19 has had such far-reaching impacts that it can be, and has been, studied from the perspective of almost any academic discipline. For geographers, the ways in which COVID-19 affects place, space and movement is particularly consequential. It is at once a global phenomenon, yet it also ties us to localities in a way not experienced for a very long time in our increasingly mobile and interconnected world. In Southeast Asia, the impact of COVID-19 has been particularly severe for migrant workers, who have found themselves un- or under-employed and sometimes stranded as economic activity has shut down and borders have closed. Professor Hirsch is part of a wide-ranging review of the implications of COVID-19 for migrant workers across the Asia-Pacific region, bringing in four main dimensions: what does it mean in terms of governance/rights, gender, public health and the environment? On the occasion of International Migrants Day on 18 December, Professor Philip Hirsch spoke to Dr Natali Pearson about the impact that the pandemic has had on migrant workers in mainland Southeast Asia, and how we can better protect this vulnerable community. Philip Hirsch is Emeritus Professor of Human Geography at the University of Sydney, where he taught from 1987 to 2017. He has written extensively on environment, development, natural resource governance and agrarian change in the Mekong Region. He is now based in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Books published over the past 10 years include the (edited) “Handbook of the Environment in Southeast Asia” (Routledge 2017), (co-authored) “The Mekong: A socio-legal approach to river basin development” (Earthscan 2016), (co-authored) "Powers of Exclusion: Land dilemmas in Southeast Asia" (NUS Press and Hawaii University Press 2011) and (co-edited) "Tracks and Traces: Thailand and the work of Andrew Turton" (Amsterdam University Press 2010). In 2021, University of Washington Press will publish his co-edited, “Turning land into capital: development and dispossession in the Mekong Region”. Professor Hirsch is fluent in Thai and Lao, speaks intermediate Vietnamese and elementary Khmer. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website here. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

As environmental emergencies go, the explosion of plastic waste is right up there. With global plastic production exceeding 300 million tonnes each year, the world has generally looked at it as an unsightly menace to be removed, but Professor Thomas Maschmeyer has gone beyond that idea. His work challenges our perceptions of waste, by turning plastic into an asset that people actively seek out to recycle because it can make them money. What he created might just clean up the planet and lift people out of poverty. Professor Thomas Maschmeyer speaks to Dr Thushara Dibley about his ground-breaking work developing catalytic technology that can recycle any kind of plastic and turn it into a valuable resource, and how he is helping Timor-Leste become the world's first plastics-neutral country. Professor Thomas Maschmeyer is Founding and Executive Chairman of Gelion Technologies (2015), Co-Founder of Licella Holdings (2007) and inventor of its Cat-HTRTM technology. He is also the Principle Technology Consultant for Cat-HTR licensee’s Mura Technologies and RenewELP. In 2001 he was one of the founding Professors of Avantium, a Dutch High-tech company. Most recently he was awarded Prime Minister’s Prize for Innovation (2020) – Australia’s top prize in the field. He concurrently holds the position of Professor of Chemistry at the University of Sydney, where he established and leads the Laboratory of Advanced Catalysis for Sustainability and served as Founding Director of the $150m University of Sydney Nano Institute (2015–2018). In 2011 he was elected youngest Foreign Member of the Academia Europea as well as Fellow of the Australian Academy of Sciences, the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, the Royal Australian Chemical Institute (RACI) and, in 2014, of the Royal Society of NSW. In 2019 he received an Honorary Doctorate from the Universities of Ca’Foscari Venice and Trieste in recognition of his scientific and societal contributions in chemistry. He has authored 330+ publications, been cited 13,000+ times, including 24 patents. He serves on the editorial/advisory boards of ten international journals and received many awards, including the Le Févre Prize of the Australian Academy of Sciences (2007), the RACI Applied Research Award (2011), the RACI Weickhardt Medal for Economic Contributions (2012), the RACI R. K. Murphy Medal for Industrial Chemistry (2018) the Eureka Prize for Leadership in Innovation and Science (2018), the Federation of Asian Chemical Societies’ Contribution to Economic Development Award (2019). For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website here. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

The Philippine Revolution of 1896-1905, which began against Spain and continued against the United States, took place in the context of imperial subjugation and local resistance across Southeast Asia. Yet scholarship on the revolution and the turn of the twentieth century in Asia more broadly has largely approached this pivotal moment in terms of relations with the West, at the expense of understanding the East-East and Global South connections that knit together the region's experience. Asian Place, Filipino Nation: A Global Intellectual History of the Philippine Revolution, 1887-1912 (Columbia UP, 2020) reconnects the Philippine Revolution to the histories of Southeast and East Asia through an innovative consideration of its transnational political setting and regional intellectual foundations. Nicole CuUnjieng Aboitiz charts turn-of-the-twentieth-century Filipino thinkers' and revolutionaries' Asianist political organizing and proto-national thought, scrutinizing how their constructions of the place of Asia connected them to their regional neighbors. She details their material and affective engagement with Pan-Asianism, tracing how colonized peoples in the "periphery" of this imagined Asia--focusing on Filipinos, but with comparison to the Vietnamese--reformulated a political and intellectual project that envisioned anticolonial Asian solidarity with the Asian "center" of Japan. CuUnjieng Aboitiz argues that the revolutionary First Philippine Republic's harnessing of transnational networks of support, activism, and association represents the crucial first instance of Pan-Asianists lending material aid toward anticolonial revolution against a Western power. Uncovering the Pan-Asianism of the periphery and its critical role in shaping modern Asia, Asian Place, Filipino Nation offers a vital new perspective on the Philippine Revolution's global context and content. Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Monks in Motion: Buddhism and Modernity Across the South China Sea (Oxford University Press 2020) is the first monograph in the English language to explore the transnationally connected history of modern Buddhist communities in China and Southeast Asia. Dr. Chia introduces the idea of “South China Sea Buddhism,” which allows Buddhist studies to move away from the “China-centered perspective” when studying overseas Chinese Buddhism. This maritime perspective of looking at Buddhism in transregional and transnational networks also invites scholars to rethink “Southeast Asian Buddhism,” which is often associated with Theravāda Buddhist majority on the mainland. Drawing on multilingual research conducted in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, Dr. Chia traces the movements of three Buddhists active in the South China Sea in the twentieth century. Through the stories of Chuk Mor, Yen Pei, and Ashin Jinarakkhita, Monks in Motion discusses how modern Buddhists negotiated and constructed cultural and religious identities in the South China Sea. Daigengna Duoer is a PhD student at the Religious Studies Department, University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation researches on transnational and transregional Buddhist networks connecting twentieth-century Inner Mongolia, Manchuria, Republican China, Tibet, and the Japanese Empire. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Globally, breast cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer in women, with over 1 million cases detected annually. The disease is particularly worrisome in Vietnam, where breast cancer incidence has more than doubled over the last two decades, making it the leading cancer among Vietnamese women, ahead of cervical and uterine cancers. It has also demonstrated a high level of aggressiveness, with over 80% of breast cancer patients presenting with local or distant metastases, while only 28% of breast cancers in Australia were diagnosed in late stages. Thus mortality rates are twofold higher in Vietnam compared with developed countries. Professor Patrick Brennan talks to Dr Natali Pearson about his decade-long work on improving breast cancer detection in Vietnam. Professor Patrick Brennan is a leading researcher at the University of Sydney's School of Health Sciences. His research involves exploring novel technologies and techniques that enhance the detection of clinical indicators of disease, whilst minimising risk to the patient. His research has involved most major imaging modalities including X-ray, computerised tomography, ultrasound and magnetic resonance imaging, with a particular focus on breast and chest imaging. His research findings have translated into improved diagnosis and management of important disease states such as cancer, musculo-skeletal injury, arthritis and multiple sclerosis. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website here. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In her latest book, Projectland: Life in a Lao Socialist Model Village (University of Hawaii Press), due out in May 2021, Associate Professor Holly High argues that socialism remains an important consideration in understanding “the politics of culture and the culture of politics” in Laos. She contends that understanding socialism in Laos requires moving past the ideological condemnations and emotion-laden judgements that marked the Cold War era, as well as paying attention to everyday experience. In this episode, Associate Professor Holly High talks to Dr Natali Pearson about her decades-long anthropological fieldwork in rural parts of Laos, recounting little-known stories of life in a remote village in Sekong Province. She explores the role of the State in shaping local aspirations, world views and beliefs, as well as discusses notions of gender and how socialist values of equality, unity and independence have influenced the lives of women in one of Laos' model villages. Warning: This episode contains discussions of gender-based violence which may be distressing to some listeners. Listener discretion is advised. Associate Professor Holly High is Chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Sydney. She has been researching Lao PDR since the year 2000. Her work has been characterised by long-term fieldwork in rural and remote Laos, where she studies everyday experience in relation to larger issues in Laos and the world. Her research has looked at poverty reduction projects and agricultural, cultural, and health policies. In 2020, Associate Professor Holly High was awarded an Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellowship for her work on reproductive health policy rollout in Laos. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website here. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

For centuries Southeast Asia has enjoyed a relatively pleasant relationship with China, its massive neighbor to the north. While Chinese merchants and laborers were common throughout the region, with exception of a 1,000-year occupation of northern Vietnam, China has rarely attempted to exercise control over Southeast Asia. However, in the past two decades, as the Chinese economy has grown by leaps and bounds, the People’s Republic of China has begun to play an increasingly assertive role in mainland and maritime Southeast Asia. President Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative and Maritime Silkroad project seek to build infrastructure throughout the region; Chinese investors have built casinos in Cambodia and Laos, drawing gamblers south; China’s navy has been building bases on tiny islands, shoals, and reefs in the disputed South China Sea; and citizens from the People’s Republic of China have started to move to Malaysia and Singapore to escape east China’s infamous pollution. Meanwhile, Sinophobia remains a potent force in Indonesian and Malaysian politics; Thai and Khmer social media is full of reports and rumors of bad behavior by Chinese tourists; nationalist mobs in Vietnam have attacked Chinese owned businesses; and Chinese dams are creating an environmental disaster for the lower Mekong Basin. Sebastian Strangio’s In the Dragon’s Shadow: Southeast Asia in the Chinese Century (Yale UP, 2020) carefully dissects the People’s Republic of China’s complicated relationships with its southern neighbors. Sebastian Strangio is the Southeast Asia editor for The Diplomat. Since 2008, his work has been published in Foreign Policy, The New York Times, The Economist, The New Republic, Forbes, Al Jazeera, The Atlantic, The Phnom Penh Post, and many other publications. In addition to living and working in Cambodia, he has reported from the various ASEAN nations, Russia, South Korea, and Bangladesh. His first book, Hun Sen’s Cambodia was first published by Yale University Press and Silkworm Books in 2014. It was named as one of the 2015 Books of the Year by Foreign Affairs. Yale University Press has just issued a revised and updated paperback edition of the book under the title Cambodia: From Pol Pot to Hun Sen And Beyond. Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford, 2018). When he’s not quietly reading or happily talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Singapore’s history has generally been represented through a linear, upward trajectory “from Third World to the First,” in the words of the postcolonial state’s founding father Lee Kuan Yew. In his book Singapore: A Modern History (Bloomsbury, 2020), Michael D. Barr synthesizes a story that complicates this progress narrative and critiques the foundational timeline of the state-sponsored history known as the ‘Singapore Story.’ At the center of the Singapore Story is modernization through good governance and outstanding leadership that set it apart from the rest of the region. This book re-positions Singapore’s history vis-à-vis peninsular Malaysia and the world, while re-considering its claims to exceptional governance. In this interview, we discuss the problematics of the “Singapore Story,” how we can reposition figures like Raffles and Lee Kuan Yew when we step back from a great man narrative, the relationship of colonialism with modernity, the elimination of the political left in Singapore and the prospects of sustaining a Singapore exceptionalism. Michael D. Barr is Associate Professor of International Studies at Flinders University in Australia. He was recently elected as a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and is an associate editor of Asian Studies Review. Faizah Zakaria is an assistant professor of history at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. You can find her website at www.faizahzak.com or reach her on Twitter @laurelinarien. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Social media has become a crucial avenue for political discourse in Southeast Asia, given its potential as a “liberation technology” in both democratising and authoritarian states. Yet the growing decline in internet freedom and increasingly repressive and manipulative use of social media tools by governments means that social media is now an essential platform for control. “Disinformation” and “fake news” production is growing rapidly, and national governments are creating laws which attempt to address this trend, but often only exacerbate the situation of state control. In this episode, Dr Aim Sinpeng and Dr Ross Tapsell discuss their new book, From Grassroots Activism to Disinformation: Social Media in Southeast Asia (ISEAS Publishing, 2020), with Dr Thushara Dibley, and explore some of the more recent controversies surrounding social media use in Southeast Asia. Aim Sinpeng is a Senior Lecturer in Comparative Politics at the University of Sydney. Her research interests centre on the relationships between digital media, political participation and political regimes in Southeast Asia. Aim is particularly interested in the role of social media in shaping state-society relations and inducing political and social change. Aim received Facebook research grants to study hate speech in the Asia Pacific (with Fiona Martin) and the effectiveness of countering misinformation strategies (with Denis Stukal). Her other scholarly works examine popular movements against democracy in democratising states. She is co-editor of From Grassroots Activism to Disinformation: Social Media in Southeast Asia (ISEAS Publishing, 2020). She is the author of a forthcoming book, Opposing Democracy in the Digital Age: the Yellow Shirts in Thailand (University of Michigan Press). You can follow Aim on Twitter: @aimsinpeng. Ross Tapsell is a Senior Lecturer and researcher at the Australian National University’s College of Asia and the Pacific, specialising in Southeast Asian media. He is the author of Media Power in Indonesia: Oligarchs, Citizens and the Digital Revolution (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017) and co-editor of Digital Indonesia: Connectivity and Divergence (ISEAS Publishing, 2017) and From Grassroots Activism to Disinformation: Social Media in Southeast Asia (ISEAS Publishing, 2020). He has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, VICE and other publications in the Southeast Asian region. Ross is currently Director of the ANU's Malaysia Institute, and is involved in the ANU's Indonesia Project and the academic blog New Mandala. You can follow Ross on Twitter: @RossTapsell. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website here. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Fluid Jurisdictions: Colonial Law and Arabs in Southeast Asia (Cornell University Press, 2020) by Prof. Nurfadzilah Yahaya is a wide-ranging, geographically ambitious book that tells the story of the Arab diaspora within the context of British and Dutch colonialism, unpacking the community's ambiguous embrace of European colonial authority in Southeast Asia. Here, Yahaya looks at colonial legal infrastructure – discussing how it impacted, and was impacted by, Islam and ethnicity. But more importantly, she follows the actors who used this framework to advance their particular interests. Yahaya explains why Arab minorities in the region helped to fuel the entrenchment of European colonial legalities: their itinerant lives made institutional records necessary. Securely stored in centralized repositories, such records could be presented as evidence in legal disputes. In order to ensure accountability down the line, Arab merchants valued notarial attestation land deeds, inheritance papers, and marriage certificates by recognized state officials. Colonial subjects continually played one jurisdiction against another, sometimes preferring that colonial legal authorities administer Islamic law—even against fellow Muslims. Fluid Jurisdictions draws on lively material from multiple international archives to demonstrate the interplay between colonial projections of order and their realities, Arab navigation of legally plural systems in Southeast Asia and beyond, and the fraught and deeply human struggles that played themselves out between family, religious, contract, and commercial legal orders. Nurfadzilah Yahaya is a legal historian of the Indian Ocean. She is currently Assistant Professor at the History Department, National University of Singapore (NUS). She was a Research Fellow at the Asia Research Institute until June 2016, NUS. She is the Editor of the World Legal History Blog on Humanities and Social Sciences Online (H-net). She received her PhD in History from Princeton University in 2012, and was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Islamic Studies in Washington University in St. Louis until June 2015. She has published journal articles in Law and History Review, Indonesia and the Malay World, and The Muslim World. Kelvin Ng hosted the episode. He is a Ph.D. student at Yale University, History Department. His research interests broadly lie in the history of imperialism and anti-imperialism in the early-twentieth-century Indian Ocean circuit. Janna Aladdin is a recent MA graduate of NYU’s Near Eastern studies program. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

From glove puppets of Chinese origin and Hakka religious processions, to wartime political theatre and contemporary choirs and dance groups, the diverse performance practices of ethnic Chinese communities throughout Southeast Asia highlight the complexity of minority self-representation and sense of identity of a community that is often considered solely in socioeconomic terms. Each performance form is placed in its social and historical context, highlighting how Sino-Southeast Asian groups and individuals have represented themselves locally and nationally to the region's majority populations as well as to state power. In this episode, Dr Josh Stenberg talks to Dr Natali Pearson about Sino-Southeast Asian self-representation in performance arts, and challenges essentialist readings of ethnicity or minority. In showing the fluidity and adaptability of Sino-Southeast Asian identities as expressed in performance and public display, Dr Stenberg enriches our understanding of Southeast Asian cultures and art forms, Southeast Asian Chinese identities, and transnational cultural exchanges. Dr Josh Stenberg is a Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies in the School of Languages and Cultures at the University of Sydney. A scholar of Sino-Southeast Asian performance and literature, he examines the intersection of ethnic and political identity through the cultural performance of minority ethnic communities. He is the author of Minority Stages: Sino-Indonesian Performance and Public Display (University of Hawaii Press, 2019). In 2020, Dr Stenberg was awarded an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) to conduct further research into the reception of China's state-funded cultural diplomacy initiatives among Overseas Chinese communities in multicultural societies. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website here. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Southeast Asia's demand for protein in the form of animal meat is increasing by more than 4% every year. This has important consequences for regional food security and household incomes and wellbeing. Laos and Cambodia are ideally placed in the region to meet the demand. However, current livestock production and health practices pose a constraint and are preventing this opportunity from being realised. In addition, farmers in both countries contend with high costs of production, variable returns and changing government policy, which is similar to the situation experienced by Australian farmers. Associate Professor Russell Bush talks to Dr Natali Pearson about his work towards improving livestock health and food security in Laos and Cambodia, and describes how better livestock management can have a transformative impact on livelihoods. Associate Professor Russell Bush is an expert in applied Livestock Production within the School of Veterinary Science at the University of Sydney, leading research and teaching activities in Southeast Asia and Australia. He is also a cattle and sheep producer from southern New South Wales with over 45 years’ experience which provides a unique perspective when interacting with smallholder farmers in Laos and Cambodia where three multi-year ACIAR funded livestock research for development projects have recently concluded. A/Prof Bush recognises the value of participatory training involving multi-disciplinary teams to ensure key messages are conveyed to stakeholders, including farmers (industry), support personnel, government, and university staff/students. He has also worked on previous livestock projects in Indonesia, China, and Pakistan. If you'd like to know more about Associate Professor Bush's work, head to the Mekong Livestock blog: mekonglivestock.wordpress.com/publications/. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website here. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In Camps: Vietnamese Refugees, Asylum Seekers and Repatriates (University of California Press, 2020) is an in-depth study of the fate of the nearly 800,000 Vietnamese refugees who left their country by boat, and sought refugee in Southeast Asia and the Pacific. The experiences of these populations and the subsequent policies remain relevant today; Who is a refugee? Who determines their status? And how does it change over time? Jana K. Lipman takes the reader to visit camps in Guam, Malaysia, the Phillipines and Hong Kong, drawing out the politics, policies and how these impacted refugees rights to remain, be resettled or repatriated. She draws out the tensions between the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and the US government, drawing into focus the direct impact this had on the day-to-day lives of those stuck in camps. Her research is the first major work to pay close attention to first-landing host sites, with particular emphasis on Vietnamese activism in the camps and as part of the diaspora. The work will unsettle conventionally accepted accounts of Southeast Asian migration to the US. It reveals how first asylum seeker sites caused UNHCR to reshape international refugee policy. It is a gripping read; historical and also somewhat anthropological, it raises concerns of humanitarianism, human rights and Asian American studies to confront the legal and moral dilemmas, and the obligations that continue to face the US and all host countries of refugees and asylum seekers. It causes the reader to recall the humanity of those seeking asylum, and question current government policies. Though the plight of the Vietnamese refugees is specific, the human need for certainty and safety are universal. This is essential reading in relation to any refugee policy, and human rights and humanitarianism more broadly. Jana K. Lipman is an Associate Professor of History at Tulane University. She is a scholar of U.S. foreign relations, U.S. immigration, and labor history. Her first book was Guantánamo: A Working-Class History between Empire and Revolution.  Jane Richards is a doctoral candidate in Human Rights Law at the University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include disability, equality, criminal law and civil disobedience. You can find her on twitter @JaneRichardsHK where she avidly follows the Hong Kong’s protests and its politics.   Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Myanmar is scheduled to hold general elections in November 2020. While the country has experienced political liberalisation since 2011, the latest Freedom House Report ranked Myanmar as “not free.” Dr Roger Lee Huang talks with Dr Natali Pearson about Myanmar's ongoing regime transition, arguing that the country’s "disciplined democracy" contains features of democratic politics, but at its core remains authoritarian. Dr Roger Lee Huang is Lecturer in Political Violence with the Department of Security Studies & Criminology at Macquarie University. Roger has broad research interests in the politics, international relations, and security of East and Southeast Asian states. He has previously researched and worked in political and policy circles in Myanmar, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Roger recently published 'The Paradox of Myanmar's Regime Change' with Routledge. Find out more and purchase the book here. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website here. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Gregory Forth, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Alberta and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, has studied the Nage people of the eastern Indonesian island of Flores for more than three decades. In A Dog Pissing at the Edge of a Path: Animal Metaphors in an Eastern Indonesian Society (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2019), he focuses on how the Nage understand metaphor and how their knowledge of animals has helped to shape specific expressions. Based on extensive field research, the book explores the meaning and use of over 500 animal metaphors employed by the Nage. Additionally, Forth investigates how closely their indigenous concept of pata péle corresponds to the Greek-derived English concept of metaphor, and demonstrates that the Nage people understand these figures of speech in the same way as Westerners - namely as conventional ways of speaking about people and objects, not expressions of an essential identity between their animal vehicles and human referents. Theoretically engaging with anthropology's recent ontological turn, the book considers whether metaphors reveal significant differences in conceptions of human-animal relations, the human-animal contrast, and human understanding of other humans in different parts of the world. To get a 20% discount on this book, go to this website here and enter this code on check out: MQF2. Akash Ondaatje is a Research Associate at Know History. He studied at McGill University (B.A. History) and Queen’s University (M.A. History), where he researched human-animal relations and transatlantic exchanges in eighteenth-century British culture through his thesis, Animal Ascension: Elevation and Debasement Through Human-Animal Associations in English Satire, 1700-1820. Contact: 17amo2@queensu.ca   Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Deep in the jungles of Myanmar lie the remains of an ancient kingdom, the 15th-century royal city of Mrauk-U. Located in the Bay of Bengal and separated from the rest of the country by the Arakan mountain range, Mrauk-U Township boasts a stunning rural landscape dotted with the hundreds of spires of stone temples, remnants of the former glories of the Arakan Kingdom. Long abandoned by local authorities, the Buddhist temple complex of Mrauk-U was brought back to the spotlight in 2017, when former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan led a mission to Rakhine State and urged Myanmar to nominate Mrauk-U for UNESCO World Heritage Site status. The proposal sought not only to protect the city’s many archaeological sites from ruin, but also aspired to nurture a communal sense of pride in the local population’s heritage. Yet in recent years, efforts to uncover Mrauk-U’s mysteries have been threatened by conflict between the Myanmar military and a secessionist group, the Arakan Army. In this episode, Dr Bob Hudson speaks to Dr Thushara Dibley about the remote archaeological site of Mrauk-U, its turbulent history, and how attempts to have it recognised as a UNESCO World Heritage Site are contributing to peacebuilding efforts in a region torn by civil conflict. Bob Hudson is an archaeologist, an associate of the Asian Studies Program, and an adviser to UNESCO and the Myanmar Ministry of Religious Affairs and Culture. Bob holds a PhD in archaeology from the University of Sydney, and recently completed a fellowship with the Australian Research Council. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website here.   Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

The tail end of the twentieth century was a good time for constitutional lawyers. Leapfrogging around the globe, they offered advice on how to amend, write or rewrite one state constitution after the next following the collapse of the Soviet Union and with it, the communist bloc. Largely overlooked in the flurry of constitution drafting in this period, officials in Myanmar worked away on a new constitution without any experts from abroad—or, for that matter, many of those at home. Soldiers watched over them, dictating terms for what became the 2008 Constitution of Myanmar: the document that lays the parameters for formal political contestation and representation there today. As the country gets set to go to the polls in November 2020, in this episode of New Books in Southeast Asian Studies, Melissa Crouch discusses her The Constitution of Myanmar: A Contextual Analysis (Hart, 2019; shortlisted for the book award of the Australian Legal Research Awards), and with it, the constitutional drafting process, its output, and its implications for politics in Myanmar now and in the foreseeable future Like this interview? If so you might also be interested in: Roman David & Ian Holliday, Liberalism and Democracy in Myanmar Benjamin Schonthal, Buddhism, Politics and the Limits of Law Nick Cheesman is a Fellow in the Department of Political & Social Change, Australian National University. He co-hosts the New Books in Southeast Asian Studies channel and hosts the New Books in Interpretive Political & Social Science series on the New Books Network. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Indonesia’s labour movement emerged weak and disorganised after more than 30 years under authoritarian rule. Yet in the two decades since the country’s transition to democracy, it has emerged as a vibrant, even influential, political actor. While the movement’s rise to success has not been without its challenges, it achieved its goals by adopting a unique combination of political tactics. As Indonesia erupts in violent protests over the passing of a controversial new jobs law, Professor Michele Ford reflects on the history of Indonesia’s labour movement, exploring how international support, the post-transition political opportunity structure, and unions’ tactical creativity combined to reinvigorate the labour movement, leading to substantial rises in the minimum wage and some policy success. Professor Michele Ford is Director of the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre. Her research focuses on trade union aid, Southeast Asian labour movements and labour migration. Michele’s work has been supported by a number of Australian Research Council Discovery Project grants related to these and other topics. She has also been involved in extensive consultancy work for the ILO, the international labour movement and the Australian government. You can follow Michele on Twitter @MicheleSSEAC. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre's website here. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Ever since American troops occupied the Philippines in 1898, generations of Filipinos have served in and alongside the U.S. armed forces. In Bound By War: How the United States and the Philippines Built America’s First Pacific Century (Basic Books, 2020), historian Christopher Capozzola reveals this forgotten history, showing how war and military service forged an enduring, yet fraught, alliance between Americans and Filipinos. As the U.S. military expanded in Asia, American forces confronted their Pacific rivals from Philippine bases. And from the colonial-era Philippine Scouts to post-9/11 contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, Filipinos were crucial partners in the exercise of US power. Their service reshaped Philippine society and politics and brought thousands of Filipinos to America. Telling the epic story of a century of conflict and migration, Bound by War is a fresh, definitive portrait of this uneven partnership and the two nations it transformed. Christopher Capozzola is Professor of History at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA Holger Droessler is an Assistant Professor of History at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. His research focuses on the intersection of empire and labor in the Pacific. wpi.edu/people/faculty/hdroessler @HolgerDroessler Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Lanka, Ceylon, Sarandib: merely three disparate names for a single island? Perhaps. Yet the three diverge in the historical echoes, literary cultures, maps and memories they evoke. Names that have intersected and overlapped - in a treatise, a poem, a document - only to go their own ways. But despite different trajectories, all three are tied to narratives of banishment and exile. In Banishment and Belonging: Exile and Diaspora in Sarandib, Lanka and Ceylon (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Ronit Ricci suggests that the island served as a concrete exilic site as well as a metaphor for imagining exile across religions, languages, space and time: Sarandib, where Adam was banished from Paradise; Lanka, where Sita languished in captivity; and Ceylon, faraway island of exile for Indonesian royalty under colonialism. Using Malay manuscripts and documents from Sri Lanka, Javanese chronicles, and Dutch and British sources, Ricci explores histories and imaginings of displacement related to the island through a study of the Sri Lankan Malays and their connections to an exilic past. Ronit Ricci is the Sternberg-Tamir Chair in Comparative Cultures and Associate Professor in the departments of Asian Studies and Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University, Near Eastern Studies Department. His research focuses on the intersection of law and the environment across the western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome. Kelvin Ng, co-hosted the episode. He is a Ph.D. student at Yale University, History Department. His research interests broadly lie in the history of imperialism and anti-imperialism in the early-twentieth-century Indian Ocean circuit. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Going Nowhere Fast: Mobile Inequality in the Age of Translocality (Oxford UP, 2020) brings together more than a decade’s worth of research during one of the most consequential moments in Cambodian history. After years of staggering economic growth and a political breakthrough in 2013, disappointment set in as the fruits of this growth failed to reach many Cambodians and the party of the country’s long-time prime minister, Hun Sen, returned to its authoritarian crackdown. But the scope of this book is much wider than the array of settings where Lawreniuk and Parsons investigate the experiences, narratives, and consequences of inequality. Instead, their research speaks to larger global articulations, such as the limits of inequality, as a concept, to account for contexts outside of the Global North, the rise of right-wing and anti-immigration political movements, and the pernicious mobility of poverty. Sabina Lawreniuk is Nottingham Research Fellow at the School of Geography, University of Nottingham. You can find her on Twitter @SabinaLawreniuk. Laurie Parsons is Lecturer in Human Geography and British Academy Fellow at Royal Holloway, University of London. You can find him on Twitter @lauriefdparsons. Dino Kadich is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography, University of Cambridge. You can find him on Twitter @dinokadich. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

The Mekong River is one of the world’s great rivers. From its source in the Qinghai-Tibetan plateau it snakes down through southern China and then borders or runs through all the countries of mainland Southeast Asia: Myanmar, Thailand, Lao, Cambodia and Vietnam. Almost 70 million people depend either directly or indirectly on the Mekong for their livelihoods. It is the world’s largest inland freshwater fishery. It’s also a place of great ecological and human diversity. Until recently, the Mekong was one of the world’s least tamed rivers, but that has rapidly changed. In Last Days of the Mighty Mekong (Zed Book, 2019), Bryan Eyler documents the huge disruption, both to the Mekong’s ecosystem and to the lives of the people who depend on it, caused by rampant dam construction, tourism development, pollution, not to mention climate change. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In Subversive Seas: Anticolonial Networks across the Twentieth-Century Dutch Empire (Cambridge UP, 2019), Kris Alexanderson offers a revealing portrait of the Dutch Empire repositions our understanding of modern empires from the terrestrial to the oceanic. It highlights the importance of shipping, port cities, and maritime culture to the political struggles of the 1920s and 30s. Port cities such as Jeddah, Shanghai, and Batavia were hotbeds for the spread of nationalism, communism, pan-Islamism, and pan-Asianism, and became important centers of opposition to Dutch imperialism through the circulation of passengers, laborers, and religious pilgrims. In response to growing maritime threats, the Dutch government and shipping companies attempted to secure oceanic spaces and maintain hegemony abroad through a web of control. Techniques included maritime policing networks, close collaboration with British and French surveillance entities ashore, and maintaining segregation on ships, which was meant to 'teach' those on board their position within imperial hierarchies. This innovative study exposes how anti-colonialism was shaped not only within the terrestrial confines of metropole and colony, but across the transoceanic spaces in between. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Buddhism has always been a world religion, but its popularity in the West really dates only from the late nineteenth century, when much of the Buddhist world was subject to European colonial rule. Of all those Westerners who became interested in, and sought to promote Buddhism at this time, perhaps no-one is more unusual and interesting than U Dhammaloka, an Irishman who “went native” and became a Buddhist monk in British Burma at the turn of the twentieth century. U Dhammaloka is now the subject of a fascinating new book, The Irish Buddhist: The Forgotten Monk Who Faced Down the British Empire (Oxford University Press, 2020) cowritten by Alicia Turner, Laurence Cox, and Brian Bocking. Beyond the story of this intrepid Irishman, this book is also a social history of British Burma at the height of European imperialism. But what is distinctive about this social history is its focus on white, working-class Europeans in the highly cosmopolitan colonial states at this time. Some of them, and U Dhammaloka was one, shared political sympathies with the Asian subjects of these colonial states. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Ravi Palat’s The Making of an Indian Ocean World-Economy, 1250–1650: Princes, Paddy fields, and Bazaars (Palgrave, 2015) counters eurocentric notions of long-term historical change by drawing upon the histories of societies based on wet-rice cultivation to chart an alternate pattern of social evolution and state formation. It traces inter-state linkages and the growth of commercialization without capitalism in the Indian Ocean World. Dr. Ravi Palat is professor of sociology at SUNY Binghamton. His research interests include world-systems analysis, historical sociology, political economy, and the sociology of food. Currently working on cuisine as an element of state formation and the cultivation of a national culture; on the Americas in the making of early modern world-economies in Asia; on the parallel transformations of China and India since the mid-1800s; and on a critique of contemporary area studies. Earlier work centered on the political economy of east and southeast Asia in the context of contemporary transformations of the capitalist world-economy; and on the making of an Indian Ocean world-economy. Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. His research focuses on the intersection of law and the environment across the Western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Democracy is a popular topic among scholars of politics in Southeast Asia. Liberalism is not. Or at least it hadn’t been up until the last few years, which have seen a spate of books with liberalism in the title: on Islam in Indonesia, capitalism in Singapore, post-colonialism in the Philippines, and now, Liberalism and Democracy in Myanmar (Oxford University Press, 2018). In this new study, Roman David and Ian Holliday draw on extensive survey and interview data to argue that people in Myanmar show inconsistent commitments to the tenets of liberalism in its adjacent aspects: by being, for instance, highly tolerant of some minority groups but highly intolerant of others, notably Rohingya; and, by showing support for democracy but also for the military’s continued role in national politics. They characterize this condition as “limited liberalism”, which they distinguish from semi-liberalism and other hybrid types. Roman David and Ian Holliday join us on New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to talk about limited liberalism in Myanmar and beyond, about trust in government and the Coronavirus pandemic, prospects for transitional justice, and about doing survey and interview research on politics in Myanmar in the 2010s. Like this interview? If so you might also be interested in: • Astrid Noren-Nilsson, Cambodia’s Second Kingdom: Nation, Imagination and Democracy • Helen Rosenblatt, The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century Nick Cheesman is a Fellow in the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In this episode, I talk with Dr. Leah Zani, a public anthropologist and poet based in California, about her truly wonderful book Bomb Children: Life in the Former Battlefields of Laos (Duke University Press, 2019). Her research takes place half a century after the CIA’s Secret War in Laos – the largest bombing campaign in history, which rendered Laos the most-bombed country in the world. Dr. Zani examines the long-term effects of air warfare by looking at how the explosive remnants of war build themselves into people’s everyday lives, and how people embody the extreme uncertainty of a peace haunted by war. The book is striking in a thousand ways, but perhaps what stands out its being composed as ethnography interspersed with “fieldpoems”. Foregrounding the blurry line between war and peace, Bomb Children is a patient and careful ethnography that looks at how people build lives in worlds that continue to explode. In today’s conversation, I ask Dr. Zani about how to write ethnography about not-knowing, the unique analytic of parallelism she developed for her research, the recursive relationship between method and theory in anthropology, and what poetry can offer ethnographic analysis. Dr. Zani received her PhD from University of California, Irvine in 2017 and is the poetry editor (!) at Anthropology and Humanism. She can be found online here https://www.leahzani.com/ and on Twitter @leah_zani. Lachlan Summers is a PhD candidate in cultural anthropology at UC Santa Cruz. He is based in Mexico City and he researches the city’s repeating earthquakes. He is a contributing editor at Cultural Anthropology, a member of the Emergent Futures CoLab (https://www.urgentemergent.org/), and can be found on Twitter @backup_sandwich. He and his friends were permanently fired from teaching at UC Santa Cruz for participating in the wildcat strike of 2019-2020, but he hopes we can all get our jobs back soon. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Edward Alpers’s The Indian Ocean in World History (Oxford University Press, 2014) is a concise yet an immensely informative introduction to the Indian Ocean world, which remains the least studied of the world's geographic regions. Yet there have been major cultural exchanges across its waters and around its shores from the third millennium B.C.E. to the present day. Historian Edward Alpers explores the complex issues involved in cultural exchange in the Indian Ocean Rim region over the course of this long period of time by combining a historical approach with the insights of anthropology, art history, ethnomusicology, and geography. The Indian Ocean witnessed several significant diasporas during the past two millennia, including migrations of traders, indentured laborers, civil servants, sailors, and slaves throughout the entire basin. The Indian Ocean in World History also discusses issues of trade and production that show the long history of exchange throughout the Indian Ocean world; politics and empire-building by both regional and European powers; and the role of religion and religious conversion, focusing mainly on Islam, but also mentioning Hinduism, Buddhism and Christianity. Using a broad geographic perspective, the book includes references to connections between the Indian Ocean world and the Americas. Moving into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Alpers looks at issues including the new configuration of colonial territorial boundaries after World War I, and the search for oil reserves. Edward Alpers is a professor of history at UCLA. Kelvin Ng, co-hosted the episode. He is a Ph.D. student at Yale University, History Department. His research interests broadly lie in the history of imperialism and anti-imperialism in the early-twentieth-century Indian Ocean circuit. Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University, Near Eastern Studies Department. His research focuses on the intersection of law and the environment across the western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

For centuries, wherever Thai Buddhists have made their homes, statues of the Buddha have provided striking testament to the role of Buddhism in the lives of the people. The Buddha in Lanna: Art, Lineage, Power, and Place in Northern Thailand (University of Hawaii Press, 2017) offers the first in-depth historical study of the Thai tradition of donation of Buddha statues. Drawing on palm-leaf manuscripts and inscriptions, many never previously translated into English, the book reveals the key roles that Thai Buddha images have played in the social and economic worlds of their makers and devotees from the fifteenth to twentieth centuries. Author Angela S. Chiu introduces stories from chronicles, histories, and legends written by monks in Lanna, a region centered in today’s northern Thailand. By examining the stories’ themes, structures, and motifs, she illuminates the complex conceptual and material aspects of Buddha images that influenced their functions in Lanna society. Buddha images were depicted as social agents and mediators, the focal points of pan-regional political-religious lineages and rivalries, indeed, as the very generators of history itself. In the chronicles, Buddha images also unified the Buddha with the northern Thai landscape, thereby integrating Buddhist and local conceptions of place. By comparing Thai Buddha statues with other representations of the Buddha, the author underscores the contribution of the Thai evidence to a broader understanding of how different types of Buddha representations were understood to mediate the “presence” of the Buddha. The Buddha in Lanna focuses on the Thai Buddha image as a part of the wider society and history of its creators and worshippers beyond monastery walls, shedding much needed light on the Buddha image in history. With its impressive range of primary sources, this book will appeal to students and scholars of Buddhism and Buddhist art history, Thai studies, and Southeast Asian religious studies. Olivia Porter is a PhD candidate at Kings College London. Her research focuses on Tai Theravada Buddhism in Myanmar and its borders. She can be contacted at: olivia.c.porter@kcl.ac.uk Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Why did the word “Jakarta” appear as graffiti on the streets of Santiago in 1973? Why did left-wing Chilean activists receive postcards in the mail with the ominous message “Jakarta is coming”? Why did a Brazilian general lose his temper in an interview with university students, threaten their safety, and yell the name of Indonesia’s capital city? In The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade & the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World (Public Affairs, 2020) journalist Vincent Bevins links the history of the overthrow of Sukarno – a leader of 1960s Third Worldism –, the rise of the Suharto – one of the most brutal and corrupt dictators – , and the slaughter of 500,000 to one million Indonesians allegedly linked to the Indonesian Community Party (the PKI) to the Latin American “dirty wars”, including Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and Central America. This is a major achievement and something that very few scholars have been able to do. Bevins persuasively argues that the long-ignored and even silenced history of Indonesia 1965 was of truly world historical significance. The Jakarta Method joins a growing body of scholarly work on what some call a “political genocide” and what a 1968 CIA report deemed “one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century”. By showing how the overthrow of the radical Sukarno, the rise of the pro-American Suharto, and the brutal destruction of the largest Communist party outside of the USSR and the PRC impacted both right-wing generals and left-wing revolutionaries from the streets of Rio de Janeiro to the jungles of Cambodia, The Jakarta Method is a much needed and very welcome globalization of this history. Vincent Bevins is a native Californian who attended UC Berkeley before he began his career as an international correspondent in Venezuela. He worked for the Financial Times in London, covered Brazil and the southern cone for the Los Angeles Times, and then moved to Jakarta where he reported on Southeast Asia for the Washington Post. He spoke to us from Sao Paulo, Brazil about The Jakarta Method. An excerpt of the book appeared in a recent issue of the New York Review of Books. Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford, 2018). When he’s not quietly reading or happily talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

As Indonesia nears the 75th anniversary of its proclamation of independence this year, the socio-political debates surrounding her birth as a nation-state take on contemporary salience. In Indonesia’s Islamic Revolution (Cambridge UP, 2019), Kevin W. Fogg analyzes the religious aspirations that motivated many Muslim revolutionaries to fight the return of Dutch after the Second World War and envision a new nation-state. The book tackles this topic on both military and political fronts; paying attention not only to how Islam energized the Indonesian Revolution but also to how revolution refreshes the practice and social organization of Islam. While much of the present historiography on the Indonesian Revolution has centered on the secular nationalist leaders as primary historical actors, this book refocuses attention on how the revolutionary movement drew additional vitality from a diverse group of pious Muslims. Integrating the experiences of relatively obscure military veterans with well-known Muslim politicians, the book is one of the first to provide a coherent survey of the multi-faceted ways Islam became entangled with Indonesia’s revolutionary ideology across different ethnic communities. In this podcast, we discuss the notion of Muslim piety and how stories from veterans of the revolution break down orthodox-heterodox binaries in the practice of Islam, the mutations of religious authority during a tumultuous period, the politics of forming a national bureaucracy to govern Islam and enduring legacies of Indonesia’s Revolution. Kevin W. Fogg is based at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he is the associate director at the Carolina Asia Center. He is also a research associate at Brasenose College and the Faculty of History, Oxford University. Find him online at www.kevinwfogg.net. Faizah Zakaria is an assistant professor of history at Nanyang Technological University. You can find her website here or on Twitter @laurelinarien Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

On the night of September 30/October 1, 1965, a bungled coup d’état resulted in the deaths of a handful of Indonesian generals and a young girl. Within days the Indonesian army claimed that the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), the largest communist party outside of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, was responsible. This set in motion the confusing, mysterious, and often perplexing events in 1965 that led to the downfall of Indonesia’s founding president Sukarno – an anti-imperialist who sought to combine the forces of nationalism, religion, and communism – and the rise of the authoritarian General Suharto who ruled Indonesia for 32 years – a period of far-right military dictatorship known as the New Order. As part of Suharto’s overthrow of Sukarno, the circle of officers around him incited regional officers to start a campaign of arrest, detention, torture, and mass murder of millions of Indonesians. We don’t have exact numbers, but somewhere between 500,000 and a million were killed and an equal number sent to brutal prisons throughout the nation’s sprawling archipelago, Buru Island being the most infamous. Prisoners worked as slave labor for years. After their release, they were subject to official repression and were treated as social pariahs. Even the children of former prisoners faced discrimination. Allegedly this wave of violence was directed at the massive Indonesian Communist Party, the PKI, but in reality, scores of other leftists including feminists, labor organizers, and artists fell victim to the bloody purge. Because the killers ran the state for decades, a generation of Indonesians were fed a steady stream of lurid propaganda that falsely claimed the PKI was planning its own campaign of mass murder. John Roosa’s Buried Histories: The Anticommunist Massacres of 1965-1966 in Indonesia, University of Wisconsin Press, 2020 is a carefully crafted study of these events that sheds light on the mechanics of mass murder and dispels a number of myths about this dark moment in Indonesian history. Based on decades of interviews and archival research the book is a welcome addition to the growing scholarly work on what some have termed a political genocide and what a 1968 CIA report called “one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century”. John Roosa is an Associate Professor of history at the University of British Columbia. Buried Histories is a sequel to his previous book, Pretext for Mass Murder: The September 30th Movement and Suharto's Coup D'État in Indonesia, the definitive political history of the event that set the Indonesian genocide in motion. Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford, 2018). When he’s not quietly reading or happily talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, and co-founder and chair of the World Science Festival. He is well known for his TV mini-series about string theory and the nature of reality, including the Elegant Universe, which tied in with his best-selling 2000 book of the same name. In this episode, we talk about his latest popular book Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe (Random House, 2020) Until the End of Time gives the reader a theory of everything, both in the sense of a “state of the academic union”, covering cosmology and evolution, consciousness and computation, and art and religion, and in the sense of showing us a way to apprehend the often existentially challenging subject matter. Greene uses evocative autobiographical vignettes in the book to personalize his famously lucid and accessible explanations, and we discuss these episodes further in the interview. Greene also reiterates his arguments for embedding a form of spiritual reverie within the multiple naturalistic descriptions of reality that different areas of human knowledge have so far produced. John Weston is a University Teacher of English in the Language Centre at Aalto University, Finland. His research focuses on academic communication. He can be reached at john.weston@aalto.fi and @johnwphd. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Challenging the geographical narrative of the history of Islam, Chiara Formichi’s new book Islam and Asia: A History (Cambridge University Press, 2020), helps us to rethink how we tell the story of Islam and the lived expressions of Muslims without privileging certain linguistic, cultural, and geographic realities. Focusing on themes of reform, political Islamism, Sufism, gender, as well as a rich array of material culture (such as sacred spaces and art), the book maps the development of Islam in Asia, such as in Kashmir, Indonesia, Malaysia, and China. It considers both transnational and transregional ebbs and flows that have defined the expansion and institutionalization of Islam in Asia, while attending to factors such as ethnicity, linguistic identity and even food cultures as important realities that have informed the translation of Islam into new regions. It is the “convergence and conversation” between the “local” and “foreign” or better yet between the theoretical notions of “centre” and “periphery” of Islam and Muslim societies that are dismantled in the book, defying any notions of Asian expressions of Islam as a “derivative reality.” The book is accessibly written and will be extremely useful in any undergraduate or graduate courses on Islam, Islam in Asia, or political Islam. The book will also be of interest to those who work on Islamic Studies and Asia Studies. Shobhana Xavier is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Queen’s University. Her research areas are on contemporary Sufism in North America and South Asia. She is the author of Sacred Spaces and Transnational Networks in American Sufism (Bloombsury Press, 2018) and a co-author of Contemporary Sufism: Piety, Politics, and Popular Culture (Routledge, 2017). More details about her research and scholarship may be found here and here. She may be reached at shobhana.xavier@queensu.ca . You can follow her on Twitter via @shobhanaxavier Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

According to Viet Thanh Nguyen, all wars are fought twice: first on the field of battle, and then in the struggles over memory. In Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (Harvard University Press, 2016) he explores the various ways in which the American War in Vietnam has been remembered and forgotten. But this wide-ranging, erudite, and joyously inter-disciplinary book is more than just a study of how we talk about this war. Professor Nguyen argues that we need to create a new ethics based on a “just memory” that recognizes not only ourselves and our own humanity but includes the humanity of others and also our own inhumanity. Nothing Ever Dies critiques what he terms the “industries” of memory production. As with the actual war which pitted lightly armed guerrilla fighters against the vast American war machine, asymmetry characterizes memory production. Nguyen contrasts the success of Hollywood films such as “Apocalypse Now” in globalizing the American narrative of the war with the more localized efforts of the Vietnamese Communist Party to promote their version of the war through monuments, museums, and massive graveyards. Nothing Ever Dies is a transnational project that engages both the United States of America and north and south Vietnam, but also brings South Korea, Laos, and Cambodia into the discussion. The book combines history, literary and film criticism, and museum studies into a larger philosophical exploration of ethics and a call for peace grounded in justice. While Nothing Ever Dies is an impressive book and was a finalist for the National Book Award for non-fiction, Viet Thanh Nguyen is best known for The Sympathizer. This novel won the 2016 Pulitzer for fiction and a host of other awards. Professor Nguyen, who holds the Aerol Arnold Chair of English and is a Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, was been awarded fellowships from the MacArthur and Guggenheim Foundations in 2017. Importantly, Nothing Ever Dies is a very personal work. The author places his identity as a refugee born in Vietnam but airlifted to the United States of America in 1975 at the center of the text. Growing up in San José, California, he learned about the war that shaped his life through American film and fiction. However, he often felt otherized in these often-racist depictions of the war. Nothing Ever Dies is his contribution to writing diverse Vietnamese experiences into our memory of Vietnam. Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford, 2018). When he’s not quietly reading or happily talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

One can’t understand modern Thailand without understanding the role of the ethnic Chinese. And one can’t understand the role of the ethnic Chinese without understanding the history of their relationship to the Thai monarchy. This is exactly what Wasana Wongsurawat has documented in her new book, The Crown and the Capitalists: The Ethnic Chinese and the Founding of the Thai Nation (University of Washington Press, 2019). The book explores this remarkable relationship against a backdrop of tumultuous changes in Thailand, Southeast Asia, and China: the Opium Wars, the European colonization of Southeast Asia, the rise of Chinese nationalism and the overthrow of the Qing dynasty in 1911, the 1932 Revolution in Siam, Japanese imperialism, World War II, and the Cold War. While the relationship between the ethnic Chinese, the Thai monarchy, and China, has experienced stresses and strains throughout this long period, it has endured intact. And, arguably, today, it is stronger than ever. According to Wasana, this relationship lies at the heart of the Thai nation-state. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Situated at the crossroads between the history of colonialism, of modern Southeast Asia, and of medical pluralism, this history of medicine and health traces the life of pharmaceuticals in Vietnam under French rule. In The Colonial Life of Pharmaceuticals: Medicines and Modernity in Vietnam (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Laurence Monnais examines the globalization of the pharmaceutical industry, looking at both circulation and consumption, considering access to drugs and the existence of multiple therapeutic options in a colonial context. She argues that colonialism was crucial to the worldwide diffusion of modern medicines and speaks to contemporary concerns regarding over-reliance on pharmaceuticals, drug toxicity, self-medication, and the accessibility of effective medicines. Retracing the steps by which pharmaceuticals were produced and distributed, readers meet the many players in the process, from colonial doctors to private pharmacists, from consumers to various drug traders and healers. Yet this is not primarily a history of medicines as objects of colonial science, but rather a history of medicines as tools of social change. Laurence Monnais is a Professor of History at the University of Montreal. Lucas Richert is an associate professor in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He studies intoxicating substances and the pharmaceutical industry. He also examines the history of mental health.  Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, is the first edited collection of scholarly essays devoted solely to the histories and legacies of this subject on North American campuses and in their Atlantic contexts. Gathering together contributions from scholars, activists, and administrators, the volume combines two broad bodies of work: (1) historically based interdisciplinary research on the presence of slavery at higher education institutions in terms of the development of proslavery and antislavery thought and the use of slave labor; and (2) analysis on the ways in which the legacies of slavery in institutions of higher education continued in the post–Civil War era to the present day. The collection features broadly themed essays on issues of religion, economy, and the regional slave trade of the Caribbean. It also includes case studies of slavery’s influence on specific institutions, such as Princeton University, Harvard University, Oberlin College, Emory University, and the University of Alabama. Though the roots of Slavery and the University stem from a 2011 conference at Emory University, the collection extends outward to incorporate recent findings. As such, it offers a roadmap to one of the most exciting developments in the field of U.S. slavery studies and to ways of thinking about racial diversity in the history and current practices of higher education. Today I spoke with Leslie Harris about the book. Dr. Harris is a professor of history at Northwestern University. She is the coeditor, with Ira Berlin, of Slavery in New York and the coeditor, with Daina Ramey Berry, of Slavery and Freedom in Savannah (Georgia). Adam McNeil is a History PhD student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

At the start of 2020 few of us would have recognized the face of the current director general of the World Health Organization. Three months later, and in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic he and other senior WHO officials appear on television and online almost daily, exhorting governments around the world to take urgent measures to stop the spread of the virus, advising them on how to do so, and coordinating efforts. To these exhortations governments in Southeast Asia, like their counterparts elsewhere, have a duty to respond. This duty they owe not only to their citizens and neighbours, but also to the international community of states, via a special regulatory regime that has emerged in part out of experiences fighting recent contagions in East and Southeast Asia. In Containing Contagion: The Politics of Disease Outbreaks in Southeast Asia (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), Sara E. Davies explains how and why a duty to contain contagion at the source or within borders became central to the contemporary politics of disease control. She tracks regulatory changes for the control of contagion worldwide in tandem with the emergence in the 1990s of a new regional regime to respond to disease outbreaks among the member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. In ASEAN, she observes, agreement to combat contagious diseases rested on a shared understanding of contagion as a security threat that member states would have to combat in unison rather than apart. Notwithstanding the divergences in capacities and willingness to combat contagion among Southeast Asian states, securitization of disease outbreaks in the 2000s made member states better prepared, overall, to combat it. But it also carried risks of costs to civil liberties and democratic practices that, if anything, are even more pronounced today than they were a decade ago. Sara Davies joins us for a coronavirus pandemic special on New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to talk about health security and political sovereignty; the revised International Health Regulations; experiments with SARS and the avian influenza; surveillance of and reporting on contagious disease in Southeast Asia; democracy, transparency and trust in the wake of outbreaks; how endemic diseases risk being neglected and relatively unfunded in the wake of epidemics; and, the responses of China and Singapore to coronavirus, so far. Nick Cheesman is a Fellow in the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University.  Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

The Jātaka tales, or stories of the Buddha’s previous lives as a bodhisatta, are included in the Pāli Canon and have for centuries been a rich source of inspiration in Theravada Buddhism. In addition to these classical Jātaka, a number of other non-canonical Jātaka tales emerged in Southeast Asia and were widely circulated throughout the region. Collections of these tales are conventionally referred to as the Paññāsa Jātaka, or the “Fifty Jātaka”. Once considered minor and apocryphal, the Paññāsa Jātaka are now recognized as the lifeblood of the region’s literature and an important source of traditional culture. Chris Baker and Pasuk Pongpaichit have translated twenty-one of the best-known tales from the Thai collection of the Paññāsa Jātaka in their recently published book From the Fifty Jātaka: Selections from the Thai Paññāsa Jātaka (Silkworm Books, 2019). In addition to the elegant and approachable translations, Baker and Phongpaichit have included an insightful introduction on the Paññāsa Jātaka and have also provided synopses of all sixty-one tales. Both an entertaining and informative book, “From the Fifty Jātaka” will be appreciated both by the layman as well as the scholar. Please join us as we explore these fascinating tales and the origins of some risqué Thai tree names on today’s podcast. Alex Carroll studies Buddhist Studies at the University of South Wales and is primarily interested in Theravāda and early Buddhism. He lives in Oslo, Norway and can be reached via his website here. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In contemporary Manila, slums and squatter settlements are peppered throughout the city, often pushing right up against the walled enclaves of the privileged, creating the complex geopolitical pattern of what sociologist Marco Garrido calls the “patchwork city.” Synthesizing literature in political sociology and urban studies, Garrido shows how experiences along the housing divide in Manila constitute political subjectivities and shape the very experience of democracy in contemporary Philippines. The Patchwork City: Class, Space and Politics in Metro Manila (University of Chicago Press, 2019) is a beautifully written ethnography is divided into two parts. In the first part, Garrido documents the fragmentation of Manila into a mélange of spaces defined by class, particularly slums and upper- and middle-class enclaves. He calls the pattern of urban fragmentation “interspersion” and persuasively argues that it is a spatial form distinct to cities in the Global South. This distinction is marked not by increasing segregation (as is the case with cities in the Global North) but by increasing proximity and dependence. For enclave residents, the proximity of slums is a source of insecurity, compelling them to impose spatial boundaries on slum residents. For slum residents, the regular imposition of these boundaries creates a pervasive sense of discrimination. Within this everyday, and almost normalized, sense of discrimination, the urban poor and middle class emerge not as labor and capital but as “squatters” and “villagers,” Manila’s name for subdivision residents. In other words, economic identities are unflinchingly spatialized. In the second part, Garrido looks beyond urban fragmentation to delineate its effects on class relations and politics, arguing that the proliferation of these slums and enclaves and their subsequent proximity have intensified class relations. Going beyond the realm of “the urban”, Garrido examines the politicization of this socio-spatial divide with the specific case of the populist president Joseph Estrada. The book ultimately argues that the two sides – middle-class and urban poor – are drawn into contention over not just the right to the city, but the nature of democracy itself. In all, The Patchwork City illuminates how segregation, class relations, and democracy are all intensely connected. It makes clear, ultimately, that class as a social structure is as indispensable to the study of Manila—and of many other cities of the Global South—as race is to the study of American cities. Sneha Annavarapu is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn't require tangibles, like rabbits or hats. Paradox works in the abstract, with words and concepts and symbols, to create the illusion of contradiction. There are no contradictions in reality, but there can appear to be. In Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy (MIT Press, 2020), Matt Cook and a few collaborators dive deeply into more than 75 paradoxes in mathematics, physics, philosophy, and the social sciences. As each paradox is discussed and resolved, Cook helps readers discover the meaning of knowledge and the proper formation of concepts―and how reason can dispel the illusion of contradiction. The journey begins with “a most ingenious paradox” from Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance. Readers will then travel from Ancient Greece to cutting-edge laboratories, encounter infinity and its different sizes, and discover mathematical impossibilities inherent in elections. They will tackle conundrums in probability, induction, geometry, and game theory; perform “supertasks”; build apparent perpetual motion machines; meet twins living in different millennia; explore the strange quantum world―and much more. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Indonesia is home to one of the world’s largest Chinese-descended populations. Their historical impact is often measured in economic terms but was equally important in the realm of language and literature. The majority of Chinese-Indonesians originally spoke Southern Min dialects, better known in Southeast Asia as “Hokkien”. They also quickly gained knowledge of Malay, the lingua franca of Indonesia and beyond. It was in Java’s vernacular Malay variety that most Chinese-Indonesians acquired literacy. Through their transregional connections and plurilingual competencies, they pioneered in the printing industry of romanized Malay newspapers and books. This foray into print capitalism served the group’s commercial and political interests, but also gave rise to fascinating expressions of a hybrid (Chinese-Indonesian-European) culture. Dr Tom Hoogervorst spoke to Mr Jarrah Sastrawan about the Sino-Malay literary tradition in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Tom Hoogervorst is a researcher at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV). One of his main interests is language contact in Southeast Asia, which can be reconstructed through a combination of historical linguistics, archival research, and philology. He has primarily worked on Malay and Javanese and their relation with other languages. At present, he focuses on the language history of Indonesia’s Chinese communities, including the unique variety of Malay in which they produced innumerable novels, newspapers, poems, and educational works from the 1870s. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In the wake of the so-called war on terror we’ve become accustomed to racialized portrayals of the Arab as an inflexible and threatening other to the mores and ways of the non-Arab world. Although these portrayals are new in their historical contingencies and sociological particulars, the manner in which Arabs are represented today recalls an earlier period in Southeast Asia, when European colonizers cast Arabs they encountered there, and Arab men especially, as provocateurs of otherwise peaceable non-Arab Muslims. Yet as Sumit K. Mandal discusses in Becoming Arab: Creole Histories and Modern Identity in the Malay World (Cambridge University Press, 2018) this representation jars with the fluidity and hybridity of Arab identities in Southeast Asia, before and under colonial rule, and with histories of commerce and pacific relations that national historiographies have elided or effaced. Sumit Mandal joins us for this New Books in Southeast Asian Studies interview, to talk about the power and limits of colonial racial categories; Hadramis, Sayyids and Sharifas in maritime Southeast Asia; modernity and cultural hybridity; the descendants of Arabs in the Malay world today; and, to share some ideas on how to succeed in rethinking, rewriting and publishing a longstanding research project. Our congratulations to Sumit on learning that Becoming Arab is the winner of the 2020 Harry J Benda Prize of the Association for Asian Studies: to find out more about the prize, visit the AAS website. Nick Cheesman is a Fellow in the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Jerome Whitington's Anthropogenic Rivers: The Production of Uncertainty in Lao Hydropower (Cornell University Press, 2019) examines the dynamics and discourses centered around the development of hydropower dams in the Mekong River Basin. Through deep and connected ethnographies, the book traces how such projects create ecologically uncertain environments and the surprising ways they offer new capacities for being human. Along the way, this study unpacks puzzles such as why corporate developers would engage with activists in environmental sustainability initiatives even in the absence of legal compulsion, the evasion strategies of rural peoples struggling with the currents of such developments and the managerial tactics as well as failures among hydrological experts. By viewing large-scale development projects as collaborations between infrastructural developers, financiers and activists, the book is able to interrogate “late industrialism” not as a high modernist project but in terms of uncharted temporalities. In our conversation, we discuss how infrastructure like dams can lead to uncertainty, the limits of the ‘Anthropocene’ as a conceptual framework, how uncertainty was utilized and managed by various stakeholders who might not see themselves as environmental actors as well as the new positioning of white male experts in Asia. Jerome Whitington is a visiting assistant professor at the Gallatin School in New York University. Faizah Zakaria is an assistant professor of history at Nanyang Technological University. She is completing her first monograph on dialectical relationships between landscape and religious conversions in maritime Southeast Asia. You can find her website here or on Twitter @laurelinarien   Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In her book, Sovereign Women in a Muslim Kingdom: The Sultanahs of Aceh, 1641-1699 (Cornell University Press, 2018), Sher Banu Khan provides a rare and empirically rich view of queenship in early modern maritime Southeast Asia. Four women ruled the Muslim realm of Aceh in succession during the second half of the seventeenth century. Their reign – with the acquiescence of the religious elite in the kingdom - was remarkable in a society where women were not seen as natural rulers, and where in more recent history, public leadership by women was discouraged. Writing against extant historiography that depicts this era as a period of decline, Khan argues instead that the queens of Aceh enabled diplomatic and trading networks to prosper and asserted Acehnese sovereignty in encounters with European powers. In our conversation, we discuss the challenges in multi-lingual archival work, how studying queens can help us to reframe the idea of decline, the gendering of authority and leadership as well as the place of female authority in the Muslim world. Sher Banu Khan is an associate professor of Malay Studies at the National University of Singapore. Faizah Zakaria is an Assistant Professor of History at Nanyang Technological University. She is completing her first monograph on dialectical relationships between landscape and religious conversions in maritime Southeast Asia. You can find her website here or on Twitter @laurelinarien Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong, assistant professor in sociology at McMaster University, provides a unique sociological analysis of how critics confront the different types of uncertainty associated with their practice. The book explores how reviewers get matched to books, the ethics and etiquette of negative reviews and ‘punching up’, along with professional identities and the future of criticism. The book is packed with interview material, coupled with accessible and easy to follow theoretical interventions, creating a text that will be of interest to social sciences, humanities, and general readers alike. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Anyone who tries to understand the history, religion, and especially the “culture” of Southeast Asia, will soon encounter the phenomenon of animism, the belief that landscapes, natural objects, trees and plants, animals, and deceased ancestors, possess spirits that influence the human world. Yet “animism” is a Western analytical category, coined during the colonial period, and used by monotheistic and scientifically-minded Westerners to understand what they openly or secretly regarded as irrational indigenous religion. The relationship between animism and missionaries, colonial officials, and early anthropologists, has generally been antagonistic. The elimination of animist belief and its replacement with Christianity and scientific, rational thinking, was one of the aims of colonial rule. But with the development of a more reflexive anthropology and the rise of cultural relativism in the post-war period, anthropologists have come to a new understanding of animism. Christopher J. Shepherd's provocative book, Haunted Houses and Ghostly Encounters: Ethnography and Animism in East Timor, 1860–1975 (NIAS Press, 2019), traces the history of how anthropologists have understood animism in East Timor. The book covers the era of colonial ethnography through to the rise of modern professional ethnography. But beyond East Timor and the subject of animism the book is also a critical narrative of the way that colonial anthropology emerged all over the colonized world. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In his book My Lai: Vietnam, 1968, and the Descent into Darkness (Oxford UP, 2017), Dr. Howard Jones describes how on March 16th, 1968, several units of American soldiers descended upon a collection of small villages in Central Vietnam, now collectively known as My Lai. In the space of a few short hours, they committed one of America’s most infamous war crimes. While failing to find the enemy troops that their intelligence insisted were there, the Americans forced dozens of unarmed elderly men, women, children, and babies out of their homes at gun point. An unknown number of women were raped as other soldiers set fire to their homes. In an act of barbarism that can correctly be compared to Nazi violence, several hundred Vietnamese civilians were forced into ditches and machine gunned. Only three brave Americans in a helicopter tried to stop the slaughter. Almost immediately, the Army covered up the massacre. Officers, including a young Colin Powell, swept the incident under the rug and fabricated an alternative narrative of the events. Thanks to a lone whistle blower and the tireless efforts of investigative journalists like Seymour Hersh the story was eventually uncovered. Howard Jones is University research Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Alabama. Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In Imperial Creature: Humans and Other Animals in Colonial Singapore, 1819-1942 (National University of Singapore Press, 2019), Timothy Barnard explores the more-than-human entanglements between empires and the creatures they govern. What is the relationship between the subjugation of human communities and that of animals? How did various interactions with animals enable articulations of power between diverse peoples? This book is one of the first to tackle these questions in the context of a Southeast Asian colonial city. Drawing from rich, archival material and with an attentiveness to visual sources, this study analyses the varied and messy positioning of animals in a city – as sources of protein, vectors of disease, cherished pets and impressed labor. The book’s deliberate focus on everyday animals such as dogs and horses – common in growing cities worldwide at the time – connects the history of colonial Singapore to a broader urban history, addressing what modernity means in terms of human-animal relationships. In our conversation, we discuss more-than-human-imperialism, the question of animal agency, the performative aspects of animal welfare and a few exciting, related reading recommendations by the author. Faizah Zakaria is an Assistant Professor of History at Nanyang Technological University. She is completing her first monograph on dialectical relationships between landscape and religious conversions in maritime Southeast Asia. You can find her website here or on Twitter @laurelinarien Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Overseas Vietnamese are estimated to remit 15 billion dollars annually to family that remains in Vietnam. Ivan V. Small moves beyond the numbers to examine how remittances affect sociality and human relations in his book Currencies of Imagination: Channeling Money and Chasing Mobility in Vietnam (Cornell University Press, 2018). Although remittances flow back to Vietnam with relative ease, bodies have more difficulty migrating and tend to remain in place. This condition reorients the gaze towards overseas horizons and opens up imaginative possibilities for labor, expectations about their own country, and desires for physical mobility. Small tracks remittances in Saigon, small coastal towns, and in Southern California, thus producing a transnational ethnography of monetary flows and relations. He notes remittances’ shifting forms from goods, to money, and charitable contributions. Although remittances are often thought of only through economic terms, Small argues that they contribute to ongoing social transformations at individual and social levels. Ivan V. Small is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Central Connecticut State University. Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on race, blackness, and visual representation in Brazil. She is on Twitter @ReighanGillam. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Despite the post-Holocaust UN convention to ensure the protection of minority communities globally, the International community has failed to notice the signs of the Rohingya genocide, but what stopped them from taking subsequent action so long after the atrocity? Who really were responsible? And what impact do the continuing campaigns by the displaced Rohingya and international civil society have? Dr. Simon Adams, Director of the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, explores these and other questions in his recent paper “The Responsibility to Protect and the Fate of the Rohingya”, published in Brill’s Global Responsibility to Protect. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

If you’re a grad student facing the ugly reality of finding a tenure-track job, you could easily be forgiven for thinking about a career change. However, if you’ve spent the last several years working on a PhD, or if you’re a faculty member whose career has basically consisted of higher ed, switching isn’t so easy. PhD holders are mostly trained to work as professors, and making easy connections to other careers is no mean feat. Because the people you know were generally trained to do the same sorts of things, an easy source of advice might not be there for you. Thankfully, for anybody who wishes there was a guidebook that would just break all of this down, that book has now been written. Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers (Stylus Publishing, 2020) by Kathryn E. Linder, Kevin Kelly, and Thomas J. Tobin offers practical advice and step-by-step instructions on how to decide if you want to leave behind academia and how to start searching for a new career. If a lot of career advice is too vague or too ambiguous, this book corrects that by outlining not just how to figure out what you might want to do, but critically, how you might go about accomplishing that. Zeb Larson is a recent graduate of The Ohio State University with a PhD in History. His research deals with the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

If tales of China’s radical ‘opening up’ to the world over the last 30 years imply that the country was somehow ‘closed’ before this, then one need only think of Beijing’s dalliances with various potential socialist allies during the Cold War to dispel this impression. There is, moreover, another equally important case in which people linked to ‘China’ were involved in transnational affairs at this time – namely that of overseas Chinese populations throughout the world. And, as Taomo Zhou’s fascinating Indonesia-centred account shows, in Southeast Asia the Chinese outside China were intimately entangled in a vast among of what was going on at this time on the diplomatic and political level. Drawing on a trove of archival and fieldwork-derived material from multiple locations, Zhou’s Migration in the Time of Revolution: China, Indonesia and the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2019) presents a rich account of the Indonesian-Chinese population’s involvement in regional and global affairs, mainly between the 1940s and the 1960s but also either side of this tumultuous window of time. As entertaining as it is rich in new insights, the book nimbly moves between China and different parts of Indonesia’s vast archipelago, in doing so painting a picture of the limitless diversity to migrant and diasporic experience and, in the process, helping us see apparently monolithic events like the Cold War in very human terms. Ed Pulford is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and northeast Asian indigenous groups. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Increasing levels of globalization have led to the proliferation of spaces of international exchange. In her new book, Global Borderlands: Fantasy, Violence, and Empire in Subic Bay, Philippines (Stanford, 2019), sociologist Victoria Reyes looks at one such space, the Subic Bay Freeport Zone, in the Philippines, to understand how they are contested and imagined by different sets of actors in everyday life. She sees freeport zones, places intended to attract foreign investment through the relaxing of domestic economic laws, as examples of what she calls “global borderlands,” or “a place controlled by foreigners and one where the rules that govern socioeconomic life differ from those outside its walls” (2) (other examples include Acapulco, NYU’s Abu Dhabi campus, and any embassy or consulate around the world). They are where two or more legal systems coexist, and where the very notion of state sovereignty gets negotiated on the ground. Through ethnographic and historical-comparative analysis, Reyes shows the origins of the Subic Bay Freeport Zone, and looks in-depth at the wide array of contexts—military agreements, family arrangements, intimate encounters, shopping, and workplaces—to reveal these meanings and their underlying mechanisms. The result is a conceptual framework that social science scholars can apply to any space where international political, economic, and cultural tensions emerge. Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), about the transformation of low-status occupations into cool, cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale men’s barbers, and whole animal butchers), and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), about growth policies, nightlife, and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. His work has appeared in such journals as City & Community, Poetics, Ethnography, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He is also the editor of Urban Ethnography: Legacies and Challenges (Emerald, 2012) and Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012), a co-Book Editor at City & Community, and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Contemporary Sociology, Work and Occupations, Metropolitics, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography. Finally, he is the director of the MA program in International Migration Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous―and easier to share than ever. We associate charts with science and reason; the flashy visuals are both appealing and persuasive. Pie charts, maps, bar and line graphs, and scatter plots (to name a few) can better inform us, revealing patterns and trends hidden behind the numbers we encounter in our lives. In short, good charts make us smarter―if we know how to read them. However, they can also lead us astray. Charts lie in a variety of ways―displaying incomplete or inaccurate data, suggesting misleading patterns, and concealing uncertainty―or are frequently misunderstood, such as the confusing cone of uncertainty maps shown on TV every hurricane season. To make matters worse, many of us are ill-equipped to interpret the visuals that politicians, journalists, advertisers, and even our employers present each day, enabling bad actors to easily manipulate them to promote their own agendas. In How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information (W. W. Norton, 2019), data visualization expert Alberto Cairo teaches us to not only spot the lies in deceptive visuals, but also to take advantage of good ones to understand complex stories. Public conversations are increasingly propelled by numbers, and to make sense of them we must be able to decode and use visual information. By examining contemporary examples ranging from election-result infographics to global GDP maps and box-office record charts, How Charts Lie demystifies an essential new literacy, one that will make us better equipped to navigate our data-driven world. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

A funny thing happened to historian Michael Vann* on the way to his PhD thesis. While he was doing his research on French colonialism and the urbanist project in Hanoi, he came across an intriguing dossier: “Destruction of animals in the city”. The documents he found started him on a research path that led to a section of his dissertation, then an article that gained a wide academic and non-academic readership, and now The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empire, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford UP, 2018). But this isn’t your typical historical monograph. One of the latest volumes in Oxford University Press’s Graphic History Series, The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt (with illustrations by Liz Clarke), explores the history of modernization, urbanization, and the spread of epidemic disease in the era of “New Imperialism” in an exciting and highly engaging format. The remaking of Hanoi as a capital of French empire from the end of the nineteenth century had unintended consequences. In the state-of-the-art sewers of the French/white areas of the city, rats found the perfect home. Then came the Third plague pandemic, the disease that travelled with rats and moved from one site to another around the globe…on railroads, ships, the growing networks of trade and empire. The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt mobilizes years of research about this episode in the city’s history, illustrating (literally!) the inherent contradictions of imperialism, and the complexities of domination and resistance in a colonial context. Framed as an undergraduate lecture that features the author as a character throughout the narrative, the book is set up with teaching in mind. In addition to the fascinating story of the rat hunt itself (and all the twists and turns involved), the volume includes a rich selection of primary sources and a series of contextual essays that will allow students to explore this history in a range of productive ways. An accessible book that is at once serious and fun, The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt was such a pleasure to read and to talk about. I hope listeners will enjoy my conversation with Mike as much as I did! *Mike is also a host on New Books in History! Be sure to check out his interviews here on the network. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. She is the author of Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France Between the Wars (2009). Her current research focuses on the history of French nuclear weapons and testing since 1945. Her most recent article, '"No Hiroshima in Africa": The Algerian War and the Question of French Nuclear Tests in the Sahara' appeared in the Spring 2019 issue of History of the Present. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (panchasi@sfu.ca). Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Jeremy Yellen’s The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: When Total Empire Met Total War (Cornell University Press, 2019) is a challenging transnational exploration of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, Japan’s ambitious, confused, and much maligned attempt to create a new bloc order in East and Southeast Asia during World War II. Yellen’s book is welcome both as the first book-length treatment of the Sphere in English and for also being innovative in both approach and analysis. The book is divided into two parts, each addressing one of the “two Pacific Wars,” as Yellen puts it: a “war of empires” and “an anticolonial war… for independence.” The first half of the book treats the Japanese “high policy” of the Sphere. Here, Yellen not only provides—through the Coprosperity Sphere—a provocative new reading of the Tripartite Pact and the imbrication of Japan’s regional and global geopolitical strategies, but also outlines an important timeline of how Japanese conceptualizations of the Sphere evolved with the changing economic, political, and military expediencies of the Pacific War. Though ideas about the Sphere as a regional order of hierarchical solidarity with Japan at its apex, a “grand strategy of opportunism” rooted in the “sphere-of-influence diplomacy” and “cooperative imperialism” of Japan’s bombastic and enigmatic foreign minister, Matsuoka Yōsuke, Yellen shows that plans for the Sphere only became specific and concrete when Japan’s war situation descended into increasing desperation from 1942 on. The second half of the book shifts gears to examine responses to the Sphere in the Philippines and Burma. Yellen shows that for local nationalist elites like Burma’s first prime minister Ba Maw, whether Japanese rhetoric about the creation of more-or-less liberal international order within the Sphere for the top-echelon nations like Burma and the Philippines was genuine or self-serving, “even sham independence brought opportunity.” By focusing on these pragmatic nationalists (“patriotic collaborators”) Yellen contributes to a growing body of literature on empire that refuses to be pigeonholed by binaries of virtuous resistance and traitorous collaboration. This podcast was recorded as a lecture/dialogue for a live audience at Nagoya University. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Do we need another book on the Vietnam War? Pierre Asselin, Dwight E. Stanford Chair in the History of US Foreign Relations at San Diego State University, thinks that we do. While he has already published A Bitter Peace: Washington, Hanoi, and the Making of the Paris Agreement (2002) and Hanoi’s Road to the Vietnam War, 1954-1965 (2013), he argues that far too much of the English language scholarship on the war has failed to explain the Vietnamese Communists’ perspective. He holds that a number of myths about Hanoi’s war with America continue to circulate. However, with Vietnam’s American War: A History (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Asselin addresses this shortcoming and offers a fresh and challenging narrative of the war. Based on extensive research in Vietnamese archives not previously accessed by foreigners, Vietnam’s American War is an iconoclastic revision of the history of the war. Amongst the various topics Asselin considers are the secret power struggle between the moderate Ho Chi Minh and the hawkish Le Duan, the impact of the Tet Offensive on the North Vietnamese regime, and Hanoi’s difficulties in mobilizing the population for war. This conversation is sure to challenge some of what you think you know about the American War in Vietnam. Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Both colonies and insane asylums are well known institutions of power. But what of asylums in Europe’s early 20th-century colonial empires? How did they operate? Who was confined in them? Who worked there? What was daily life like in such an institution? How did Western medical experts and the colonized population understand mental illness and its treatment? How did colonial racism impact mental illness? In this episode we chat with Claire Edington, Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego, about her new book of Beyond the Asylum: Mental Illness in French Colonial Vietnam (Cornell University Press, 2019). Beyond the Asylum draws from extensive archival research in Vietnam and France. A gifted writer, Edington is particularly good at presenting the life stories of patients, doctors, and workers drawn into French Indochina’s mental health system. She also looks at the families of patients and the Vietnamese language popular press, as they tried to make sense of troubling issues around mental health, including how the French colonizers understood and treated psychological afflictions. More than a history of the asylum as an institution, Edington uses mental health care facilities as a prism to explore crucial transformations of Vietnamese society in the era of high imperialism. This wide-ranging conversation will be of interest to listeners interested in Vietnam and Southeast Asia, imperialism, French history, and the study and treatment of mental illness. The book is an excellent complement to the increasingly rich historiography of colonial Vietnam. Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Since the fall of the Indonesian New Order regime in 1998 there has been a steady rise of Islamic popular culture in the nation. Muslim consumers and producers have cultivated a mediated domain where they can encounter commercial entertainment though the prism of spiritual reflection and piety. In Gender and Islam in Indonesian Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), Alicia Izharuddin, Women's Studies in Religion Program Research Associate at Harvard Divinity School, explores the development of the Islamic film genre with a specific focus on gender representation. Indonesian cinema throughout the New Order era focused on Muslim characters, both men and women, frequently framing them in nationalistic ideals. But after the record success of 2008’s film, Ayat-Ayat Cinta (Verses of Love), the viewing preferences of Indonesian Muslim audiences were met with a slew of Islamically themed films. These often contained the repetition of formulaic tropes and symbols deemed Islamic in order to sell out the box office. In our conversation we discussed the characteristics of the film Islami genre, the importance of gender analysis and feminist methodologies, the role of women as actors and filmmakers, idealized masculinities, the public piety of celebrity actresses, producing a “Good Muslim”/ “Bad Muslim” narrative dichotomy, films about the famous Wali Songo saints, and mediated public Islamic values in contemporary Indonesia. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. He is the author of Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Cinematic Lives of Muslims, and is the editor of the forthcoming volumes Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (ILEX Foundation) and New Approaches to Islam in Film (Routledge). You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kpeterse@odu.edu. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Can justice heal? Must there be justice in order to heal? Is there such a thing as justice, something to be striven for regardless of context? Alexander L. Hinton thinks through these questions in a pair of new books. The two are companion pieces, each using Cambodia in a different way as a lens through which to look at the notion of transitional justice. In The Justice Facade: Trials of Transition in Cambodia (Oxford University Press, 2018), he argues there is something deeply mistaken in the way thinkers and practitioners have imagined and employed transitional justice in the past half-century. Justice, Hinton argues, is much more deeply embedded in localities and particularity than conventional notions of transitional justice allow. Rather than striving toward a universal notion of justice, what is needed is a deeply rooted sense of the way local actors, organizations and values understand and respond to calls for justice. Transitional justice requires a thorough understanding of local societies, of the way that global and local institutions intersect and interact. In Man or Monster?: The Trial of a Khmer Rouge Torturer (Duke University Press, 2016), Hinton turns his eye toward a more granular question of justice. Hinton witnessed most of the trial of Duch, the Khmer Rouge commander of the S-21 prison. The book takes us through the trial day by day, carefully observing not just the words spoken, but the manner and responses of witnesses and judges. In doing so, Hinton asks us to wonder how we should understand someone like Duch, someone who oversaw the murder of thousands of people yet presented himself as trapped by orders and by context. Using the words of the prosecutor and defense attorneys, he wonders whether we should better understand Duch as a man or as a monster, and asks what it would mean if we accepted his essential humanity. Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. He’s the author of four modules in the Reacting to the Past series, including The Needs of Others: Human Rights, International Organizations and Intervention in Rwanda, 1994, published by W. W. Norton Press. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

As you may know, university presses publish a lot of good books. In fact, they publish thousands of them every year. They are different from most trade books in that most of them are what you might called "fundamental research." Their authors--dedicated researchers one and all--provide the scholarly stuff upon which many non-fiction trade books are based. So when you are reading, say, a popular history, you are often reading UP books at one remove. Of course, some UP books are also bestsellers, and they are all well written (and, I should say, thoroughly vetted thanks to the peer review system), but the greatest contribution of UPs is to provide a base of fundamental research to the public. And they do a great job of it. How do they do it? Today I talked to Kathryn Conrad, the president of the Association of University Presses, about the work of UPs, the challenges they face, and some terrific new directions they are going. We also talked about why, if you have a scholarly book in progress, you should talk to UP editors early and often. And she explains how! Listen in. Marshall Poe is the editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@gmail.com. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Wang Gungwu has long been recognized as a world authority on the history of China and the overseas Chinese. His work has been inspired by his own experience growing up Chinese in Southeast Asia, but with strong family, educational, and indeed emotional connections to China. In his new memoir, Home Is Not Here (NUS, 2018), he recollects his upbringing in British Malaya at a time of great political turmoil, which included the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War, and the Japanese invasion and occupation of Malaya. Following World War II his studies in China at the National Central University in Nanjing were cut short by the imminent victory of the Chinese Communist Party in China’s civil war. This book is an intimate reflection on the themes of family, education, language, Chinese identity, and the search for a sense of home during a tumultuous period in Southeast Asian and Chinese history. Patrick Jory teaches Southeast Asian History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. He can be reached at: p.jory@uq.edu.au Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

By now we all know that Vietnam is a country, not a war. But how have decades, and even centuries, of war impacted the land of this southeast Asian nation? Professor David Biggs of the University of California, Riverside, specializes in Vietnamese environmental history. In Footprints of War: Militarized Landscapes of Vietnam (University of Washington Press, 2018) he examines the impacts of warfare in the region around Hue in central Vietnam. Using cutting edge methodology drawn from GIS (graphic information system), aerial photography, and more traditional archival documents, Biggs finds legacies of war in the soil, water, and rain forests. Starting with 14th-century battles between the Cham states and the invading Viet and continuing through the Ming Dynasty’s occupation in the early 1400s, the Tayson Rebellion (1771-1802) and the French colonial occupation from the 1880s to 1954, Biggs argues for an important pre-history of wars prior to the American War of the 1960s to January, 1973. The book ends with the American military machines “creative destruction” and a discussion of the toxic war remnants that pollute former battlefields and military bases. Linking environmental history to social, military, and political history, Footprints of War excavates the layers of history that make up the landscape of central Vietnam. Our conversation about the book reveals his deep understanding of Vietnamese culture and his original conceptualization of the meaning of war in the country. Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, he can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

The things that make people academics -- as deep fascination with some arcane subject, often bordering on obsession, and a comfort with the solitude that developing expertise requires -- do not necessarily make us good teachers. Jessamyn Neuhaus’s Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers (West Virginia University Press, 2019) helps us to identify and embrace that geekiness in us and then offers practical, step-by-step guidelines for how to turn it to effective pedagogy. It’s a sharp, slim, and entertaining volume that can make better teachers of us all. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A Peoples History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

What happens when market-oriented policy reforms butt heads with a single-party state’s strictly maintained limits on political freedoms? That question sets the terms for Luxury and Rubble: Civility and Dispossession in New Saigon (University of California Press, 2016) by Erik Harms, an ethnography of two districts in Saigon, or Ho Chi Minh City, the one a gleaming model of high modernist urban planning and building through party state-endorsed private enterprise, the other a demolition site. Though the residents of both speak of civic duties and advocate for civil rights, in the one these are realized through the manner in which people choose to live, while in the other they are undermined through the ways in which they are dispossessed. Erik Harms joins us for this New Books in Southeast Asian Studies interview, to talk about detritus and condominiums, civility and civil society, liberalism and neoliberalism, the paradoxes of struggles for rights fought over contested land, the view from a suspension bridge, and the merits of open-access publishing through subvention. Luxury and Rubble is available for free download here. Do you have comments about this episode or any other on the New Books in Southeast Asian Studies channel? Perhaps you have suggestions for authors whom we ought to interview? If so, mail the hosts at nick.cheesman [at] anu.edu.au or p.jory [at] uq.edu.au. We look forward to hearing from you. Nick Cheesman is a fellow at the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University and in 2019 a visiting researcher at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University, and Ritsumeikan University, also in Kyoto. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

How can the history of rubber be used as a way to understand the history of 20th-century Vietnam? In this episode of New Books in History, Michael G. Vann talks about Rubber and the Making of Vietnam: An Ecological History, 1897-1975 (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), with Michitake Aso, an Associate Professor of history at SUNY Albany. This extremely well-researched study of Vietnamese rubber plantations from the colonial origins to their near destruction during the American war opens new insights into the development of contemporary Vietnam. Dr. Aso explains such things as the difference between environmental and ecological history, how rubber plantations symbolized a type of French colonial modernization, the changing nature of French science, and the role of plantations in the First and Second Indochina Wars. Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford, 2018). Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In this episode, we talk with Stephen Hamnett about Planning Singapore: The Experimental City(Routledge, 2019), a book he edited with Belinda Yuen. Two hundred years ago, Sir Stamford Raffles established the modern settlement of Singapore with the intent of seeing it become ‘a great commercial emporium and fulcrum’. But by the time independence was achieved in 1965, the city faced daunting problems of housing shortage, slums and high unemployment. Since then, Singapore has become one of the richest countries on earth, providing, in Sir Peter Hall’s words, ‘perhaps the most extraordinary case of economic development in the history of the world’. The story of Singapore’s remarkable achievements in the first half century after its independence is now widely known. Stephen Hamnett is Emeritus Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of South Australia and a Commissioner of the Environment, Resources and Development Court of South Australia. Belinda Yuen is Professorial Research Fellow and Research Director at the Lee Kuan Yew Centre for Innovative cities, Singapore University of Technology and Design. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

The political protests of the “Red Shirts” movement in Thailand in April-May 2010 ended in tragedy, with the security forces killing over 90 people and injuring thousands more. Thailand’s political protests have been studied from many different angles, but perhaps the most unusual approach to this subject is to be found in Benjamin Tausig’s book, Bangkok is Ringing: Sound, Protest, & Constraint(Oxford University Press, 2019). This book examines the protests and the associated violence from a sound studies perspective. The book is an ethnographic study of the sounds that accompanied the protests: music, rally speeches, sound trucks, mobile phone ringtones, whistle-blowers, hand-clappers, and much more. All these sounds, in Tausig’s words, “pulse with meaning”. A fascinating theoretical argument weaves the different sounds discussed in the book together: that constraints on movement in the political realm are reflected in constraints on movement in the sonic world. And towards the end of the book, in a Bangkok backstreet, Mark Zuckerberg makes an appearance. An audio version of Bangkok is Ringing: Sound, Protest, & Constraint is available here. Listeners to this episode might also enjoy listening to Tyrell Haberkorn talking about her new book,In Plain Sight: Impunity and Human Rights in Thailand (U. of Wisconsin Press, 2018) or, to Andrew Walker about his book, Thailand’s Political Peasants: Power in the Modern Rural Economy (U Wisconsin Press, 2012).   Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Nicholas Walton’s Singapore Singapura: From Miracle to Complacency (Hurst, 2019) is far more than a portrait of the rise of a resource-poor nation that has become a model of economic development, governance and management of inter-communal relations. Part travelogue, part history, Walton charts the opportunities and pitfalls confronting small states that have become particularly acute in an era of identity politics and civilizational leadership. Potential threats include not only the Singapore’s struggle to insulate itself from global trends as well the impact of the rise of ultra-conservative attitudes in its majority Muslim neighbours, Malaysia and Indonesia, but also increased difficulty in balancing rival powers China and the United States. If that were not enough, Singapore is juggling multiple issues at a time that it is transiting to a new generational leadership faced with the challenge of ensuring that Singapore remains relevant to its neighbours as well as the international community at large. To do so, Singapore’s leadership will have to upgrade if not reinvent its relevance to its neighbour as well as the international community at large given tectonic geopolitical and technological shifts among which first and foremost artificial intelligence. Walton argues convincingly that complacency may be one of Singapore’s greatest challenges. Generational change involves not only a new generation of leadership but also a generation that was born into a wealthy welfare state, lacks the older generations’ sense of being pioneers and takes things for granted. It is a challenge that is likely to have consequences for a rethink of Singapore’s education system, considered one of the world’s best. In portraying the miracle of Singapore’s success and the challenges it faces, Walton brings a strong sense of history, keen observation and a journalist’s ability to paint with words an incisive picture of a country that has turned its lack of resources into an asset. James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies and the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

How do you understand mindfulness? Is your understanding limited by your own culture’s definition of what mindfulness is? These are some of the questions you will ask yourself while reading Remembering the Present: Mindfulness in Buddhist Asia (Cornell University Press). In today’s podcast, Prof. Julia Cassaniti takes us on a tour of three Theravada Buddhist countries (Thailand, Myanmar and Sri Lanka) to show us how mindfulness is understood in this region and what this, in turn, can teach the West about its own understanding of the concept. This is an insightful read not only for academics interested in contemporary Buddhist studies in the countries surveyed, but also for anyone interested in broadening their perspective on what the term ‘mindfulness’ means. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In the preface to In Plain Sight: Impunity and Human Rights in Thailand (University of Wisconsin Press, 2018) Tyrell Haberkorn asks, echoing Pakavadi Veerapaspong, if and when it might one day be possible to write a book on “memories of dictatorship” in Thailand. Concluding that today a clear end to dictatorship is not in sight, she invokes Howard Zinn to insist that nevertheless, “We must not accept the memory of states as our own… it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus has suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners”. It is in this spirit that she takes up the task of writing a history of impunity: one that “aims to explicitly challenge the repressive organs of the state and their ongoing evasion of accountability”. How she pursues that aim and what she uncovers is the topic of this New Books in Southeast Asian Studies interview, in which Tyrell talks about Thailand’s exemplary injustice cascade, distinguishes a history of impunity from a history of human rights abuse, and reflects on her experiences of reading for state violence in state archives.  Listeners of this episode might also be interested in Tyrell talking on her first book, Revolution Interrupted: Farmers, Students, Law and Violence in Northern Thailand; and, Sam Moyn on The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History. Nick Cheesman is a fellow at the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University and currently a visiting research scholar at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University. He co-hosts the New Books in Southeast Asian Studies channel with Patrick Jory. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Chika Watanabe’s Becoming One: Religion, Development, and Environmentalism in a Japanese NGO in Myanmar (University of Hawaii Press, 2019) is a rich ethnographic study of the work of a Japanese NGO called the Organization for Industrial, Spiritual and Cultural Advancement. Watanabe’s deep dive into the daily workings of OISCA explores the “moral imagination” of constructing unity based on a distinctly Japanese-marked set of ideals and practices within the confines of an unusual Japanese NGO working for decades in Mynamar. OISCA is intriguing in its own right, with roots in a postwar new religion (Ananaikyō) and connections both to right-wing politics in Japan, and with commitments both to a kind of new Shinto-derived global environmentalism and also to a Japanist/culturalist social reform agenda. Becoming One is especially significant as an object of study given not just the NGO’s unusual pedigree, but also the historical relationship between modern Japan and Burma-Myanmar and the ways in which OISCA forces us to reexamine the politics of international aid and development. Watanabe’s book is attuned to the “muddy” (dorokusai) processes of making people (hitozukuri) and constructing a shared sense of home (furusato) that animate the everyday workings of OISCA, as well as the tensions that these goals create on the ground in the training camps. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Thanks to the international tourism industry most people are familiar with the spectacular ruins of Angkor, the great Cambodian empire that lasted from about the 9th to the early 15th century. We are especially familiar with those haunting images of the face of King Jayavarman VII, represented in the stone sculptures of the Bayon temple in Angkor Thom. Archaeologists and historians tend to relate the history of the Angkorean era through the dynasties of great kings. These are, of course, all male images. But this apparent maleness of the Angkorean state contrasts with one of the paradigms of Southeast Asia as a cultural zone: the comparatively high status of women. Ashley Thompson addresses this apparent contradiction in her new book titled, Engendering the Buddhist State: Territory, Sovereignty and Sexual Difference in the Inventions of Angkor (Routledge, 2016). Among the themes of this rich, challenging, and provocative book is the gendered nature of the Angkorean state. Patrick Jory teaches Southeast Asian History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. He can be reached at: p.jory@uq.edu.au Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Paul Thomas Chamberlin has written a book about the Cold War that makes important claims about the nature and reasons for genocide in the last half of the Twentieth Century. In The Cold War's Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace (Harper, 2018), Chamberlin reminds us that the Cold War was not at all Cold for hundreds of millions of people.  He argues that the Soviet Union and the US competed fiercely over the states and people living in a wide swath of land starting in Manchuria, running south into South East Asia and then turning west into South Asia and the Middle East.  This zone received a huge percentage of aid and support from the superpowers.  This zone saw by far the most military interventions by the superpowers.  And this zone saw millions of people die in conflicts tied to the Cold War. Chamberlin reminds us that these conflicts were not simply instigated and propelled by the superpowers.  Instead, the Cold War intersected with colonial and post-colonial conflicts in complicated and nonlinear ways.  Similarly, he argues that the nature of these conflicts changed dramatically over time, from Maoist people's revolutions to conflicts driven by sectarian struggles. By making the broader contours of this period clearer, Chamberlin is able to put genocides in Indonesia, Cambodia, Bangladesh and others into a common framework.   In doing so, he's written a book that is not explicitly about genocide, but says a great deal about genocidal violence in the second half of the twentieth century. Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. He’s the author of four modules in the Reacting to the Past series, including The Needs of Others: Human Rights, International Organizations and Intervention in Rwanda, 1994. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In Returns of War: South Vietnam and the Price of Refugee Memory (New York University Press, 2018), Long T. Bui examines the complicated relationship between the Vietnamese diasporic community and its home country, the former South Vietnam. Central to Bui’s argument is his use of Richard Nixon’s definition of Vietnamization as a way to frame the postwar afterlives of South Vietnamese refugees, their descendants, and those remaining in Vietnam today. While Nixon used this term as a military strategy to pull the U.S. military out of Vietnam, Vietnamization for Bui is a way to highlight how this Cold War term continues to function as an ideology and a discourse in the Vietnamese American community. Bui utilizes an interdisciplinary approach that includes discourse analysis, interviews, archival research, and personal narrative, in tackling questions of memory, loss, national identity, sovereignty, and agency. This book is both a critical investigation and a tribute to the refugee community that is a legacy of the Vietnam War. Laura Ha Reizman is a PhD candidate in Asian Languages & Cultures at UCLA. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Thailand is one of the world’s last remaining military dictatorships, and the last in Asia. While we are familiar with the Thai military’s frequent interventions in Thai politics, we know rather less about its external security role. As rivalry between the superpowers, the United States and China, has grown in recent years, Thailand’s strategic position in the East Asian region has become increasingly important. But what do we know about Thailand’s “strategic culture”? How does the country’s security elite, including the military, think about “war, force, and security”? This is the subject of Greg Raymond’s timely new book, Thai Military Power: A Culture of Strategic Accommodation (NIAS Press, 2018). At a time when the Thai military, and in particular, its controversial relationship with Thailand’s monarchy, are under great scrutiny, the subject of this book has implications not only for Thailand, but for the broader region. Listeners to this episode may also enjoy listening to Lee Morgenbesser, Behind the Facade: Elections under Authoritarianism in Southeast Asia(SUNY Press, 2016) and  Shane Strate, The Lost Territories: Thailand’s History of National Humiliation (University of Hawaii Press, 2015). Patrick Jory teaches Southeast Asian History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. He can be reached at: p.jory@uq.edu.au Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Michael Walzer once began a book with the advice of a former teacher to “always begin negatively”. Tell your readers what you are not going to do and it will relieve their minds, he says. Then they will be more inclined to accept what seems a modest project. Whether or not Ward Keeler had this writing strategy firmly in mind when he wrote the preface to The Traffic in Hierarchy: Masculinity and Its Others in Buddhist Burma (University of Hawaii Press, 2017), it’s the one he adopts, and with the recommended effect. Anticipating that the reader picking up a book on Burma with both “hierarchy” and “masculinity” in its title might be looking for answers to the question of how and why military men dominated the country for so long, and how and why everyone else tolerated them for as long as they did, he tells the reader that he leaves it to them “to speculate as to how such notions as the workings of hierarchy or the location of power ‘above one’s head’ encouraged… members of the former regime to impose control over the nation’s populace with such ferocious complacency”. His own concerns are more immediate and pedestrian, he says. Except, of course, they are much more than that. For as the reader turns the pages they are led through deceptively straightforward descriptions of both street and monastic life, into a theory of hierarchy and a study of masculinity that is at once in conversation with Keeler’s many interlocutors in Burma, and with classics in anthropological inquiry. Ward Keeler joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to discuss egalitarianism and autonomy, anthropology and audience, clientelism and communism, and how the study of Java and Bali informed his thinking about Burma. Enjoyed this episode? Then you may also like listening to Ward Keeler discuss Guillaume Rozenberg’s The Immortals: Faces of the Incredible in Buddhist Burma, which he translated. Are area studies your thing? Then why not also check out the New Books in Eastern European Studies channel. They’re featuring a lot of great books on topics relevant to Southeast Asian studies. Nick Cheesman is a fellow at the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University. He can be reached at nick.cheesman@anu.edu.au Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic. How can publishers and authors contribute to this process? This podcast addresses this issue. We interview Professor Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, whose book, The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance (forthcoming with MIT Press) is undergoing a Massive Online Peer-Review (MOPR) process, where everyone can make comments on his manuscript. Additionally, his book will be Open Access (OA) since the date of publication. We discuss with him how do MOPR and OA work, how he managed to combine both of them and how these initiatives can contribute to the democratization of knowledge. You can participate in the MOPR process of The Good Drone through this link: https://thegooddrone.pubpub.org/ Felipe G. Santos is a PhD candidate at the Central European University. His research is focused on how activists care for each other and how care practices within social movements mobilize and radicalize heavily aggrieved collectives. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

More than forty year after its end the Vietnam War casts a long shadow over our understanding of Vietnam’s modern history. But the acute focus on the war has perhaps distorted our understanding of modern Vietnam. Christopher Goscha’s award-winning new book, Vietnam: A New History (Basic Books, 2016), brilliantly paints a picture of an ancient, diverse, and complex country which had already begun to modernize before the arrival of the French (let alone the Americans) and which was itself an imperial power. In Vietnam: a New History Ho Chi Minh and the communists were not the only anti-colonial nationalists, but rather one of a number of groups fired by the radical new idea of republicanism.Vietnam: a New History takes us beyond the bitter divide in Vietnamese historiography between the “orthodox” and “revisionist” interpretations of Vietnam’s modern history. Goscha provokes the reader to become aware of the haunting possibility that Vietnam’s modern history could have been different – which in turn stimulates the reader to think of new possibilities for a future Vietnam. Listeners of this episode might also enjoy listening to: Max Hastings, Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975 (Harper, 2018)Ken Maclean, The Government of Mistrust: Illegibility and Bureaucratic Power in Socialist Vietnam (U of Wisconsin Press, 2013)Patrick Jory teaches Southeast Asian History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. He can be reached at: p.jory@uq.edu.au. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In his recent monograph, The Buddha’s Wizards: Magic, Protection, and Healing in Burmese Buddhism(Columbia University Press, 2018), Thomas Patton examines the weizzā, a figure in Burmese Buddhism who is possessed with extraordinary supernatural powers, usually gained through some sort of esoteric practice. Like the tantric adept in certain other Buddhist traditions, the weizzā can use his skills both to manipulate human affairs in the present world and to help people progress towards Buddhist soteriological goals. The weizzā is thus a morally ambiguous figure, for while this Buddhist wizard might heal a sick relative or help one’s karmic circumstances, he might just as well cast an evil spell. Indeed, it is precisely because of the weizzā’s perceived power that these wizards and their devotees have been persecuted by both the government and Buddhist monastic leaders, and why this tradition has largely existed at the margins of state-sanctioned orthodoxy and orthopraxy. Patton shows that while prototypes for this Buddhist wizard can be found in Burmese Buddhism in premodern times, the weizzā as we know him really emerges during the twilight of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. Like many other Buddhists of this time, the weizzā were dismayed by the presence of the British in Burma, which they saw as a direct threat to Buddhism, and they used their supernatural powers to fight the British in whatever ways they could. Later, after the British left and once it was seen that Buddhism was not in decline, weizzā shifted their focus from protection to propagation of Buddhism; to this end they built pagodas not only throughout Burma, but also in far-away lands such as the United States. These pagodas were supposed to transmit the power of the weizzā with whom they were associated, and many weizzā devotees liken them to nodes in an electricity grid or even to wifi hotspots. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

At an often-stressful time in global affairs, and with the very idea of the ‘international community’ seemingly under threat, it can be beneficial to look at the 'global order’ from its disorderly fringes. Andray Abrahamian’s North Korea and Myanmar: Divergent Paths (McFarland, 2018) does precisely this, comparing and contrasting North Korea’s and Myanmar’s long careers as ‘pariah’ states during the 20th and 21st centuries, and offering a convincing account of how one – Myanmar – has to some extent managed to emerge from its ‘pariah’ position in recent years, whilst the other – North Korea – remains largely excluded, whatever recent signs of detente across the 38th parallel. Abrahamian's work on each place is based on years of firsthand experience in these ‘outposts of tyranny’, as former-US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice dubbed them in 2005 (p. 2), and he is thus able to offer us vital context for both the latest warming in inter-Korean relations and Myanmar's recent slide back into partial outcast status amidst the horrifying Rohingya crisis. For anyone interested in these countries or in the very idea of an international community of nations, this is a compelling read. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Recent economic crises have made the centrality of debt, and the instability it creates, increasingly apparent. In Beyond Debt: Islamic Experiments in Global Finance (University of Chicago Press, 2018), anthropologist Daromir Rudnyckyj illustrates how the Malaysian state, led by the central bank, is seeking to make the country’s capital Kuala Lumpur the central node of global financial activity conducted in accordance with Islam. Beyond Debt tracks efforts to re-center international finance in an emergent Islamic global city and, ultimately, to challenge the very foundations of conventional finance. Daromir Rudnyckyj is Associate Professor of anthropology at the University of Victoria. Hillary Kaell co-hosts NBIR and is Associate Professor of Religion at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Since the late 1990s Thai cinema has come to global attention with movies like the famous ghost film, Nang Nak, and more recently the evocative films of director Aphichatpong Weerasethakul, who won a Palme D’Or award at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival. A perennially popular theme in Thai cinema is that of haunting by a female ghost. In this unique, unusual book, Ghostly Desires: Queer Sexuality and Vernacular Buddhism in Contemporary Thai Cinema (Duke University Press, 2016), Arnika Fuhrmann hones in on this ghostly theme in contemporary Thai cinema to explore the subjects of female desire and queer sexuality. In doing so she raises questions about a central concept in Queer Theory: the nature of desire. Fuhrmann identifies a tension between Western liberal and everyday Thai Buddhist understandings of desire. Arguably, Buddhist teaching about desire is one factor that has contributed to Thailand’s reputation for being a “queer-friendly” country. Indeed, it is even marketed as a “gay paradise”. But the reality is not quite so simple, especially for women in same-sex relationships. Fuhrmann’s Ghostly Desires also addresses the issue of the subtle regulation of heteronormative sexuality, “Thai-style”. Listeners to this episode might also enjoy listening to: Justin Thomas McDaniel, The Lovelorn Ghost and the Magical Monk: Practicing Buddhism in Modern Thailand (Columbia University Press, 2011)Martin Joseph Ponce, Beyond the Nation: Diasporic Filipino Literature and Queer Reading (NYU Press, 2012)Patrick Jory teaches Southeast Asian History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. He can be reached at: p.jory@uq.edu.au Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

If you want to read just one book to properly understand capitalism, let it be Tania Li’s award-winning 2014 book Land’s End: Capitalist Relations on an Indigenous Frontier (Duke University Press, 2014). This might seem like a strange choice: how can a study of a faraway and possibly exotic indigenous place shed light on “our” own global realities of jobless growth and rising inequality? But it can, and it does. The book is a masterpiece of social scientific scholarship and critical political praxis. Through a longitudinal ethnography conducted over twenty years, the book follows the consequences of Indonesian highlanders’ fateful decision to plant the booming cash crop of the 1990s, cacao. That decision, Li shows, was the reason that capitalism took root and developed apace in the highlands over the coming decades. All the telltale signs of capitalist relations emerged: land was privatized, commons eroded, classes differentiated, and wealth and poverty co-created. Instead of coming as an imposition from the outside, from the state or transnational corporations, capitalism grew within the highlands, in the intimate spaces between kin and neighbors who had all planted cacao hoping it would lead them to a better life and many of whom instead ran into a dead end -- land’s end. The dilemmas and challenges that land’s end brought are explored with care, compassion, and a critical eye in Li’s astonishingly lucid prose. The book is a challenge both to development discourse that insists that only capitalism can improve the lives of the rural poor, and to social movements which insist that indigenous people must be protected from capitalism’s unwanted encroachment. Neither of these two sides of the debate can account for the situation that many Lauje highlanders find themselves in - landless, jobless, dependent on the market for survival, desirous of joining the march for progress, and yet facing a grim future. Tania Li has once again brought to light the most critical and pressing issues of our time in a book that is a must-read for everyone who cares about poverty and inequality. Anthropologists, historians, economists, activists, policy-makers, and development professionals will all find a great deal of value in this remarkable work. I had the pleasure of speaking with Professor Li earlier today. Aparna Gopalan is a Ph.D. student in Social Anthropology at Harvard University. Her research focuses on how managing surplus populations and tapping into fortunes at the “bottom-of-the-pyramid” are twin-logics that undergird poverty alleviation projects in rural Rajasthan.   Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

From Indonesia’s declaration of independence in 1945 up until today, the relationship between Indonesian nationalism, Islam, and modernity has been a key subject of debate. One of the central figures in this debate was the great writer, journalist, public intellectual – and pious Muslim from Minangkabau, West Sumatra, Haji Abdul Malik Karim Amrullah, better known by his pen-name, Hamka. Largely self-taught, Hamka was one of Indonesia’s most prolific writers. Between the 1920s and his death in 1981 he penned novels, short stories, biographies, memoirs, self-help books, travel books, histories, and many studies of Islam, including a famous thirty-volume commentary on the Qur’an. In Hamka's Great Story: A Master Writer’s Vision of Islam for Modern Indonesia (University of Wisconsin Press, 2016), James R. Rush traces the development of Hamka’s thinking as expressed through these works against the backdrop of Indonesia’s tumultuous modern history, including late Dutch colonial rule, the Japanese occupation, the Indonesian revolution, the Sukarno years, and the New Order military dictatorship under Suharto. Since the end of the New Order regime in 1998 some scholars have referred to a "conservative turn" in Islam in Indonesia. Listen to James Rush explain how an appreciation of Hamka and his influence in twentieth century Indonesia can help us better understand what is happening in Indonesian Islam today. Listeners of this episode might also enjoy listening to: Vanessa Hearman, Unmarked Graves: Death and Survival in the Anti-Communist Violence in East Java, Indonesia.Anthony Reid, A History of Southeast Asia: Critical Crossroads Patrick Jory teaches Southeast Asian History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. He can be reached at: p.jory@uq.edu.au Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century (Verso, 2017) introduce readers to important work in Anglophone cultural studies, psychoanalysis, political theory, media theory, speculative realism, science studies, Italian and French workerist and autonomist thought, two “imaginative readings of Marx,” and two “unique takes on the body politic.” There are significant implications of these ideas for how we live and work at the contemporary university, and we discussed some of those in our conversation. This is a great book to read and to teach with! Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Over the course of the 1930s, Vietnamese author Vũ Trọng Phụng published eight novels, hundreds of works of narrative nonfiction, stories, plays, essays and articles. He was a best-selling writer in his own day who sharpened his acute literary talents, Peter Zinoman observes in the opening pages of Vietnamese Colonial Republican: The Political Vision of Vu Trong Phung (University of California Press, 2014), “as a lower-class, untraveled, half-educated, opium addicted, colonized subject from a remote outpost of France’s second-rate empire”. He died in 1939, aged just 28. Today he is remembered as a literary giant, for Zinoman, comparable to Orwell in the English-reading world. Like Orwell, he was a complex and defiant figure whose work crossed genres and drew deeply on his rich life experiences as well as his wide reading in literature, politics, and psychology. His views on a range of topics attracted heated debate in his own lifetime, in which he engaged vigorously. He had a persistent interest in sexuality and sexual promiscuity, and for this some critics labeled his work obscene. After his death, he was for a quarter century denounced and banned by the ruling communist party, before being rehabilitated in the 1990s. Peter Zinoman joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to discuss Vũ Trọng Phụng’s life and oeuvre, why he is best characterized as a Vietnamese colonial republican, and how a reappraisal of his political interests and commitments through this category opens up opportunities for a more nuanced account of Vietnamese political history beyond the usual binaries of pro-French versus anti-French; collaborators versus nationalists; and capitalists versus communists. Listeners of this episode might also be interested in: * Eric Jennings, Imperial Heights: Dalat and the Making and Undoing of French Indochina * Ken Maclean, The Government of Mistrust: Illegibility and Bureaucratic Power in Socialist Vietnam Nick Cheesman is a fellow at the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University. He can be reached at nick.cheesman@anu.edu.au Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

People of various political stripes in many countries (particularly those countries where various political stripes are allowed) have been arguing about the Vietnam War for a long time. The participants in these debates were (and are) always quick to assign blame in what seems to be an endless attempt to justify “their side” and vilify “the other side.” In this context, Max Hastings’ new book Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975 (HarperCollins, 2018) comes as something of a relief, for he essentially says that all the “sides” in the war made a moral mess of things. According to Hastings, the North Vietnamese, the South Vietnamese, the French, and the Americans were all guilty as sin of cynically starting, ruthlessly fighting, and stubbornly continuing a conflict that was, if not “unnecessary,” at least not worth it for any of them. In Hastings’ very readable account, everyone gets their hands very dirty indeed. Listen in. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

This interview is the fourth and and final interview in a short series of podcasts about the mass violence in Indonesia.  Earlier this year I talked with Geoff Robinson, Jess Melvin and Kate McGregor and Annie Pohlman about their works. All of them have written thoughtful, carefully researched and richly detailed analyses of the violence.  Each of them shared a similar interest in the causes and nature of the violence.  While their approaches varied, each attempted to shed new light on events which have been hidden or misrepresented. Vannessa Hearman, in her new book Unmarked Graves: Death and Survival in the Anti-Communist Violence in East Java, Indonesia (NUS Press, 2018), continues this effort.  By focusing on East Java, Hearman looks at the violence from another angle, allowing us to compare how different regions descended into violence.  Reading her book together with Melvin’s offers us a fuller understanding of the relationship between high-level actors and local officials and between center and periphery.  In particular, her analysis of the relationship between the army and non-state actors was eye-opening. But Hearman offers much more than this.  The book, largely based on extensive interviews Hearman conducted over the course of years, recounts the violence on an individual level.  Hearman helps us understand how those who were targeted with murder tried to escape.  She documents the networks of safe houses, couriers and information sources that emerged within days of the violence.  She demonstrates how the Communist Party in East Java tried to understand and respond to the violence, reminding us that, in Indonesia, violence was a process, not an event.  And she shows how the army eventually destroyed the Party’s attempt to create a safe space, using violence that affected not only the communists, but other citizens who lived in the region.  It’s a richly textured, thoroughly researched and ultimately moving portrayal of people trying to understand how their world was falling apart. Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. He’s the author of four modules in the Reacting to the Past series, including The Needs of Others: Human Rights, International Organizations and Intervention in Rwanda, 1994. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

China’s growing presence in all of our worlds today is felt most keenly by those living directly on the country’s borders. They, together with the Chinese people who also inhabit the borderlands, are parties to a dazzling array of of China-driven transformations unfolding on a vast scale in economics, politics, culture, kinship and other spheres. Consequently, Juan Zhang and Martin Saxer’s edited volume The Art of Neighbouring: Making Relations Across China’s Borders (Amsterdam University Press, 2018) is a timely contribution to our understanding of what is going on at many points of China’s local contact with its 14 neighbouring states. The collected volume sees anthropologists, geographers and historians draw on extensive fieldwork all around the country’s borders with Russia, Laos, Nepal, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Myanmar and Vietnam, seeking in part to answer the question “what does China’s rise mean for its immediate neighbours?” (p. 12). But The Art of Neighbouring is much more than this, for it also offers a theoretical intervention into old debates over China’s past and present approaches to the outside world, and encourages us to look anew at how states and peoples living next-door engage one another more broadly. Here’s an open-access version of the book. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

The dramatic fall and destruction of Ayutthaya at the hands of the Burmese in 1767 has been the subject of films, television shows, songs and books for popular audiences and classrooms, many of them aimed at stoking nationalist sentiment among the citizens of contemporary Thailand and Myanmar by invoking a sense of historical animosity and vengefulness. But what was Ayutthaya before its downfall? How did it become so successful, and if it was such a success, why did it collapse so quickly when confronted by enemies.  In A History of Ayutthaya: Siam in the Early Modern World (Cambridge University Press, 2017) long-time collaborators Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit answer these questions and many more. Along the way they offer a new thesis on the economy and society of Ayutthaya that departs from an established view of it as peasant-based. Baker joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to discuss this thesis, to talk about the city’s commercial and political relations not only with its close neighbours but also with China, Japan, Persia and Europe; the part that Buddhism played in its politics and social life, and to reflect on the uses and challenges presented to scholars of the period by sources both official and literary.  Listeners of this episode might also be interested in: * Shane Strate, The Lost Territories: Thailand’s History of National Humiliation * Kathelene Baldanza, Ming China and Vietnam: Negotiating Borders in Early Modern Asia Nick Cheesman is a fellow at the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University. He can be reached at nick.cheesman@anu.edu.au Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

It’s not often that you run across a smoking gun. Jess Melvin did, at an archive in Banda Aceh. Since the massacres in Indonesia in 1965-66, academics, journalists, politicians and military officials  have argued about the motivations for the killing.  With little documentation to draw from, these debates relied on careful analysis of context and circumstance.  The result was widespread disagreement about how centralized the killing was and whether the killing was planned in advance. Melvin, in her new book The Army and the Indonesian Genocide: Mechanics of Mass Murder (Routledge, 2018), puts some of these questions to rest.  It seems clear from her work that, at least in the regions covered by her research, that the Army was looking for an occasion to eliminate the Communist Party.  And that it saw the clumsily executed kidnappings and killings of 1 October as a golden opportunity to put this plan into action.  Finally, while she lacks direct evidence for other regions in Indonesia, her efforts to apply her own insights to the rest of the country seem measured and logical. Melvin’s research is careful and thorough.  The book reminds me of Christopher Browning’s The Origins of the Final Solution–it feels like a detective working through every bit of evidence in an attempt to be fair and impartial.  Anyone studying the violence in Indonesia will have to reckon with Melvin’s book. This podcast is part of a short series on the mass atrocities in Indonesia.  Recently I talked with Geoff Robinson about his book The Killing Season and Kate MacGregor, Annie Pohlman and  Jess Melvin about their edited volume The Indonesian Genocide of 1965:  Causes, Dynamics and Legacies.  I’ll conclude the series soon with an interview with Vannessa Hearman about her book Unmarked Graves. Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. He’s the author of four modules in the Reacting to the Past series, including The Needs of Others: Human Rights, International Organizations and Intervention in Rwanda, 1994. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Jan M. Padios‘ new book A Nation on the Line: Call Centers as Postcolonial Predicaments in the Philippines (Duke University Press, ) sheds light on the industry of offshore call centers in the Philippines, and attempts to understand the narratives cast upon call center workers as laborers whose main resource is their ability to relate to their Western-and specifically American-clientele. What does it mean when we see relatability as a national resource? How are Filipino workers reshaped by this seemingly benevolent industry? Dr. Padios attempts to tackle these questions through years of transnational research involving interviews and participation, and through understanding call center work within a longer history of American colonization and neoliberal policies that have shaped the contemporary Philippines.    Christopher B. Patterson teaches at the University of British Columbia, Social Justice Institute. He is the author of Transitive Cultures: Anglophone Literature of the Transpacific and Stamped: an anti-travel novel. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Today we are joined by Gerald Gems, Professor of Kinesiology at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois, and the author of several books on sports history including Sport in American History: From Colonization to Globalization (2017), Sport and the American Occupation of the Philippines (2016), and Blood and Guts to Glory: A History of Sports (2014).  Gems is also the former president of the North American Society for Sport History, the former vice-president of the International Society for the History of Physical Education and Sports, and a former Fulbright Scholar. In Sport and the American Occupation of the Philippines: Bats, Balls, and Bayonets (Lexington Books, 2016), Gems explores the history of sport during the US occupation of the Philippines.  Based on extensive primary and secondary source research, Gems work uses hegemony theory to investigate how and why American colonizers imported ideas about sports to the Philippines, and in what circumstances Filipinos adopted, adapted, rejected these sporting practices.  He shows that American politicians, military planners, missionaries, and businessmen saw sports like baseball and basketball as essential for keeping soldiers physically and morally fit, while  teaching American values including capitalism, militarism, and work ethic.  Filipino sportsmen and women played some American sports, first baseball and later basketball, but on their own terms.  For many Filipino athletes, sports became a way to assert Filipino nationalism.  When they played basketball against US soldiers, they overcame American height advantages by developing a fast paced style and they likened their victories to the rapid strikes of Filipino guerrillas against the occupying forces. Gem’s work has resonance beyond the Philippines and will be interesting reading for scholars studying the translation of American ideas in similar colonial contexts. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Dr. Valerie Francisco-Menchavez‘s new book, The Labor of Care: Filipina Migrants and Transnational Families in the Digital Age (University of Illinois Press, 2018) traces how globalization, neoliberalism and new technology have reshaped migrant care work from the Philippines. The book is the result of five years of research interviewing migrant women and participating in their communities, as well as intermittent trips to the Philippines where Dr. Francisco-Menchavez spent time speaking with the families and extended families of migrant workers. Her book attempts to redefine notions of care and overseas employment that focus solely on the worker’s labor, and rather to understand a form of what she calls “multidirectional care,” which describes the ways in which “transnational family members activate multiple resources, people, and networks to redefine care work in the family” (23). Dr. Francisco-Menchavez explores this larger network of care to understand how migrant work affects gender roles and creates new solidarities. Christopher B. Patterson teaches at the University of British Columbia, Social Justice Institute. He is the author of Transitive Cultures: Anglophone Literature of the Transpacific and Stamped: an anti-travel novel. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

From the sidelines of the Asian Studies Association of Australia’s biennial conference, where she presented the inaugural keynote address of the Association of Mainland Southeast Asia Scholars, Katherine A. Bowie, joined New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to talk about Of Beggars and Buddhas: The Politics of Humor in the Vessantara Jataka in Thailand (University of Wisconsin Press, 2017). Bowie at first hated the Vessantara Jataka: a story in which women and children are objects to be given away so as to demonstrate extraordinary generosity of the Buddha-to-be. But she reconciled her initially negative reaction with a growing awareness of the possibility for the story to offer up counter-hegemonic and deeply humorous readings. This awareness led her, through oral historical and archival work, to track the movement of the story across Thailand’s north, northeast and central regions. Along the way she found considerable divergence in how it has been told and received. In those parts of the country where Bangkok’s control has been greatest, the story’s subversive teeth have been blunted or removed, while in those farthest from the central ruler, villagers can at least recount its satirical contents, even if the full blown bawdy vaudeville style performances of yore, with monks as lead entertainers, are today largely a thing of the past. Participating in the discussion as a special guest on this episode is Patrick Jory, whose Thailand’s Theory of Monarchy: The Vessantara Jataka and the Idea of the Perfect Man, has already featured on the channel. Nick Cheesman is a fellow at the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University. He can be reached at nick.cheesman@anu.edu.au Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

I don’t often start these blog posts with comments about the cover art.  But the reproduction of Alit Ambara’s “After 1965,” featured on the cover of the new set of essays The Indonesian Genocide of 1965: Causes, Dynamics and Legacies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), fits the subject perfectly.  The piece compels your gaze, while resisting easy interpretations and answers. I found the book much the same. The essays, edited by Katharine McGregor, Jess Melvin, Annie Pohlman, demand attention.  Roughly divided into two sections, they range from military/political analyses to contemplations about the way the genocide left its mark on individuals and communities to reflections on the failures of the Indonesian state to acknowledge its complicity. Each individual essay informs and challenges. I have a new appreciation of the nature of the Genocide Convention and  the ways it can be interpreted after reading. Annie Pohlman and Jess Melvin’s essay on the logic for calling the killings genocide  And the pieces on efforts by visual artists (by Kate McGregor) and puppeteers (by Marianna Lis) left me running to google to learn more. As I said in the interview, I learned an enormous amount from the book. But collectively the essays are also a call to action. As you’ll hear in the interview, the editors are clear-eyed about the long-term consequences of the violence and the failures of Indonesians to address this. Fifty years on, the struggle to understand the genocide and address its consequences continues. This podcast is part of a short series on the mass atrocities in Indonesia. Last month, I talked with Geoff Robinson about his book The Killing Season. In the months to come, I’ll be speaking with Jess Melvin and Vannessa Hearman about their research on killings. Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. He’s the author of four modules in the Reacting to the Past series, including The Needs of Others: Human Rights, International Organizations and Intervention in Rwanda, 1994. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Ahead of a nominal general election scheduled in Cambodia for the end of July 2018, Michael Sullivan, author of Cambodia Votes: Democracy, Authority and International Support for Elections 1993–2013 (NIAS Press, 2016), joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to make a case for elections there, however fraught, as a site of authentic struggle. Tracking Cambodian elections from the unprecedented UN-managed election of 1993 up to the present, Sullivan examines the complex relations and agendas that inform and enliven these events: domestic and international, bureaucratic and personal, technical and political. Against the idea of Hun Sen as hegemon, Sullivan maintains that electoral cycles in Cambodia reveal just how tenuous the ruling party, and its leader’s, hold on government really is. Even under highly oppressive political conditions they represent, he argues, an opportunity for an “inherent democratic impulse” to be realized. Going beyond particulars, Sullivan also offers Cambodia as an instructive case for international agencies that invest heavily in projects for social and political change which, when they do not turn out as planned, force reappraisals but not withdrawals of funding or support—even in conditions where political opponents of the ruling party are killed or exiled. Going to the 2018 Asian Studies Association of Australia biennial conference at the University of Sydney? Join us for a special New Books in Southeast Asian Studies panel (Session 2.4), with Holly High, Patrick Jory and Lee Morgenbesser. Check out the conference website for details. Nick Cheesman is a fellow at the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University. He can be reached at nick.cheesman@anu.edu.au Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

I first assigned Joshua Oppenheimer’s film “The Act of Killing” for my course in Comparative Genocide at Newman.  The movie is a documentary about the mass violence in Indonesia beginning in 1965.  My students and I found it chilling:  emotionally moving, troubling, and enormously sad.  Naturally, they had many questions. I wasn’t able to answer many of them.  It turned out, the killings in Indonesia had received far less attention than other cases of mass violence. In the brief few years since then, this has started to change.  So I’m going to devote three interviews to this topic. Later this summer, I’ll talk with Katharine McGregor and Annie Pohlman about their edited volume The Indonesian Genocide of 1965-66 and Jess Melvin about her book The Army and the Indonesian Genocide. We’ll start, however, with Geoffrey Robinson and his book The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 1965-1966 (Princeton University Press, 2018). The book is a carefully argued, thoroughly researched attempt to understand what happened following the kidnapping and killing of several army generals on 1 October 1965.  The book is narrative, but it’s also intensely analytical. Robinson is most interested in understanding what happened and why, questions disputed since the very hours the violence began.  He’s also interested in the long-term implications of the violence for Indonesian political culture, for the experience of victims and perpetrators and for attempts to come to grips with the past.  It’s an extraordinary analysis. Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. He’s the author of four modules in the Reacting to the Past series, including The Needs of Others: Human Rights, International Organizations and Intervention in Rwanda, 1994. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Recent years have brought a burgeoning interest in how highland people in mainland Southeast Asia live and communicate along and across the boundaries geographically assigned states whose lowland people and their rulers were once but are by now no longer so far away. In The Lisu: Far from the Ruler (University Press of Colorado, 2017), Michele Zack offers an account of how one group dispersed across the geographic territory of three countries—Yunnan Province in China, and the northernmost reaches of Myanmar and Thailand—is responding to the challenges of the present. Initially researched in the 1990s and completed following further travel and interviews done in the 2010s, Zack’s book is attentive to how much the ways and means of being Lisu are changing with the times, and also committed to a view that they do have an essential coherence. Not just a shared language but a character and outlook that makes them familiar to one another, she writes, distinguishing them not only from the people of the lowlands and their rulers, but also other “less anarchic” highlanders. Michele Zack joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to discuss her time spent travelling and researching among Lisu along the borderlands of China and Southeast Asia over two decades, and to share her experiences and tips on starting, stopping and starting a book all over again. Going to the Asian Studies Association of Australia biennial conference? Join us for a special New Books in Southeast Asian Studies panel (Session 2.4), with Holly High, Patrick Jory and Lee Morgenbesser. Check out the conference website for details. Nick Cheesman is a fellow at the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University. He can be reached at nick.cheesman@anu.edu.au Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

As any scholar of the Vietnam War can tell you, the field doesn’t lack for study: it’s one of the most-studied fields for both military and diplomatic historians. And yet, for all of the scholarly attention it has received, there are understudied facets of this complicated, multilateral conflict, particularly in its early years, before American ground troops entered the country in large numbers. Jessica Elkind’s Aid Under Fire: Nation Building and the Vietnam War (University of Kentucky Press, 2016) does precisely this by examining U.S. development programs that tried to foster a viable South Vietnamese state in the 1950s and early 1960s. The outcomes of those disparate programs ultimately deepened a U.S. commitment to the Republic of South Vietnam and helped set the United States on the road to war. Dr. Elkind’s research was conducted using U.S. government sources, private collections from Michigan State University, and South Vietnamese government sources held in Ho Chi Minh City. Michigan State University was an important actor in this narrative because it was responsible for establishing and running certain programs. In each of the book’s five chapters, she examines a different aid program, ranging from the resettlement programs created for refugees fleeing the newly-created North Vietnam, to agricultural aid and development, to police training. What emerges from these various perspectives is a view of widely-ranging intentions and goals that often differed starkly. Not only did the U.S. government and South Vietnamese government disagree on what would constitute effective aid and development, the public-private partnership that existed between the U.S. government and Michigan State University also frayed as the individual aid workers began to lose faith in their mission. As the United States and the international community confronts global problems about development and nation-building, Aid Under Fire suggests lessons that policymakers and the public should heed. Development cannot succeed without taking into account the wishes of the people who are receiving aid, and simply transplanting western modalities cannot work without taking into account the conditions on the ground. As Elkind demonstrates, overconfidence in nation-building can have dire consequences. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In Ming China and Vietnam: Negotiating Borders in Early Modern Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Kathlene Baldanza explores the complex diplomatic exchanges between China and Vietnam from the 13th to the 17th centuries. Drawing on vast material of both Chinese and Vietnamese primary sources, Baldanza challenges conventional narratives that focus on Chinese aggression and Vietnamese resistance, instead highlighting Vietnam’s use of East Asian classical culture as an ideological threat to China.  As such, Sino-Viet relations, read through the seven interrelated biographies covered here, should be understood as a process of negotiation and compromise. Ricarda Brosch is a curatorial assistant at the Asian Art Museum Berlin (Museum fur Asiatische Kunst Berlin Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz), which is due to reopen as part of the Humboldt Forum in 2019. You can find out more about her work by following her on Twitter @RicardaBeatrix or getting in touch via ricarda.brosch@gmail.com. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

“It is difficult to characterize this fascinating book,” George Tanabe writes in his short preface to The Immortals: Faces of the Incredible in Buddhist Burma (University of Hawai’i Press, 2015), “Not just because it concerns thousand-year-old Burmese Buddhists who fly but also because its author has chosen, almost by necessity, unusual procedures for studying and writing about this strange topic.” Indeed. Not only Guillaume Rozenberg’s topic but also his book is itself unusual and intriguing. First published in French and now available in English thanks to the work of Ward Keeler, this is the second in a planned tetralogy on the extraordinary in Burmese Buddhism. Variously a thrilling narrative of raining coconuts and candles, a how-to guide for budding alchemists, and an account of people rendering their bodies impervious to swords and blows, at its twists and turns The Immortals also offers uncommon insights into the relationship of belief to political and social order. At the same time, it reflects frankly on the odd role of the author in not merely recording but somehow also participating in the fashioning of this cult of the incredible in an otherwise unremarkable village in Burma’s Buddhist heartland. The book’s translator Ward Keeler joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to discuss scepticism and believing, vulnerability and masculinity, public order and military rule, Melford Spiro and the study of supernaturalism, anthropology’s crisis in representation, expository French style and the third person as rhetorical device, and language learning as anthropological exercise. You may also be interested in: * Erik Braun The Birth of Insight: Meditation, Modern Buddhism, and the Burmese Monk Ledi Sayadaw * Lawrence Principe, The Secrets of Alchemy Nick Cheesman is a fellow at the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University. He can be reached at nick.cheesman@anu.edu.au Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In Schooling Diaspora: Women, Education, and the Overseas Chinese in British Malaya and Singapore, 1850s to 1960s (Oxford University Press, 2018), Karen Teoh relates the history of English and Chinese girls’ schools that overseas Chinese founded and attended from the 1850s to the 1960s in British Malaya and Singapore. She examines the strategies of missionaries, colonial authorities, and Chinese reformists and revolutionaries for educating girls, as well as the impact that this education had on identity formation among overseas Chinese women and larger society. These schools would help to produce what society ‘needed’, in the form of better wives and mothers, or workers and citizens of developing nation-states, while ensuring compliance with desired ideals. Chinese women in diaspora found that failing to conform to any number of state priorities could lead to social disapproval, marginalization, or even outright deportation. Through vivid oral histories, and by bridging Chinese and Southeast Asian history, British imperialism, gender, and the history of education, Schooling Diaspora shows how these diasporic women contributed to the development of a new figure: the educated transnational Chinese woman. Karen M. Teoh is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Asian Studies Program at Stonehill College (Massachusetts). Her research focuses on Chinese migration and diaspora from the 17th century to the present, and examines how changing notions of gender roles, ethnicity, and cultural hybridity have shaped the identities of groups and individuals. Tyler Yank is a senior doctoral candidate in History at McGill University (Montreal, Canada). Her work explores bonded women and British Empire in the western Indian Ocean World. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Counterinsurgency doctrine, the Vietnam War, and the vagaries of politics all come together in Max Boot‘s latest work, The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam (Liveright, 2018). One of the most prolific and iconoclastic commentators on American foreign policy currently active in American letters, Max Boot examines the life and career of General Edward Lansdale, in this detailed and quite personal biography. As he considers the various successes and failures of Lansdale’s professional life, as well as his role as the inspiration for some of the most telling fictional accounts of the Cold War in Southeast Asia, Boot also develops a context for counterinsurgency that positions strategic empathy as the most essential characteristic for its success. Yet the story of Lansdale’s life and career is also a riveting chapter in the great American tragedy that is the Vietnam War, one of which Boot offers an unvarnished and stark assessment. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Since the 1990s, vast sums of money and time have been invested in training and resources to hold elections around the world, including in parts of Southeast Asia. The conventional wisdom is that elections either enable or consolidate democracy. Where they do not have either of these effects, the reasoning goes, it’s because the design of elections is not yet right, or conditions in which they have been held are not yet sufficiently matured as to make democracy possible. In Behind the Facade: Elections under Authoritarianism in Southeast Asia (SUNY Press, 2016), Lee Morgenbesser departs from these positions and seeks to explain why and how dictators also hold elections. Through close comparative study of Cambodia, Myanmar, and Singapore, Morgenbesser argues that even when held competitively, elections can be pliable instruments for dictators to obtain information, manage subordinates, distribute largesse and claim legitimacy. Lee Morgenbesser joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to talk about the functions of elections under authoritarian government in Southeast Asia (tabulated here), the targets of electoral functions (tabulated here), and the relevance of the region for study of authoritarian electoral politics elsewhere. You may also be interested in: –Dan Slater, Ordering Power: Contentious Politics and Authoritarian Leviathans in Southeast Asia –Erik Ching, Authoritarian El Salvador: Politics and the Origins of the Military Regimes, 1880-1940 Nick Cheesman is a fellow at the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University. He can be reached at nick.cheesman@anu.edu.au Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Christopher B. Patterson‘s book Transitive Cultures: Anglophone Literature of the Transpacific (Rutgers University Press, 2018) reads English-language literary production from Southeast Asia and its diasporas in North America to recognize and reveal discourses of pluralist governance. Building upon established arguments that state-sponsored multiculturalism at home justifies imperialism abroad and that state-assigned ethnic identities in Southeast Asia are vestiges of colonial pluralism, Patterson studies minor literatures of the Transpacific as a mode of creative response to pluralist govermentality. In examining these cultural communities, he finds an alternative politics of identity in their literature that express a motif of “transition.” Engaging in these ceaseless processes of transition, which Patterson dubs “Transitive Cultures,” enables individuals to maintain mobility in hyper-controlled spaces. Instead of using a national paradigm, such as “Asian-American literature,” Patterson uses the term “Transpacific Anglophone literature” to describe English-language texts from Malaysia, Singapore, and the Philippines as well as those written by Southeast Asian migrants to Hawaii, Canada, and the mainland United States. He uses this label to emphasize the encounter and exchange that typifies transitive culture, and to stress the ideology of linguistic identities. This genealogy of an under-appreciated literary tradition explores transitive cultures in metahistorical novels, travel narratives, and in non-realist genres and offers a border-crossing method for conceptualizing and reading literature that purposefully elides multicultural categorizations. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

When the army brutally dispersed Red Shirts protestors in Bangkok’s busy commercial district in May 2010, motorcycle taxi drivers emerged as a key force, capable of playing cat-and-mouse with security forces, evading military checkpoints, and rescuing protestors and their leaders once the army attacked them. Motorcycle taxis are ubiquitous across the developing world. Dexterously weaving in and out of dense urban conurbations, they transport people, commodities and news through peak traffic with an unparalleled knowledge of the city. They are owners of the map. In his vividly etched monograph, Owners of the Map: Motorcycle Taxi Drivers, Mobility and Politics in Bangkok (University of California Press, 2017), Claudio Sopranzetti moves across the city and between city and country to examine how migrant laborers driven off the factory floor following structural adjustment reforms in the late-1990s turned to motorcycle taxi driving as a form of flexible and yet unfree means of livelihood. Owners of the Map not only confronts the specific realities of ordinary Thais resisting military authoritarianism over a decade-long period, but also the question of how modes of circulation can become sites of collective action, particularly for precarious workers, in the neoliberal moment. Sopranzetti is a Postdoctoral Fellow at All Souls College, University of Oxford. You may also be interested in: Serhat Unaldi, Working Towards the Monarchy: The Politics of Space in Downtown Bangkok Annette Miae Kim, Sidewalk City: Remapping Public Space in Ho Chi Minh City Madhuri Karak is a Ph.D. candidate in cultural anthropology at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her dissertation titled “Part-time Insurgents, Civil War and Extractive Capital in an Adivasi Frontier” explores processes of state-making in the bauxite-rich mountains of southern Odisha, India. She tweets @madhurikarak and more of her work can be found here. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In the wake of Ken Burns’ most recent series, The Vietnam War, America’s fascination with the conflict shows no sign of abating. Fortunately the flood of popular retellings of old narratives is supplemented by a number of well-researched and reasoned efforts aimed at garnering a better sense of how our presumptions about the Vietnam War are in need of reinterpretation and revision. Returning to New Books in Military History is historian Gregory A. Daddis, author of two recent accounts of the war that together offer a sharp reassessment of the American effort. In Westmoreland’s War: Reassessing America’s Strategy in Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2014) and Withdrawal: Reassessing America’s Final Years in Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2017) Daddis challenges many existing perceptions of the readiness and roles of MACV’s two most prominent commanders, Generals William Westmoreland and Creighton Abrams, as well as their struggles with the Washington defense establishment during the war. By centering his study on the strategic planning and its execution, Daddis not only acknowledges the centrality of Vietnamese agency in the outcome of the war, he also reveals how some historians have misjudged the war’s outcome to present flawed visions of possible victory. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Harrod Suarez‘s new book The Work of Mothering: Globalization and the Filipino Diaspora (University of Illinois Press, 2017) focuses on the domestic workers that make up around a third of all overseas Filipino/a workers, and whose remittances back to the Philippines contribute to about 9% of its GDP or around twenty billion dollars. These migrants circulate through the world serving in positions of nurture, care, and service. Suarez examines literary, film, and cultural representations of these figures as part and parcel of a broader historical movement that structures the Philippines under globalization. To understand the multiple sites and histories of these figures, Suarez employs a framework that he calls “the diasporic maternal,” which focuses on the various forms of care and service that these migrants occupy throughout the world. Through a reading method that Suarez calls “archipelagic reading,” Suarez attempts to trace the undercurrents of these narratives that expose the feelings, desires and strategies that exist outside of motherhood and maternal care. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In 1898, the United States took control of the Philippines from the Spanish. The U.S. then entered into a brutal war to make the Filipinos submit to the new colonial power. The war and subsequent decades of U.S. rule meant a small, but continuous presence of American soldiers on the islands, which, unsurprisingly, produced a notable population of children born to Filipino mothers and American fathers. Nicholas Trajano Molnar’s new book, American Mestizos, the Philippines, and the Malleability of Race, 1898-1961 (University of Missouri Press, 2017), examines the contested racial identities of these children. The United States brought a strong and binary sense of racial hierarchy to the discussion. Yet, as Molnar shows, Filipino understandings of race prevented a simple application of American ideas. The children were defined as American Mestizos locally, but many simply lived as Filipinos. Molnar’s book examines the ongoing contest over this mixed nationality and mixed race populations identity. By examining the process of racial formation of a group that never cohered as a separate identity group, American Mestizos provides uncommon insight into, as the title suggests, the malleability of race, and does so in a very readable narrative. In this episode, Molnar discusses the insights of American Mestizos about this history of racial identity in the Philippines and in the U.S. He explains some of the efforts within the Philippines and by U.S. policymakers to shape the racial identity of the Mestizos and the stakes of this debate for various segments of the U.S. military. Finally, he also discusses the research involved in the project. Christine Lamberson is an Assistant Professor of History at Angelo State University. Her research and teaching focuses on 20th-century U.S. political and cultural history. She’s currently working on a book manuscript about the role of violence in shaping U.S. political culture in the 1960s and 1970s. She can be reached at clamberson@angelo.edu.   Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Think of Christianity in Southeast Asia today and what might come to mind is the predominantly Catholic Philippines, or the work of the Baptist church among linguistic and cultural minorities in Myanmar, or any one of the thousands of Christian communities scattered throughout Indonesia. Tam T. T. Ngo‘s new book is about none of these relatively familiar groups and places, but instead about the quite recent emergence and rather rapid growth of evangelical Christianity among the Hmong in the upland areas of Vietnam, on the border of China. Her The New Way: Protestantism and the Hmong in Vietnam (University of Washington Press, 2016) is the first ethnography of Christian conversion in the borderlands of one of the only two formally communist states remaining in Southeast Asia today. Not only is the book remarkable for its collection and use of hard-to-get data from a wide array of sources in Vietnam and abroad, including extended periods of fieldwork in a Hmong village, but also for the story it recounts of conversion not by mission on the ground but via broadcast from the air. Tam Ngo joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to talk about Hmong converts and de-converts, family and neighborhood religious conflicts and their consequences, Pastor John Lee and the Far Eastern Broadcasting Company, the remittance of faith, ethnic relations and religious regulation in Vietnam, officials attempts through violence and persuasion to stop or reverse conversions, and the power of ethnography. You may also be interested in: * Bradley Camp Davis, Imperial Bandits: Outlaws and Rebels in the China-Vietnam Borderlands * Sebastian and Kirsteen Kim, A History of Korean Christianity Nick Cheesman is a fellow at the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University. He can be reached at nick.cheesman@anu.edu.au Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

The work of sociologist Norbert Elias has had a renaissance in recent times, with Steven Pinker, among others, using it to argue that interpersonal violence has declined globally as states have expanded and subdued restless populations. In Violence and the Civilising Process in Cambodia (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Roderic Broadhurst and his co-authors Thierry and Brigette Bouhours bring the declinist thesis to Southeast Asia. Coupling Elias’s approach with criminological theory, Broadhurst and the Bouhours argue that Cambodia’s experience over a 150 years is broadly consistent with what Elias found in Europe: that by monopolising force, generating chains of interdependence, and sensitising people to violence, states have an overall civilising effect. This is a startling and counterintuitive finding for a country whose name was not so long ago synonymous with genocide. But, Broadhurst and co-authors explain, the civilizing process is not linear. Asia like Europe has had its decivilising periods, and it might yet have some more. The overall trend, nevertheless, is away from violence and towards civility. Roderic Broadhurst joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to talk about state violence versus interpersonal violence, French colonial administration, postcolonialism and modernity, Sihanouk and the Khmer Rouge, Hun Sen and authoritarianism, and the challenges of doing historical sociology across multiple regime types and periods. You may also be interested in: Astrid Noren-Nilsson, Cambodia’s Second Kingdom: Nation, Imagination, and Democracy Abram de Swaan, The Killing Compartments: The Mentality of Mass Murder Nick Cheesman is a fellow at the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University. He can be reached at nick.cheesman@anu.edu.au. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

The government of the Philippines has for decades encouraged its citizens to seek work abroad and send money back to the country in remittances. But in recent years it has increasingly sought to entice Filipinos who have settled abroad to come home, not only for tourism but also for retirement. In Migrant Returns: Manila, Development, and Transnational Connectivity (Duke University Press, 2017), Eric J. Pido travels with Filipino Americans as they try to reimagine their lives and lifestyles in the gated communities and malls of Manila, and beyond. Along the way he encounters real estate agents, bureaucrats, investors and family members of returnees, or balikbayan, all in one way or another participating in attempts at selling an idea of home, one that for balikbayan from the US in particular evokes feelings both of homecoming and of a homeliness that they associate with their years spent on the other side of the Pacific. Eric J. Pido joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to talk about histories of departing from and returning to the Philippines, segregated suburbs and walled megacities, the balikbayan economy, returning migrants’ anxieties and hopes, medical tourism, and 1950s nostalgia. You may also be interested in: Megha Amrith, Caring for Strangers: Filipino Medical Workers in Asia Ulla Berg, Mobile Selves: Race, Migration, and Belonging in Peru and the US Nick Cheesman is a fellow at the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University. He can be reached at nick.cheesman@anu.edu.au. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Billed as “an exploration of the role of nationalist imaginings, discourses, and narratives in Cambodia since the 1993 reintroduction of a multiparty democratic system,” Cambodia’s Second Kingdom: Nation, Imagination, and Democracy (Cornell Southeast Asia Program, 2016) pays special attention to how competing nationalistic imaginings are a prominent part of contestation in the country’s post-war reconstruction politics. These imaginings, the book’s author Astrid Noren-Nilsson argues, constitute resources with which parties obtain popular support and win elections. In making her case, she draws on an impressive array of primary sources, including extensive interview data with members of Cambodia’s political elite. Duncan McCargo speaks with Astrid Noren-Nilsson for New Books in Southeast Asian Studies on the sidelines of the 2017 EuroSEAS conference at the University of Oxford, where Cambodia’s Second Kingdom was shortlisted for the EuroSEAS social science book prize. You may also be interested in: Sophal Ear, Aid Dependence in Cambodia: How Foreign Assistance Undermines Democracy Patrick Jory, Thailand’s Theory of Monarchy: The Vessantara Jataka and the Idea of the Perfect Man Duncan McCargo is Professor of Political Science at the University of Leeds and Visiting Professor of Political Science, Columbia University Nick Cheesman is a fellow in the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University. He can be reached at nick.cheesman@anu.edu.au.   Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

The relationship between religion and economic activity has attracted generations of scholars working in myriad settings. In recent years, many have turned to questions of how Islamic ideas are generative of economic activity, to Islamic finance and capital, and to the relationship between contemporary Islam and capitalism more broadly. In Corporate Islam: Sharia and the Modern Workplace (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Patricia Sloane-White builds on this work by asking “not only how the spread of global capitalism transforms the lives of Muslims… but how capitalism empowers the spread of Islam.” Drawing from interviews and ethnographic fieldwork over a seven-year period, and a wealth of knowledge from over two decades of research in Malaysia, Sloane-White argues that the “sharia space” of the today’s corporate Islamic workplace is a third domain between the public and the private in which employees must submit to the guidance of their professional and personal lives by men who insist that their businesses can and must be both profitable and pious. Patricia Sloane-White joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to talk about Malaysia’s self-styled men of the mosque and the market; the new nexus between Islamic scholars and CEOs; the decline of the bumiputera generation; sexuality, gendered divisions of labour, and the problem of patriarchy in the capitalist workplace everywhere. Listeners of this episode may also be interested in: Iza Hussin, The Politics of Islamic Law: Local Elites, Colonial Authority and the Making of the Muslim State Meredith Weiss, Student Activism in Malaysia: Crucible, Mirror, Sideshow Nick Cheesman is a fellow in the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University. He can be reached at nick.cheesman@anu.edu.au Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Recent years have seen an upsurge in studies asking questions about, and in, borderlands. The topic is certainly not new to scholars of mainland Southeast Asia, but as Bradley Camp Davis shows in Imperial Bandits: Outlaws and Rebels in the China-Vietnam Borderlands (University of Washington Press, 2017), plenty of work remains to be done on the parallel processes of border and state formation in the region. Drawing on Chinese, Vietnamese and French written sources as well as hundreds of interviews with villagers in the uplands of Yunnan and northern Vietnam, Davis tells the story of a half-century of violence, trade and taxation at the hands of competing armed groups; of their alliances and wars with lowland states, and of the bandit as symbol in nationalist and local histories and memorials today. Bradley Camp Davis joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to discuss the malleability of bandits and banditry, Black Flags and Yellow Flags, the merits of oral traditions in study of history, and the place of the imperial bandit in movie and museum. You may also be interested in: Pamela McElwee, Forests are Gold: Trees, People and Environmental Rule in Vietnam Geraldo L. Cadava, Standing on Common Ground: The Making of a Sunbelt Borderland Nick Cheesman is a fellow at the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University and in 2016-17 a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He can be reached at nick.cheesman@anu.edu.au Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

The conquest of the Philippines in 1942 brought thousands of Americans under the control of the empire of Japan. While most of them were interned or imprisoned for the duration of the war, a remarkable few evaded capture and fought on against the Japanese. In MacArthur’s Spies: The Soldier, the Singer, and the Spymaster Who Defied the Japanese in World War II (Viking, 2017), Peter Eisner describes the efforts of three of them John Boone, Claire Phillips, and Chick Parsons to incite an insurgency against the Japanese occupation. Facing long odds, they risked their lives to undermine Japan’s control, with Claire’s Manila nightclub supplying resources and information to Boone in the nearby countryside and the intelligence passed on to Chick and other officers working towards America’s return to the Philippines. Their efforts in association with that of others provided American and Filipino guerrillas with much-needed material, and smuggled in food and supplies to thousands of prisoners of war the Japanese held on Luzon. As Eisner reveals, while their efforts aided America’s eventual reconquest of the islands, it came at personal cost to them as it did for so many others, who faced detention, torture, and even death for their actions. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Now and then we feature a book on New Books in Southeast Asian Studies whose author we ought to have had on the show some time ago. The Perfect Business? Anti-Trafficking and the Sex Trade Along the Mekong (University of Hawaii Press, 2012) is one such book. Sverre Molland wrote his tandem ethnography of traffickers and anti-traffickers while researching on the border of Thailand and Laos in the 2000s, after a stint in an anti-trafficking project in which the incongruities of identifying and criminalizing alleged human traffickers became all too obvious to him. Bringing an anthropological lens to the juridical and economic categories that are usually deployed both to explain and address the phenomenon of trafficking for sex, Molland shows that the premises on which anti-trafficking programs operate are unsound. The movement of women and girls in and out of the sex trade is deeply socially embedded. Only by attending to the many varied ways that recruitment into the trade occurs can it be understood. With that, moralizing and paternalistic projects for trafficking’s elimination, as well as indicator projects for its enumeration, might be set to one side, and replaced with other ways of knowing and dealing with the phenomenon that might be rather more sensible, if less aspirational. Sverre Molland joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to talk about the many layers of deception and consent in sex work, bad faith among traffickers and anti-traffickers, the misguidance of the market metaphor, teens trading teens, agency, structural violence, and the trend towards privately funded anti-trafficking and anti-slavery projects in Southeast Asia. Listeners of this episode may also be interested in: Holly High, Fields of Desire: Poverty and Policy in Laos Denise Brennan, Life Interrupted: Trafficking into Forced Labor in the United States Nick Cheesman is a fellow at the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University and in 2016-17 a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He can be reached at nick.cheesman@anu.edu.au Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

If you’ve been hospitalized in Europe, North America, Australia or the Middle East in recent years, chances are that at some point a nurse from the Philippines has had some part in your treatment. As Megha Amrith writes in the introduction to Caring for Strangers: Filipino Medical Workers in Asia (NIAS Press, 2017), Filipinos today comprise one of the largest global diasporas of medical workers, with the Philippines having over 400 nursing colleges, many of them aimed primarily at preparing graduates for work abroad. But as the book’s subtitle indicates, it is a diaspora that stretches not only beyond but also across Asia. And whereas other studies have looked at the political economy of care in the West, Caring for Strangers is an ethnographic exploration of Filipino medical workers in Singapore. The story it tells is one of a community of women, and a few men, occupying an ambiguous space somewhere in-between their local counterparts on the one hand and tens of thousands of unskilled Filipino migrant workers on the other; between exhausting and demanding roles as care-givers for Singaporeans in hospitals and hospices, and high expectations of professional development; and, between nursing as a calling, and aspirations for a better life of consumption and modernity somewhere else. Megha Amrith joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to talk about strategic self-essentialism; the importance of status and faith among Filipino nurses; the racialized and feminized features of the global medical worker economy; and the meaning of home among a migrant community in a transit city. Nick Cheesman is a fellow at the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University and in 2016-17 a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He can be reached at nick.cheesman@anu.edu.au. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Burmese Buddhist monks have featured in the news quite a lot in recent times, not as peaceful practitioners of self-abnegation, but at activists at the forefront of political movements characterized as comprising of a new kind of religious nationalism. For anyone confused by this phenomenon, and wondering how the religious thought of Buddhist monks and laypeople in Myanmar informs and motivates political action, Matthew J. Walton‘s much awaited Buddhism, Politics and Political Thought in Myanmar (Cambridge University Press, 2017) is essential reading. Drawing on years of research and relying predominantly on Burmese language sources, Walton throughout the book presents Burmese Buddhist political ideas in a manner that is at once intelligible to readers outside the tradition but also true to the logics internal to a distinctive moral universe. After offering a concise intellectual and political history, he patiently sets out the doctrinal building blocks with which to build a comparative theory of political order and freedom. In doing so, he also lays the foundations for an understanding of how and why conceptions and practices of democracy in Myanmar today might not correspond to those of deductive political science or international aid programs, but nevertheless be internally intelligible and coherent to their intended audience. Matthew Walton joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to talk about Buddhist ideas of political participation and social welfare, interpretive plasticity, politics and the political, Hobbes, the hybrid political thought of Aung San Suu Kyi, and the intellectual legacy of Gustaaf Houtman. Nick Cheesman is a fellow at the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University and in 2016-17 a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He can be reached at nick.cheesman@anu.edu.au Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In Working Towards the Monarchy: The Politics of Space in Downtown Bangkok (University of Hawaii Press, 2016), Serhat Unaldi offers a provocative and original interpretation of the relationship between space, architecture and power in one of Southeast Asia’s biggest and most complicated cities. Climbing the towers and exploring the alleyways of Siam-Ratchaprasong, that part of Bangkok famous for its gaudy malls, pretentious hotels and tourist strips, Unaldi finds that the charismatic authority of the royal institution has combined with the political economy of the capitalist marketplace to form a highly potent yet unstable admixture of elements for modern state formation. The dense concentration of forces for elite domination of Thailand in these few city blocks at once affirms and celebrates the project’s success, enabling the dominant classes to be seen exactly as they would have themselves seen. But these spaces are also fraught with danger, subject to instability caused by realignments among erstwhile allies within, and to increasingly overt challenges to the status quo from opponents without — expressed most dramatically in the antigovernment protests of 2010, which left in their wake the smoldering ruins of the very architectural hierarchy intended to signify modernity via proper relations of inequality. Serhat Unaldi joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to talk about Siam Paragon and the politics of space, the appeal of Thaksin Shinawatra, the Erawan Shrine and its others, disappeared and hidden palaces, Phibun Songkhram and the making of Chulalongkorn University, and how all roads in Bangkok lead to the monarchy. Nick Cheesman is a fellow at the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University and in 2016-17 a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He can be reached at nick.cheesman@anu.edu.au Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In recent years, scholarship on Burma, or Myanmar, has undergone a renaissance. Jayde Lin Roberts’ Mapping Chinese Rangoon: Place and Nation among the Sino-Burmese (University of Washington Press, 2016) is a bellwether of exciting new books to come, and a model for how they might be done. Although Roberts completed much of her research for the book back under military dictatorship in the 2000s, she explores and situates the Sino-Burmese in downtown Rangoon, or Yangon, in a manner that anticipates and responds to the political changes of the 2010s, and with them, the current ethnographic turn towards Burma. In doing so, she delivers on the book’s title, telling the hitherto largely untold story of the in-between place that Rangoon’s Sino-Burmese community has occupied. But she does more than this, along the way drawing the readers attention towards the larger story of nation and state formation in Burma through the lens of a community that has for over a century struggled with how to be both local enough and Chinese enough in an enduringly colonial, yet distinctively postcolonial Southeast Asian city. Jayde Lin Roberts joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to talk about temples as nested places, Chinese vernacular schooling, hungry ghosts, how tiger prawns built City Mart, and the tactical occupation of Rangoon’s public spaces through lion dances. Nick Cheesman is a fellow at the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University and in 2016-17 a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He can be reached at nick.cheesman@anu.edu.au Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Siam’s New Detectives: Visualizing Crime and Conspiracy in Modern Thailand (University of Hawaii Press, 2016) is a rewarding, multilayered study of how Thailand became the Kingdom of Crime, and its police, masters of simulation and representation. While working towards an account of the visual culture of criminality, Samson Lim carefully documents the establishment and growth of the police force in Thailand, hitherto Siam, and its adoption of technologies to identify, name, class, measure, investigate and explain criminal phenomena. Photography, mapping and fingerprinting altered fundamentally conceptions of what constituted evidence. Perceptions of what crime is and how it can be captured for presentation at trial also underwent profound change. According to Lim “the determination of how things should look became a key preoccupation of the state.” With time, crime scene reconstruction morphed into a powerful new genre of reenactment, which ostensibly helps to organize existing knowledge about crime, while in fact doing something altogether different. Together, Lim convincingly shows, reconstruction and reenactment have brought the criminal act to life, not only for the purposes of assembled judges, but perhaps even more importantly, for the cameras of assembled journalists. Need proof? Look no further than the cover of your typical Bangkok daily. Samson Lim joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to talk about the chronotope of crime, science and technology studies, epistemological history, modus operandi, the aesthetics of reenactment, and, of course, murder in Thailand’s vernacular press. Nick Cheesman is a fellow at the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University and in 2016-17 a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He can be reached at nick.cheesman@anu.edu.au. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In his recent monograph, Deathpower: Buddhism’s Ritual Imagination in Cambodia (Columbia University Press, 2015), Erik W. Davis explores funerary ritual in contemporary Cambodian Buddhism and the way in which Buddhist monks manage death such that its negative power is harnessed and used for the reproduction of morality and of a particular social reality. The book is organized around two themes, which serve as the warp over and under which Davis skillfully weaves the ethnographic detail resulting from his many years of fieldwork in Southeast Asia. The first of these two themes is binding. In the funeral itself binding is both symbolic, as when the funerary ritualists contain the potentially malevolent spirits exiting the corpse, and physical, as when the corpse is bound with consecrated string. Davis sees this image of binding extending far beyond the funeral rite, however, and discusses the way in which Khmer culture itself is founded in part upon the binding or controlling of water–necessary in rice agriculture as practiced in Cambodia–and the binding of people, which is actualized as the enslavement of highland non-agricultural peoples by lowland-dwelling Cambodians. The second theme that runs throughout the book is the dichotomy between civilization and its other. Thus, we find in the Khmer imagination a distinction made between the civilized, moral, agricultural, deforested lowlands and the wild, amoral, forested highlands. In its firm association with civilization, agriculture, and social hierarchy, Cambodian Buddhism legitimates this imagined dichotomy and renders the social world of the lowlands moral. Because Davis explains the nitty-gritty of the many rituals he discusses in larger theoretical terms, the book will be of great interest to both specialists and those with no knowledge of Cambodian Buddhism. On the more detailed side, he discusses not only funerals, but also the sīmā ceremony, the domestication of ghosts by Buddhist monks, the feeding of ghosts and ancestors, witchcraft, the ordination of novice monks, slavery in Cambodia, Khmer origin legends, fertility rituals associated with rice cultivation, nāgas, apotropaic tattoos, Khmer views of leftovers (of food, that is), and a fascinating amulet that is supposedly created by ripping a fetus out of a living woman. But all of this is explained with reference to broader perennial themes, including Buddhism’s management and power over death, reciprocity within the family and (more broadly) human society, the relationship between kingship and Buddhism, human sacrifice, the ambiguity that so often characterizes attitudes towards the deceased, the relationship between agriculture and social hierarchy, and the way in which Buddhism defines itself in opposition to an imagined, amoral other. Specialists will learn something new about the particulars of Cambodian Buddhist ritual, Cambodian society, and funerary practice, while scholars of Buddhism and other religions will surely recognize familiar patterns even as they appreciate the idiosyncratic nature of Cambodian Buddhism. Furthermore, in addition to his rich, first-hand accounts of various rituals and his examination of these rituals through a number of theoretical lenses, Davis includes at the end of each of the book’s nine chapters a vignette relating either a legend or an episode from his own time in the field that illustrates a particular point he is trying to make. This, along with the inclusion of sixteen black and whitephotographs from the author’s fieldwork and a Khmer glossary, make this a very accessible book despite its complexity and depth. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Forests are Gold: Trees, People and Environmental Rule in Vietnam (University of Washington Press, 2016) begins with two related puzzles: why does Vietnam simultaneously plant and cut trees at unprecedented rates; and, if reforestation projects that clear native species and mono-crop Australian exotics do not protect habitat, what do they aim to achieve? To answer these questions, Pamela McElwee proposes a cogent new schema for what she terms environmental rule, whereby projects whose primary goals lie in social planning are represented and justified ecologically. Drawing on the literature of governmentality and actor-network theory, McElwee reveals how from the French colonial period through state socialism to our neoliberal era the discovery of environmental problems in Vietnam has produced certain types of knowledge that have enabled changes to society via forestry. But Forests are Gold is not only exceptional in its use of material from an array of sources to document and explain forest policy and practice in Vietnam. It is wide-ranging in its implications for the study of political ecology, and for the work of policymakers and lobbyists as well, both in Southeast Asia and beyond. Pamela McElwee joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to discuss the politics of bald hills, payments for environmental services, the enduring influence of colonial maps, problems with acacia, and why Foucault and Latour are useful to think with when asking questions about the environment. Nick Cheesman is a fellow at the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University and in 2016-17 a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He can be reached at nick.cheesman@anu.edu.au. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In Thailand’s Theory of Monarchy: The Vessantara Jataka and the Idea of the Perfect Man (SUNY Press, 2016; in paperback from 2017), Patrick Jory offers a compelling reinterpretation of religious text as political theory. The Vessantara Jataka is one of the most historically significant stories of Gautama Buddha’s previous births. Rather than reading the jataka as religious narrative or folktale, Jory convincingly resituates it at the centre of statecraft and ruling ideology in pre-modern Thailand. Tracking the jataka’s rising popularity from the period of early state formation, he shows how its preeminence gradually came to an end with European empire in the 1800s, when the country’s elites undertook to save Buddhism by recasting the religion and its larger traditions to fit with colonial forms of knowledge. Although the jatakas lost favour in the capital they remained popular in the countryside. Today their relationship to the Thai monarchy has been partly restored, with the idea of the perfect man embodied in recently deceased King Bhumibol. Patrick Jory joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to discuss gift giving, Southeast Asian conceptions of power, the idea of literature, superficially modernized monarchy, and the many uses of history. Nick Cheesman is a fellow at the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University and in 2016-17 a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He can be reached at nick.cheesman@anu.edu.au Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Activist Archives: Youth Culture and the Political Past in Indonesia (Duke University Press, 2016) is a book about Indonesian youth activism both before 1998 and after. But it is no ordinary chronological study, a story told in halves with Soeharto’s end days in its interval. Rather, following a cue from her interlocutors, Doreen Lee enfolds the past into the present by attending to how urban activists in the post-New Order and post-reformasi eras have created a sense of belonging here and now by being historically situated. Youth activists don’t just preserve and produce their own collective histories; they identify as the subjects of history, giving rise to powerful impulses to document, record and encode struggle visually and in writing. The activist as archivist, Lee shows, deploys material practices and cultural styles that emphasize the persistent relevance of radical politics even as these politics are at risk of being domesticated, or swept away by newly emergent forces. Her Activist Archives is not only a rich and at times moving ethnographic study of both the potential and ambivalence of youth politics in Southeast Asias most successfully democratized country; it also is exemplary in its careful use of theory to illuminate and enhance case study research on social movements. Doreen Lee joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to discuss pemuda fever, the street as archive, the asymmetry of state violence and student counter-violence, and the persistence of youth activism in democratic Indonesia. Nick Cheesman is a fellow at the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University and in 2016-17 a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He can be reached at nick.cheesman@anu.edu.au Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Piksa Niugini by Stephen Dupont, with forward by Robert Gardner and essay by Bob Connolly, is published by the Peabody Press and Radius Books, (2013). Volume 1: 144 pages, 80 duotone, 6 color images. Volume 2: 144 pages, 120 color images. Piksa Niugini records noted Australian photographer Stephen Dupont’s journey through some of Papua New Guinea’s most important cultural and historical zones – the Highlands, Sepik, Bougainville and the capital city Port Moresby. The project is contained in two volumes in a slipcase one of portraits of local people, and the second of personal diaries. This remarkable body of work captures one of the world’s last truly wild and unique frontiers. Stephen’s work for this book was conducted with the support of the Robert Gardner Fellowship of Photography from Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. The first volume of portraits reproduced in luscious duotone and 4 color; the second is an eclectic collection of the diaries, drawings, contact sheets and documentary photographs that Dupont created as he produced the project, which add to a broader understanding of the images in volume one. Stephen Dupont has produced a remarkable body of visual work; hauntingly beautiful photographs of fragile cultures and marginalized peoples. He skillfully captures the human dignity of his subjects with great intimacy and often in some of the worlds most dangerous regions. His images have received international acclaim for their artistic integrity and valuable insight into the people, culture and communities that have existed for hundreds of years, yet are fast disappearing from our world. Dupont’s work has earned him photography’s most prestigious prizes, including a Robert Capa Gold Medal citation from the Overseas Press Club of America; a Bayeux War Correspondents Prize; and first places in the World Press Photo, Pictures of the Year International, the Australian Walkleys, and Leica/CCP Documentary Award. In 2007, he was the recipient of the W. Eugene Smith Grant for Humanistic Photography for his ongoing project on Afghanistan, and in 2010 he received the Gardner Fellowship at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In Orientalists, Propagandists and Ilustrados: Filipino Scholarship and the End of Spanish Colonialism (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), Megan Thomas offers a thoroughly researched and closely attentive account of how anthropological sciences contributed to the making of the Philippines. While attending to the political concerns that drive Edward Said’s critique of orientalism, Thomas corrects his thesis by pointing to how orientalist forms of knowledge and modes of inquiry could be put to the service of nascent nationalist projects. Filipino polymaths used expertise obtained in ethnology, philology, orthography, folklore and history to advance claims that situated them as the equals of, and sometimes superiors to, their archipelago’s Hispanic rulers. Drawing on Spanish, German, French, English and Tagalog language sources, Orientalists, Propagandists and Ilustrados is a study of the colonial encounter in the best traditions of Southeast Asian scholarship. Not only does it offer a nuanced telling of the colonial intellectual encounter with the islands, and an intelligent and engaged critique of postcolonial scholarship; it is also a compelling history of the Filipino present. Megan Thomas joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to discuss colonial forms of knowledge and the difference between India and the Philippines, racial theory in 19th century Filipino nationalism, the letter K controversy, and the legacy of the late, great Ben Anderson. (Visitors to the website in the Philippines can go to the Anvil Publishing website to order the 2016 reprint of the book, with a new introduction by Caroline Hau.) Nick Cheesman is a fellow at the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University and in 2016-17 a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He can be reached at nick.cheesman@anu.edu.au Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

A lot has been going on in Myanmar in the last few years, and even people who are deeply familiar with the country have had trouble following and interpreting the many changes. Fortunately, Marie Lall’s new book, Understanding Reform in Myanmar: People and Society in the Wake of Military Rule (Hurst, 2016), brings the close attention to events of someone who has been intimately involved in efforts for reform in Myanmar together with an informed reading of how and why reforms have succeeded. Beginning her narrative in 2005, Lall describes how even in the period of unmediated military rule in the mid-to-late 2000s, people in Myanmar began to anticipate and act to effect changes that at the time were not easily discerned, yet which gave rise to conditions that enabled the more substantive changes of the 2010s. Closing with the overwhelming victory of the National League for Democracy in the 2015 general elections she offers a sober but optimistic view of the country’s current conditions and future prospects. Marie Lall joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to discuss Myanmar’s resilient civil society, the peace process, educational reforms, the rise of Buddhist nationalism, and hopes for years to come. Nick Cheesman is a fellow at the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University. He can be reached at nick.cheesman@anu.edu.au Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In the introduction to Embodied Nation: Sport, Masculinity, and the Making of Modern Laos (University of Hawaii Press, 2015), historian Simon Creak writes that Laos, a country that has never won an Olympic medal, may seem an unlikely place to study the history of sport. Yet from the uplands of mainland Southeast Asia, Creak draws on rarely accessed archival material to tell a fascinating and nuanced story of regional and global interconnectedness through masculinity, national pride and competitiveness. By tracking the idea and practice of physical culture alongside changing conceptions of civility and development Creak shows that there is much more to sport, even in the unlikeliest of places, than meets the eye. Describing it as “one of the most fascinating books I have read in years,” Justin McDaniel writes that Embodied Nation “should become a model for the study of masculinity and sports culture in the [Asian] region and beyond.” Simon Creak joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to discuss bodily training and aesthetics in the colonies of France, the relationship between physical exercise and militarization, athletic theatrics and state power, socialist spectator sport, and the malleability of what counts as success in competition on the field and off. Nick Cheesman is a fellow at the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University. He can be reached at nick.cheesman@anu.edu.au Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Working against the tendency to conflate the analytic categories “rule of law,” and “law and order,” Nick Cheesman’s Opposing the Rule of Law: How Myanmar’s Courts Make Law and Order (Cambridge University Press, 2015) makes a significant two-fold contribution, one as “the first serious attempt for half a century to situate Myanmar’s courts in its politics;” and the other, that rather than reproduce the binaried, linear thinking inherent to terms like “rule by law,” Cheesman exposes and repairs a significant conceptual weakness in rule of law scholarship through the analytic lens of law and order. Martin Krygier writes, “Opposing the Rule of Law combines three elements rarely seen in one place: fine-grained, indeed masterly, unravelling of Myanmar criminal laws social and political history, character and significance; an original and sophisticated account of the rule of law and its enemies in Myanmar, generally, and in principle; and uncommonly fine prose. It is a tour de force, instructive–indeed illuminating–and a pleasure to read.” Eve Darian-Smith highlights the study’s rich empirical research and assesses the book as “an extraordinary achievement.” Engaging with Opposing the Rule of Law’scareful and nuanced analysis reveals that this praise, from leading scholars of rule of law, social theory, legal anthropology, and socio-legal studies, is well deserved. Jothie Rajah is Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation, Chicago. She writes on rule of law discourses and can be reached at jrajah@abfn.org. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Eric Tang’s book, Unsettled: Cambodian Refugees in the NYC Hyperghetto (Temple University Press, 2015), is an intimate ethnography of a single person, Ra Pronh, a fifty year old survivor of the Cambodian genocide, who afterwards spent nearly six years in refugee camps in Thailand and the Philippines before moving to the Northwest Bronx in 1986. Through Ra’s story, Tang re-conceives of the refugee experience not as an arrival, but as a continued entrapment within the structures and politics set in place upon migration. Situating Ra’s story within a larger context of liberal warfare, Tang asks how the refugee narrative has operated as a solution to Americas imperial wars overseas, and to its domestic wars against its poorest residents within the hyperghetto. Christopher B. Patterson is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Centre for Cultural Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His articles have appeared or are forthcoming in American Quarterly, Games and Culture, M.E.L.U.S. (Multi-ethnic Literatures of the United States) and the anthologies Global Asian American Popular Cultures (NYU Press) and Queer Sex Work (Routledge). He writes book reviews for Asiatic, MELUS, and spent two years as a program director for the Seattle Asian American Film Festival. His fiction, published under his alter ego Kawika Guillermo, has appeared in numerous journals, and he writes regularly for Drunken Boat and decomP Magazine. His debut novel, Stamped, is forthcoming in 2017 from CCLAP Press. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

The relationship between religion, imperialism, and national identity can be quite complex. At the same time, nationalist readings of history, particularly when they are combined with other ideological perspectives, can easily provide reductionist narratives that do not due full justice to these complicated realities. The history of Catholicism in Vietnam is a case in point, as nationalist and Communist histories tend to present the Catholic Church as the friend of French colonialism with Catholic apologists defending their Church’s role in Vietnamese history in accordance with nationalist standards. In his book, Catholic Vietnam: A Church from Empire to Nation (University of California Press, 2012), Dr. Charles Keith challenges such overly simple narratives by tracing the transformations in the Catholic Church in Vietnam from the pre-colonial, through the colonial, to the post-liberation periods (ending in approximately 1954). For instance, through his careful, rich, and detailed study, Keith shows how Vietnamese Catholics could remain Catholic while being at times pro-colonial, anti-colonial, pro-left, anti-Communist, and other places within and without these labels as their community transformed from a colonial to a national Church. Thus, Keith’s study is well worth a read for anyone interested in Vietnamese history or the history of Christianity. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In her recent monograph, Thailand’s International Meditation Centers: Tourism and the Global Commodification of Religious Practices (Routledge, 2015), Brooke Schedneck examines Buddhist meditation centers in Thailand and draws our attention to the way in which these institutions have creatively (though not always intentionally) altered Buddhist meditation and the meditation retreat format so as to make them accessible to the large number of non-Thai meditators who come to these centers. While at first sight the topic of meditation centers in Thailand might appear fairly narrow and easy to delimit, Schedneck shows that to understand both the histories of these centers and the ways in which they currently operate, one must locate these institutions in the broader contexts of Southeast Asian history, European intellectual and colonial history, and Buddhism’s encounter with modernity. After covering the rise of mass meditation movements (a process that can be traced in part to developments in late nineteenth-century Burma), Schedneck turns to the way in which the meditation centers where she conducted her fieldwork have created two systems within a single institution: one for Thai retreatants, and the other for foreigners. Not only does the social interaction between teacher and student differ in the two systems, but so too does the way in which meditation is taught. Thai participants understand meditation as but one of a number of activities that are meaningful according to a worldview based on Buddhist ideas and values, and they are taught accordingly. Non-Thai meditators, who are almost exclusively from the West, are instead presented with meditation as a secular practice that is to be understood in psychological and universalistic terms, and is largely a matter of individual development. This difference is in turn related to the motivations and preconceptions about Buddhism and Asia that foreign meditators bring to the retreat. Schedneck positions such motives and assumptions in the larger contexts of Buddhist modernism, Orientalism, and the history of European views of Buddhism (both of the Enlightenment and Romantic varieties). As part of this discussion, she clarifies the way in which many first-time retreatants’ associate Buddhist meditation with nature, or, alternatively, see it as a form of therapy through which individual transformation and healing can be realized. However, Western objectifications of Buddhism constitute but one aspect of Schedneck’s multi-faceted exploration of the international meditation centers. Her novel research into the ways in which individual meditation centers, the World Buddhist Federation, and the Tourism Authority of Thailand have portrayed and promoted these centers, is the “commodification” in the subtitle of the book. Schedneck demonstrates that the repackaging of Buddhist meditation is neither a wholesale adaptation of Western modernity nor a conscious attempt at securing tourist spending, but rather a creative adaptation through which Buddhism and meditation are rendered intelligible and meaningful to those who are culturally unfamiliar with both. And Schedneck is careful to point out that this dynamic is as old as Buddhism itself, for Buddhism’s two-and-a-half-millennia survival was possible only because Buddhism was translated into the languages of, and adapted to the thinking of, those cultures to which it spread. One of the most satisfying features of the book is the inclusion of excerpts from some of the interviews that Schedneck conducted with over sixty international meditation teachers and students. In addition, we find fascinating descriptions of the retreat centers at the center of her research and of the details of daily life during a retreat: schedu... Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Mary M. Steedly‘s book, Rifle Reports: A Story of Indonesian Independence, is “one of a kind and will continue to be so,” writes Benedict Anderson. This is high praise from one of the greats of Southeast Asian studies. A reading of Rifle Reports reveals why it is praise that is so well deserved. Steedly deftly weaves the stories of Indonesian independence told to her on “the outskirts of the nation” together with thought-provoking discussions of memory practice and the writing of history via ethnography. Concentrating on the accounts of Karo women about their struggle against Dutch colonizers and Japanese invaders, Steedly situates the fight for independence in the day-to-day activities of North Sumatra’s entire population. In so doing, she offers a much more richly textured account than conventional histories concentrated on male-dominated politics, military strategies and moments of combat provide, one that “moves toward difficulty rather than simplification, one that compels as well as enacts the strategies of patient and engaged reading”. Mary Steedly joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to discuss Karoland, buried guns, the language of “struggle” rather than “revolution”, Sinek’s song, the importance of narrative, and what it means to do ethnographic history. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Labour consciousness is not just class-based; it also emerges out of cultural identities, as Tran Ngoc Angie argues powerfully in Ties that Bind: Cultural Identity, Class, and Law in Vietnam’s Labor Resistance (Cornell University Press, 2013). Vietnamese workers habitually form relationships based on native place, ethnicity, religion and gender. At critical class moments, as Tran calls them, these workers can also succeed in transcending or building on their cultural ties to form larger movements for labour rights. Through detailed study of 33 cases from French colonial Indochina to present day Vietnam, Tran tracks labour activism across a range of political and economic conditions, industries and sectors. Concentrating on the period since economic reform and liberalization from 1986 to the present, she compares worker agency in state-owned and equitized factories, factories with foreign-direct investment and domestic privately owned factories, to arrive at findings that speak to conditions not only in Vietnam today, but also to the lives and struggles of workers across much of Southeast and East Asia. Angie Tran joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to talk about trends in labour unrest in Vietnam, the importance of legal claims to workers rights, cicada factories, and time taken to read graffiti on toilet walls. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

There is no female religious figure so widely known and revered as the Virgin Mary. Filipino Catholics are especially drawn to Mama Mary and have a strong belief in her power, including her ability to appear to her followers. In Mother Figured: Marian Apparitions and the Making of a Filipino Universal (University of Chicago Press, 2015), historical anthropologist Deirdre de la Cruz offers a detailed examination of Filipino interactions with Marian apparitions and miracles. By analyzing the effects of mass media on the perception and proliferation of these phenomena, de la Cruz charts the emergence of voices in the Philippines that are broadcasting Marian discourse globally. She traces a shift from local to national to transnational contexts, and from the representational to the virtual – in short, Mother Figured explores what Mary tells us about becoming modern. Deirdre de la Cruz is assistant professor of Southeast Asian studies and history at the University of Michigan. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In Radicals: Resistance and Protest in Colonial Malaya (Northern Illinois University Press, 2015) Khairudin Aljunied tells a neglected story of anticolonial politics in Malaya from the late 1800s to the Emergency. Whereas other scholars working from imperial archives have downplayed the role of radicalism in nationalist resistance and the struggle for Malayan independence, Khairudin “seeks to rescue the Malay radicals from the shadows of nationalist scholarship” and resituate them in accounts of the country’s past, and its present. Concentrating on the period from 1937, with the establishment of the Kesatuan Melayu Muda, Khairudin tells a complex story of resistance, collaboration, anxiety, ferment and experimentation under both British and Japanese occupiers. Through close readings of memoirs, poems, newspapers and polemical tracts, he offers a lively and engaging account of political consciousness and action in the era of late European colonialism, amid intense warfare and heavy repression. Khairudin Aljunied joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to discuss Malay radicalism and its legacy; warisan and the Malayu Raya; the significance of women for radical anti-British politics on the peninsula; prison stories, and Southeast Asian historiography. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Sidewalk City: Remapping Public Space in Ho Chi Minh City (University of Chicago Press, 2015) is a remarkable book about overlooked yet ubiquitous urban spaces, and the people and things that occupy them. Drawing on the resources of property rights theory, spatial ethnography and critical cartography Annette Miae Kim rethinks public space and re-maps the sidewalks of Vietnam’s southern metropolis. Combining a powerful aesthetic sensibility with excellent scholarship, her book is of rare quality: beautifully written, visually compelling, and passionately argued. Annette Miae Kim joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to discuss sidewalk symbols and vendors, the regulation of public space old and new, the right to the city, pushing the boundaries of the map, and the passing of time along the streets and alleyways of Ho Chi Minh City. To download and view a space-time map and a narrative map from Sidewalk City click here, hereand here. Thank you to the University of Chicago Press for permission to reproduce these maps on the New Books Network websites. More maps, and more on the book, are available on the Spatial Analysis Lab website. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In The Lost Territories: Thailand’s History of National Humiliation(University of Hawaii Press, 2015), Shane Strate tracks the movements of two competing narratives of national identity in nineteenth and twentieth-century Siam, subsequently Thailand. Against the dominant narrative of royal nationalism, he shows how in moments of crisis another narrative of national humiliation functions to bond citizens to the state through the solidarity of victimhood. Both narratives rely heavily on the trope of territory lost to French imperialism. In the royal nationalist narrative, the lost territories are cleverly conceded: a finger sacrificed to save the hand. In the national humiliation narrative, duplicitous colonizers betray and embarrass Siam for their own ends, emasculating its geobody through the seizure of vassals on its periphery. National prestige is restored when the military embarks on new expansionist projects to reclaim the nation’s former preeminence. And when plans to regain an imagined lost empire on the Southeast Asian mainland fail, the narrative switches back to the royal nationalism: territories are again given up strategically, not needlessly, for the greater good and survival of the nation. Shane Strate joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to discuss irredentism, anti-Catholicism in wartime Thailand, imperial Japan and pan-Asianism, the challenges of doing archival research on difficult topics, and how attention to history can inform our understanding of present-day politics in mainland Southeast Asia. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

To write a comprehensive history of Southeast Asia is a task reserved for precious few scholars: historians of unrivaled skill and formidable knowledge. Anthony Reid is among them. His new book, A History of Southeast Asia: Critical Crossroads (Wiley Blackwell, 2015), is almost impossibly vast in scale and ambitious in scope, ranging across familiar territory while drawing out major new themes in the history of one of the world’s most diverse yet nevertheless coherent regions. Writing against the “seductive pressure” to view past political and cultural arrangements as analogues of our own, Reid draws on the resources of a life spent studying and writing Southeast Asian history to take the reader on a journey from the nagara polities and stateless majorities of a thousand years ago to the rise of high modernism in the places that today we know as Indonesia, Singapore and Vietnam. His strong engagement with major debates will appeal to specialists, yet the book is also highly accessible to students new to study of the region. Tony Reid joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to discuss civilizations without cities, global war in the Indian Ocean, state evasion, the shared poverty of late colonial rule, and the role of women in the economies and societies of Southeast Asia from earliest times to the present day. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

When a revolutionary party aims to take administrative control of the countryside, what kinds of devices, training and documents does it use? And what are their consequences? In The Government of Mistrust: Illegibility and Bureaucratic Power in Socialist Vietnam (University of Wisconsin Press, 2013), Ken MacLean explains that confounded by its inability to get a clear reading of its own practices, let alone those of the rural population, the party/state in Vietnam has since the late 1920s layered varied and oftentimes conflicting approaches to the management of information one on top of the other. Although the approaches have differed, all have been premised on a lack of trust: of villagers, of cadres, and of the integrity of the processes of data collection and interpretation themselves. The government of mistrust both produces and is reproduced by the forms of documentation on which it relies. Ken MacLean joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to discuss the functions of “legibility devices” in state practice, the periodization of Vietnam’s modern history, the categories “exemplary” and “deviant”, the debate over reform from above and reform from below, and how the government of mistrust persists despite remaining partially illegible to itself. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Researching the communal killings that occurred in North Maluku, Indonesia during 1999 and 2000, Christopher Duncan was struck by how participants “experienced the violence as a religious conflict and continue to remember it that way”, yet outsiders–among them academics, journalists, and NGO workers–have tended to dismiss or downplay its religious features. Agreeing that we need to move beyond essentialist explanations, Duncan nevertheless insists that the challenge for scholars “is to explain the role of religion in the violence without essentializing it”. In Violence and Vengeance: Religious Conflict and Its Aftermath in Eastern Indonesia (Cornell University Press, 2013) he takes up the challenge. Drawing on over a decade of research in North Maluku, and informed by time spent in the region prior to the conflict, Duncan speaks with impressive authority about the before, during and after of the bloodshed. Utilizing work by scholars of political violence and the management of memory like Stanley Tambiah and Steve Stern, he shows how participants themselves produced and reproduced master narratives of holy warfare. In the process, he critiques scholarship that overstates elite agendas and machinations, remaining too focused on the causes of violence and losing sight of how, in the words of Gerry Van Klinken, “a runaway war can become decoupled from its initial conditions”. Violence and Vengeance makes a powerful case for why study of vernacular understandings of conflict matter. The book also is exemplary in demonstrating how such study can and should be done. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

“Getting By”: Class and State Formation Among Chinese in Malaysia (Cornell University Press, 2015) is a powerful and multilayered book that upbraids overseas Chinese studies for their neglect of class. Bringing class struggle and identity firmly to the centre of his analysis, Donald Nonini argues that scholars of the overseas Chinese have not accounted for class and its role in state formation adequately. Instead, an abiding concern for articulating an imagined essential “Chinese culture” causes scholars to disregard the radical dialectics of state formation and antagonism that crisscross time and space in Southeast Asian postcolonies. Nevertheless, class relations have been fundamental to Malaysian society, and especially, to the making of meaning among its racially differentiated citizenry. Drawing on over three decades of fieldwork, from 1978 to the 2000s, “Getting By is full of detail yet highly readable. Sometimes provocative but always reflective, it is throughout concerned with rethinking premises and questioning assumed knowledge–both of the state in Malaysia and of the academic discipline. In parts political history, in other parts political ethnography, at each point the book couples Nonini’s concern for historical contingency and insularity with larger debates on hegemony, struggle and domination. At a time that it seems to be the fashion for academics to hobnob with policymakers rather than hang out with petty traders or lorry drivers, to demonstrate competencies rather than take up causes, and to produce thought bubbles rather than do deep longitudinal research, “Getting By” is a beautifully unfashionable book that reminds its readers of how much can be learned from staying put, and from thinking and writing plainly about people and things that clearly matter. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

There’s a lot more to money than its exchange value, as Allison Truitt reveals in her smartly written and lively study, Dreaming of Money in Ho Chi Minh City (University of Washington Press, 2013)about how people in Vietnam’s largest city negotiate relations with one another, the state, the global marketplace and the spirit world through dollars and dong, On the streets of Ho Chi Minh City, remitted greenbacks cease to be the stuff of the currency trader or foreign state. Here, they take on new and distinctive roles. They mingle with their counterfeits, the one burned at cemeteries and shrines to satisfy ancestral debts, the other sent by relatives living abroad to acknowledge the debt-bond owed by those who have left the country to those who remain behind. They celebrate the transnational yet also beckon to the intimate. And, they challenge the communist party to reorder its narrative of modernity so as to maintain the primacy of its role in political and administrative affairs. As Truitt herself puts it, Dreaming of Money in Ho Chi Minh City tells a story of “monetary pluralism rather than tightly wound institutional bets, of the sensuous pleasures of cash rather than calculations of derivatives”. It also tells a story of power: of the claims to power that states make through the production of territorial currency, and of how those claims are undermined by the ways that people use money for their own purposes. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Policymakers around the world design projects in which the demands of citizens for basic services are cast as a problem of poverty. Villagers are expected to prove their worthiness for charitable projects and participate with gratitude in schemes for their gradual improvement. When projects fail, the recipients get blamed for being corrupt, ignorant, or disinterested in their own welfare. In Fields of Desire: Poverty and Policy in Laos (NUS Press, 2014), Holly High recounts how Laotian villagers participate in road projects they know will fail, attempt to restart irrigation schemes they had only recently thwarted, and engage with a state they distrust not because they lack awareness, but out of culturally embedded desire. Poverty alleviation campaigns aim to enlist people into cooperative projects with appeals to egalitarianism and democratic choice, yet the success of mutual assistance depends on hierarchical relations, the making of extravagant claims, and sometimes, the ritualized delivery of excessive abundance. Little wonder that when budgets are small and official expectations are modest, roads end up going nowhere and irrigation pumps fall idle. Yet, people’s seemingly unrealistic aspirations still lead to realistic choices, and practical outcomes. “If stories of state are to be approached ethnographically, then they must be allowed to catch us,” High writes. As an ethnographer, she acts firmly on this imperative, taking reification of the state seriously, and writing against projects that rush to demystify it. As an author, she catches the reader with her sympathetic portrayals of life in rural Laos, weaving keen insights into evocative narratives to deliver a highly informative and engaging account of the politics of poverty in mainland Southeast Asia. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Think of student activism in Asia and what comes to mind? The democracy movement in China during 1989? Or Burma the year before? The tumultuous student politics of Thailand in the mid 70s? Perhaps the 2014 protests in Hong Kong. For most of us, student politics in Malaysia probably isn’t the first thing we’d think of. But not Meredith Weiss, author of Student Activism in Malaysia: Crucible, Mirror, Sideshow (Cornell SEAP & NUS Press, 2011), who provides a definitive account of student politics and university life in this Southeast Asian country, from the colonial period to the present. The number of scholarly monographs on Malaysia is relatively small, and few are as meticulously researched and referenced as this book. For these reasons alone, Student Activism in Malaysia deserves close attention. Weiss writes to recover lost history, and she does so with keen insight and nuance. At the same time, she pushes the reader to rethink what the categories of “student” and “activist” mean–not only in Malaysia or Southeast Asia, but also in the modern world. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In Saving Buddhism: The Impermanence of Religion in Colonial Burma (University of Hawaii Press, 2014), Alicia Turner tells the story of how Burmese Buddhists reimagined their lives, their religious practice and politics in the period of 1890 to 1920, following the fall of Mandalay to the British. Whereas many histories narrate the modern anti-colonial struggle in Burma from the 1920s onwards, Turner shows how in the preceding decades Buddhists were working to navigate, explain and respond to rapidly changing conditions through familiar tropes of Buddhist decline and revival, often for new and innovative purposes, and with unfamiliar consequences. By juxtaposing the dynamic Buddhist concept of sasana with the bureaucratic colonial category of “religion” she explains how projects to bring Buddhist practice into alignment with colonial government failed and how new types of conflict emerged, and with them, new identity politics and interest groups. “Turner’s book not only contributes to the study of religious transformations in mainland Southeast Asia but makes substantial contributions to larger scholarly conversations on Buddhist modernities and comparative colonialism,” Anne Hansen writes. “It will be required reading for everyone in the growing field of Theravada Studies.” Saving Buddhism also recommends itself to anyone following what is going on in Burma, or Myanmar, today, since the “modes of mobilization and collective belonging” it describes help us to understand how people continue to act in defence of sasana there, and why. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Over the last decade, debates about political turmoil in Thailand have loomed large in talk shows, chat rooms and public lectures. From the military coup of 2006 that ousted the government of Thaksin Shinawatra, through the tumultuous years after the restoration of civilian government and the latest coup of 2014, events in Thailand have held our attention. Much of the time, these events are reduced to simplistic binaries: yellow shirts and red shirts, elites and commoners, urbanites and rural dwellers. In Thailand’s Political Peasants: Power in the Modern Rural Economy (University of Wisconsin Press, 2012) Andrew Walker, co-founder of the influential New Mandala website–takes the reader beyond the binaries. Rural politics in contemporary Thailand, he advises, is not the old resistant politics of the rural poor; rather, it is a new middle-income politics, a politics through which rural people seek out productive connections with sources of power. In this fundamental shift in the thinking and practices of rural people, Walker argues, we find the basis of support for a new type of constitutionalism, as well as the sources of grievances that have led, at least in part, to the conflicts of the last decade. Thailand’s Political Peasants deftly guides the reader through the many domains of power that constitute rural politics in Thailand: from the world of matrilineal spirits to organic fertilizer projects and electoral politics. The book is full of photographs, maps, and tables that add to the breadth and depth of its contents. Written with ease and flair, it offers a lucid and persuasive account of how rural Thailand is modernizing, and what change in the village means for the politics of Bangkok. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Robert Cribb and his co-authors Helen Gilbert and Helen Tiffin have together drawn on the resources of history, literature, film, science, and cultural theory to write Wild Man from Borneo: A Cultural History of the Orangutan (University of Hawaii Press, 2014), an unusual and fascinating story spanning four centuries of human-orangutan encounters in Southeast Asia and beyond. The book tracks these encounters from the jungles of Sumatra in the 17 century through to the cinematic performances of the 20 century, and into contemporary advocacy for animal rights. It shows how humans–particularly Europeans–have been troubled by the orangutan, because it challenges political, juridical and ethical ideas, perceptions and representations of humanness. Wild Man from Borneo is an illuminating and revealing study, which will appeal to general readers as well as specialists. Over 50 illustrations complement the authors’ elegant and detailed written account. In view of the orangutan’s precarious condition today, the book also contains an urgent message that the disappearance of the “wild man” from the wild would be a tragedy not only for the orangutan but for humanity as well. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Erik Braun‘s recent book, The Birth of Insight: Meditation, Modern Buddhism, and the Burmese Monk Ledi Sayadaw (University of Chicago Press, 2013), examines the spread of Burmese Buddhist meditation practices during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the social, political, and intellectual historical contexts that gave rise to this development. Braun accomplishes this by focusing on the role that the Burmese monk Ledi Sayadaw (1846-1923) played in this movement, drawing primarily on Ledi Sayadaw’s own writings, three biographies, polemical responses to Ledi Sayadaw’s writings, and contemporaneous periodicals. Central to the book is the importance of the Abhidhamma (Buddhist metaphysics or psychology) in Burmese Buddhist monasticism and, more specifically, the way in which Ledi Sayadaw spread the study of the Abhidhamma among the laity and used it as the foundation for insight meditation. In contrast to many recent proponents of insight meditation (both Asian and not), who emphasize technique at the expense of study and theory, Ledi Sayadaw saw insight meditation and study of the Abhidhamma as an inseparable pair, with the latter serving as a basis for the former. Braun places Ledi Sayadaw’s approach in the larger context of Buddhist and Burmese theories about meditation, exploring the different views on the relationships among samatha (concentration meditation), the jhanas (stages of meditative absorption), insight meditation as direct awareness of sensory and mental experience, and insight meditation as discursive thinking informed by Abhidhammic categories. Exploring the cultural milieu of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Burma, Braun demonstrates that Ledi Sayadaw exhibits characteristics that we would regard as traditional (e.g., the importance he grants to literary competence, his belief in Buddhist cosmology) as well as those we might think of as modern (e.g., his charismatic style of preaching, his focus on the laity). In addition, as opposed to Buddhist reformers who argued that Buddhism was in fact applicable to and accorded with modernity (being synonymous with the West, in most such cases), Ledi Sayadaw flipped this relationship on its head by asserting that modernity (e.g., Western science) was in agreement with Buddhism. In so doing he avoided the usual contradictions between Buddhism and modernity but without apparently compromising the Buddhist worldview in the process. Braun places Ledi Sayadaw’s thoughts on these matters in the larger historical context of colonialism: Burma was annexed by the British (in three stages: 1826, 1852, 1886) and many Burmese believed that Buddhism’s final days were nigh. Ledi Sayadaw’s theories, then, were in part a response to a new environment in which Buddhist monks were losing their traditional position as educators, and in which the age-old relationship between the sa Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In Authoritarian Rule of Law: Legislation, Discourse and Legitimacy in Singapore (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Jothie Rajah tells a compelling story of the rule of law as discourse and praxis serving illiberal ends. Through a series of case studies on legislation criminalizing vandalism and regulating the print media, legal profession, and religion in Singapore, Rajah raises critical questions about the meaning and place of law in a postcolony that celebrates colonialism as a cause of its modernity, prosperity and plurality. Terrence Halliday describes Rajah’s work as “theoretically innovative, empirically compelling, and gracefully written”, adding that it “has far-reaching consequences for national leaders who seek ‘third ways’ in which economic development is partitioned from political liberalism”. As Halliday suggests, the contents of Authoritarian Rule of Law transcend the confines of the small city-state with which it is primarily concerned, and go to global debates about legislation, discourse and legitimacy, as well as to the inherent tensions in the rule-of-law ideal itself. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

For many Muslim communities particular religious identities were formulated or hardened within colonial realities. These types of cultural encounters were structural for the various Muslim tribes in the southern Philippine islands of Mindanao and Sulu during the turn of the twentieth century. In Making Moros: Imperial Historicism and American Military Rule in the Philippines’ Muslim South (Northern Illinois University Press, 2012), Michael Hawkins, Assistant Professor of history at Creighton University, demonstrates the dramatic consequences of this short historical moment for Filipino Muslims. Between 1899-1913, professional ethnographers and military officers worked to represent Filipino Muslims as noble primitive warriors. Various communal identities were fused into a singular construction, the Moro. Moro identity was constructed in the American imagination to serve colonial civilizing agendas. Ultimately, this period served as a crucial moment for Filipino Muslim identity and is looked back upon with nostalgia. In our conversation we discussed imperial historicism, colonial legitimacy, taxonomy and classification, capitalism, slavery in American and Moro society, communal remembrance, frontiers, and Islamic authenticity. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Few books on Southeast Asia cover as much geographic, historical and theoretical ground as Dan Slater’s Ordering Power: Contentious Politics and Authoritarian Leviathans in Southeast Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2010). Working across seven case studies, the book argues that existing theories of institutionalization don’t account for regional variation in regime type. Tracing causal processes from the colonial period to the present day, it shows how internal conflicts occurring at critical moments of state building encouraged the formation of elite “protection pacts” with a high degree of durability. Along the way, it engages with an expansive and diverse array of literature on Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Burma, Singapore, South Vietnam, and Thailand. Ordering Power is an ambitious and demanding study, but also a highly accessible one that appeals to a range of audiences. Above all, it is a book that demands the attention of anyone interested in Southeast Asian politics. As John Sidel puts it, “Slater has single-handedly raised the standards–and the stakes–of cross-national comparative analysis” of the region. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Denise Cruz‘s Transpacific Femininities: The Making of the Modern Filipina (Duke University Press, 2012) traces representations of Filipinas in literature and popular culture during periods of transitional power in the Philippines, from the transition from Spanish to American colonial power, then to Japanese Imperialism, then to independence and the Cold War, and then to contemporary global capital. Professor Cruz questions how these disruptions in power destabilized the elite classes, and provided moments of possibility for writers to shift ideas of femininity in the Philippines and for Filipinas abroad. Rather than focus solely on gender within the Philippines, Cruz considers how Filipina femininity was made through imperial networks from Spain, Japan, America and across the globe. In doing so, she exposes how the making of the Filipina was neither natural nor national, but was actually a strategic response to shifting colonial powers as well as to the demands of the global capital market.  Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

What is justice for a man who supervised the interrogation and killing of thousands? Especially a man who now claims to be a Christian and to be, at least in some ways and cases, repentant for his crimes? Thierry Cruvellier has written a fascinating book about the trial of ‘Duch’ the director of the S-21 prison and interrogation center in Cambodia during the rule of the Khmer Rouge. Cruvellier watched virtually the entire trial and interviewed many of the participants and observers. The Master of Confessions: The Making of a Khmer of Rouge Torturer (Ecco, 2014) is both history and philosophy, a deeply moving attempt to understand Duch and his actions. Cruvellier offers the reader an finely crafted narrative of S-21, of the life of Duch and of the place Duch occupied in a genocidal structure. But he also wrestles with deeply philosophical questions about our ability to really understand other people’s actions, about the nature of justice in the aftermath of mass violence, and about the role of courts and trials. It’s a book that gets under your skin in the best kind of way. A journalist, Cruvellier earlier wrote a similar account of witnessing the trial of perpetrators from the Rwandan genocide. As we discuss in the interview, the experience of listening to accounts of atrocities day after day has taken a toll on him, as it would on anyone. But the book that resulted is profoundly moving and unsettling. I hope our discussion offers a taste of the ideas and understanding his book offers. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Singapore has a well-deserved reputation as a state that stifles dissent and polices activism. But as Lynette Chua shows in Mobilizing Gay Singapore: Rights and Resistance in an Authoritarian State (National University of Singapore Press, 2014), repressive government nowhere goes unchallenged, even if the forms that resistance takes are not manifest. Turning away from social movement theory that tends to valorize public protest and other forms of highly visible contentious politics, Chua tells another story: a story of contingent, incremental gains through strategic adaptation; a story of “pragmatic resistance” to authoritarianism. Mobilizing Gay Singapore is a highly readable and finely researched account of how a contemporary political movement has emerged and grown in a small Asian state, yet it is a book with a bigger story to tell about the beginnings and progress of social movements in difficult circumstances. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In a foreword to Tyrell Haberkorn‘s first book, Revolution Interrupted: Farmers, Students, Law and Violence in Northern Thailand (Wisconsin University Press, 2011), Thongchai Winichakul observes, “Haberkorn writes to prevent the fading of life to oblivion, recounting stories that bring the forgotten back to life.” She does this and more. By recalling the forgotten story of farmers who risked and paid with their lives to struggle against repressive forces in the mid-1970s during a period of intense political turmoil in Thailand she writes to refract light from the past onto events in the present. She also raises compelling questions about the meaning of law and its relationship to the violence and impunity that pervade Southeast Asia today. Revolution Interrupted is a study of rare nuance, sincerity and reflection, with much to offer not only to area studies scholars but also to researchers of political violence everywhere. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Tine Gammeltoft‘s new book explores the process of reproductive decision making in contemporary Hanoi. Haunting Images: A Cultural Account of Selective Reproduction in Vietnam (University of California Press, 2014) develops an anthropology of belonging, paying special attention to the ways that women and their communities understand and make decisions based on ultrasound imaging technologies. In the course of making life-and-death decisions, the subjects of Gammeltoft’s book confronted ethically demanding circumstances through which they forged moral selves. Inspired by the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Haunting Images considers their reproductive choices as acts of collective belonging, producing the subjectivities of both mother and fetus. The book considers these choices in light of the extended repercussions of Agent Orange in Vietnam, the local specificity of biopower, national concepts of “population quality,” and the precarity of individual attachments to social collectives. The second half of the book follows the experiences of women who were informed via 3D ultrasound scans that the children they expected would be anomalous, tracing their choices, questions, contexts, and encounters with childhood disability.  It is a powerful and deeply affecting study Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Are Islam and feminism inherently at odds? Is there a contradiction between piety and gender justice? This is the guiding theme for Rachel Rinaldo, professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia, in her book Mobilizing Piety: Islam and Feminism in Indonesia (Oxford University Press, 2013). After more than eighteen months of fieldwork in the contemporary nation with the highest Muslim population, Indonesia, she found that global discourses on Islam and feminism were constantly in dialogue in this local context. Mobilizing Piety is an ethnography of women activists in Jakarta during a time of democratization, popular religious resurgence, and post-9/11 anxieties and suspicions. Rinaldo examined a feminist NGO, Muslim women’s organizations, and a Muslim political party to see how piety and politics intersected. In our conversation we discussed public aspects of piety, field theory, agency, polygamy, pornography, bodily politics, religion as cultural schema, and gender. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Reading Peter Maguire and Mike Ritter‘s book Thai Stick: Surfers, Scammers and the Untold Story of the Marijuana Trade (Columbia Press, 2013) is the most fun I have had doing this podcast. Maguire makes a point during the interview that police officers preferred to arrest marijuana smugglers because they were so laid back and safe to handle. You get the same feeling reading his account of the members of the roaming hippy/surfer community who fund their lifestyle through ‘scams’, that is, smuggling marijuana into Australia, New Zealand, the USA and Canada. Maguire is a former pro-surfer and he communicates the culture of the surfer and their dedication to their past-time. Drug smuggling has a very utilitarian role. While the surfers smoke drugs and have the connections to buy them; a good smuggling run can fund many years on the international surfing trail. Thus they are not drug smugglers who surf but surfers who take advantage of the profit margin of smuggling. Reading the book made me think that they were almost outside the scope of the podcast; this is not organised crime but the occasional foray into crime. It is also the story of invincible young men taking on the impossible in an often amateurish manner and succeeding. However, as Maguire explains, the lure of money can change people and some of the people in the story reverse this equation. This is a story of a time that has passed. There was an innocence in the story during the 1960s and 70s that has been overtaken by the hard edge of the international drug trade. This is an important and overlooked story in the history of crime. The book provides an insight into how people can turn to crime in a manner that contradicts the strongly held theories of the life-course criminologists. I hope the book inspires others to study these marginal areas of crime. As you will hear in the interview, I have volunteered to do so myself. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

While it has become typical to see Filipina/o migrants working in nursing or domestic work in the United States, many are surprised to see Filipina/os doing the same work in Hong Kong, Israel, and Dubai. Indeed, Filipina/o workers are ubiquitous around the globe, and may be the world’s first truly global labor force. In Robyn Rodriguez‘s new book, Migrants for Export: How the Philippine State Brokers Labor to the World (University of Minnesota Press, 2010),Rodriguez explores labor brokerage as a global capitalist strategy wherein the Philippine state mobilizes its citizens and sends them abroad to work for employers throughout the world while generating profit from the remittances that migrants send back to their families and loved ones remaining in the Philippines. Rodriguez traces this trend in Filipina/o overseas workers, which has become one of the largest labor export systems in the world. Ultimately, she questions how and why citizens from the Philippines have come to be the most globalized workforce on the planet, and argues that the reason for this lies in the emergence of the Philippine state as a labor brokerage state. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

There is a city in the Southern hills of Vietnam where honeymooners travel each year to affirm their love at high altitude, breathing in the alpine air and soaking in the legacies of French colonialism. Developed by the French in the nineteenth century, Dalat remains a contemporary tourist destination fully equipped with a “Valley of Love”, an artificial lake with paddleboats, and cowboys. It is also the subject of Eric Jennings‘ Imperial Heights: Dalat and the Making and Undoing of French Indochina (University of California Press, 2011). In his impressive study, Jennings explores more than one hundred years in the history of this colonial and now postcolonial city. Over the course of fourteen chapters, the book examines issues of space and place; disease and health; colonial violence and injustice; culture and leisure; the impacts of war, race and ethnicity, class, gender, memory, and nostalgia. Using Dalat’s past and present as a way into some of the deep contradictions and anxieties of French colonialism, the book is a stunning examination of a unique local context with broader implications for how we think empire and “Frenchness” together. Along the way, Jennings tells a series of fascinating stories, narratives of scientific debate and discovery; of murder and exploitation; of physical illness and recovery; and the attempt to create a French “home away from home” in the colonial mountains. Grounded in hitherto unexplored archival material, Imperial Heights opens up critical questions regarding the tensions and legacies of a French Indochina that was first made and then undone. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Genocide studies has been a growth field for a couple of decades. Books and articles have appeared steadily, universities have created programs and centers and the broader public has become increasingly interested in the subject. Nevertheless, there remain some aspects of the field and some geographic regions that remain dramatically understudied. Deborah Mayersen and Annie Pohlman’s new edited collection Genocide and Mass Atrocities in Asia: Legacies and Prevention (Routledge, 2013) is an excellent step toward filling one of these gaps. The book adds greatly to our understanding of mass violence in East and Southeast Asia. As the title suggests, Mayersen and Pohlman focus not the violence itself, but on its long-term impact on Indonesia, East Timor and other regions in Asia. Deborah and Annie are, besides being solid scholars, delightful conversationalists. The result, I hope, is an interview well worth listening to. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Indonesia is often highlighted as having the right kind of Islam, ‘moderate’ and ‘peaceful.’ Whether that remains true (if it ever was a reality) will be tested in the future but what about the past? How did we end up with this picture of Islam in Indonesia? Michael Laffan, Professor of History at Princeton University, explores this question in his new book, The Makings of Indonesian Islam: Orientalism and the Narration of a Sufi Past (Princeton University Press, 2011). From a plethora of sources Laffan has reconstructed the history of interactions and the formation of discourses about Islam in Southeast Asia. The narrative includes the exchanges between Dutch (and British) authorities, missionaries, and Muslims, in both local and global perspectives. Much of the debates was about the process of Islamization and how it was remembered. Muslim accounts regularly stressed the role of Sufi brotherhoods in situating Islam in the local context but other evidence puts this into question. Islamic texts played a major role though for both Muslim participants and the foreign parties. Laffan brings a Dutch orientalist, Snouk Hurgronje, to life in order to demonstrate the dynamic relationship between all the players involved. In our conversation we discussed Islamization, the role of print technologies, Islamic education, elite and public religious participation, orientalist scholarship, textual archives, colonial power, and Sufism. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

I’m not sure what it would feel like to interview a leader of a genocidal regime. Asking why people decide it is right and necessary to kill many thousands is one of the standard questions in genocide studies. But it is one most of us face at a distance, in the classroom, while listening to a radio broadcast, or when present at a moment of remembrance personal or public. Gina Chon and Sambeth Thet, co-authors of Behind the Killing Fields: A Khmer Rouge Leader and one of his Victims (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), had the opportunity to ask that question in a much more personal way. Between them, the two spent hundreds of hours interviewing Nuon Chea, Brother Number Two in the Khmer Rouge. The result is a book that both reviews Nuon Chea’s life as a revolutionary and offers a glimpse into his attempts to wrestle with the past, both his own and his country’s. Alongside this story, Chon and Thet offer a brief narrative of Thet’s experience during the rule of the Khmer Rouge. The losses he and his family suffered make his encounter with Nuon Chea especially fascinating. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Borneo is an island where three very different nation-states meet: Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei. The Indonesian province of Kalimantan occupies most of the island; of the rest, all except one percent is taken up by the Malaysian provinces of Sabah and Sarawak. The tiny but wealthy Sultanate of Brunei occupies that one percent. So, people living in the northern parts of the island have lots of borders to cross. It’s almost like having your own mini-continent; and one that the outside world doesn’t really think of in terms of barbed wire and immigration check points- such imagery being reserved for the more famous borders of India and Pakistan, Israel and the Palestinian territories, or even Thailand and Cambodia. Borneo to most of us out here is all about orangutans, long houses, and tropical rainforest. But Noboru Ishikawa‘s magnificent, trail-blazing book, Between Frontiers: Nation and Identity in a South East Asian Borderland (NUS Press, 2010) is all about the borders and frontiers that slice up Borneo, the people who have to live around them, and the daily negotiations that take place on them. Noboru conducted extensive fieldwork in the villages on the border demarcating Malaysian Sarawak and Indonesian Kalimantan to see how the people lived the experience of being on a borderland- for the Malaysian village of Telok Melano, for instance, it was 3 kilometres to Indonesia, and an 8 hour walk (tide permitting) to Sematan in Malaysia when the sea was too rough for boats to traverse. The result of his work is a marvelous fusion of historiography and anthropology. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

The Spanish-American War was not only the beginning of a new imperial period for the United States, David Silbey observes in his book A War of Frontier and Empire: The Philippine-American War, 1899-1902 (Hill and Wang, 2008), it was also the point at which the Filipino people first began to conceive of themselves as a nation. Where Americans sought to conquer, control, and pacify their newly-purchased possessions, a nascent nationalist movement sought to create some sense of unity from the hundreds of different tribes, clans, and ethnic groups living in the archipelago. As David Silbey creates a new narrative of this highly controversial, yet little-understood period in American history, he also unveils a series of new interpretations of the war’s conduct, its haphazard administration across thousands of miles, and the new relationships growing between Filipinos and Americans even amidst war. In the end, the Philippine-American War certainly was a strange moment in the history of the US Army and American foreign policy. It was a counter-insurgency that worked, despite the pressures of racial intolerance and mutual misperceptions on the part of its participants. Silbey’s gifts as a writer combined with his skill as a historian create a short yet vital account of this generally forgotten period that is extremely relevant for readers today. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

My uncle fought in Vietnam. He flew F-105 Thundercheifs, or “Thuds.” He bombed the heck out of an area north of Hanoi called “Thud Ridge.” He’d come home on leave and tell us that it was okay “over there” and not to worry. I didn’t because I was sure “we” would win and my uncle would come home a hero. Of course, neither of these things happened (though my uncle did come home). Since then, I’ve read many books about the war In an effort to try to figure out “what happened,” which is to say why it all went so horribly wrong. But I’d never read one quite like Mark P. Bradley’s Vietnam at War (Oxford University Press, 2009). Mark succeeds in doing something very unusual–and perhaps unique–in the American literature on the Vietnam conflict: he shows us the war from the Vietnamese point of view, and more particularly the North Vietnamese point of view. He’s mined Vietnamese archives, literature, and popular culture to see the war through Vietnamese eyes, and he’s done a marvelous job of it. My uncle’s war was very different from the one Mark presents. He fought the “Vietnam War”; they fought the “French War” and the “American War.” He saw it from a cockpit; they lived it on the ground, under the bombs. He was in their country; they were in their own country. He was sure he would leave; they were sure they would stay, and grasp victory once the invaders were gone. Now that I think about it, there is something strangely familiar about this story. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

What to think about the Vietnam War? A righteous struggle against global Communist tyranny? An episode in American imperialism? A civil war into which the United States blindly stumbled? And what of the Vietnamese perspective? How did they–both North and South–understand the war? Mark Bradley and Marilyn Young have assembled a crack team of historians to consider (or rather reconsider) these questions in Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars: Transnational and International Perspectives (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). The book is part of the National History Center‘s Reinterpreting History series. The pieces in it are wide-ranging: some see the war from the heights of international diplomacy, others from the hamlets of the Mekong Delta. They introduce new themes, for example, the role of American racial stereotypes in the conflict. More than anything else, however, they are nuanced. Their authors provide no simple answers because there are none. You will not find easy explanations, good guys and bad guys, or ideological drum-beating in these pages. What you will find is a sensitive effort to understand an event of mind-boggling, irreducible complexity. There’s a lesson here: we may think we know what we are doing on far-away shores, but we are fooling ourselves. Reminds one a bit of Tolstoy’s thoughts on the philosophy of history at the end of War and Peace. Still worth a read, as is this book. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

The thing about empire building is that when you’re done building one, you’ve got to figure out what to do with it. This generally involves the “extraction of resources.” We tend to think of this in terms of things like gold, oil, or rubber. But people can be “extracted” as well. The French empire of the later nineteenth century offers a case in point. Havingfound themselves in a very nasty war with the Germans, the French decided that it might be useful to enlist their African and Southeast Asian colonials in the fighting. As Richard Fogarty demonstrates in his excellent new book Race and War in France: Colonial Subjects in the French Army, 1914-1918 (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), this effort to draft the colonials led to no end of paradoxes. France was the home of Republicanism, and Republicans are supposed to be keen on liberte, egalite, fraternite. But the colonials weren’t at liberty–they were subjects. Neither were they equal–they enjoyed few of the rights of the native French. And of course they weren’t brothers–rather they were “children” of France. Yet the French felt free to ask their colonial underlings to undertake the highest act of civic sacrifice, namely, to fight and die for la Patrie. Would this sacrifice earn themliberte, egalite, fraternite? No. In fact, it didn’t earn them much but a hellish trip to what looked like the end of the world. For, as Fogarty shows, French racism trumped French Republicanism throughout the war (and after, one might add). The colonial soldiers were segregated, stereotyped, and often used as cannon fodder. Some French felt bad about this. But most didn’t. After all, the colonials needed to be “civilized” in order to enjoy the fruits of Republicanism, and presumably the French believed that asking them to die for their would-be motherland would help accomplish this feat. All it probably did was engender bitterness, as the French were to discover some decades later when their empire slipped away. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

U.S. forces invade a distant country in order to disarm an international threat to American security. They fight well, and win every major battle decisively. They become occupiers, and find themselves engaged in a low-level guerrilla war against a determined though shadowy enemy. The American-backed government has a tenuous hold on power, and it is unclear whether it can survive without significant U.S. military aid. Nevertheless, the American political climate favors rapid withdrawal.  The U.S. forces are ordered to prepare the country’s military to take over “major combat operations.” The results of these efforts are mixed. No one seems to know what will happen in the country, but one thing is sure: the Americans are leaving. That was the situation in Vietnam in 1970; so too is it the situation in Iraq today. Thus there could be no more timely moment to revisit Lt. Col. James Willbanks’ (ret.) outstanding Abandoning Vietnam: How America Left and South Vietnam Lost Its War (University of Kansas, 2004; reissue, 2008). Lt. Col. Willbanks is uniquely positioned to tell the tale. He is an excellent historian with a gift for plainspoken, even-handed analysis. But not only that: he was also there. Lt. Col. Willbanks served as an adviser to the South Vietnamese forces during the era of “Vietnamization” in the early 1970s. In Abandoning Vietnam, Willbanks shows just how the Nixon administration’s plan to win “peace with honor” won neither. There are lessons here. Let us hope that whomever is charged with the unenviable task of extricating the U.S. from Iraq will heed them. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies