History | New Directions in Asian History
HSS Conference Room
Thursday, November 14
4:30-6:00pm
This year has seen major contributions to Asian Studies from the History department with the publication of four books. Come join us to hear what these books have to say, how they are shaping new directions in Asian History, and to celebrate their achievements with the authors.
Moderated by Assoc. Professor Farish Ahmad-Noor.
Els van Dongen, Realistic Revolution: Contesting Chinese History, Culture, and Politics after 1989 (Cambridge University Press, 2019)
Between 1989 and 1993, with the end of the Cold War, Tiananmen, and Deng Xiaoping’s renewed reform, Chinese intellectuals said goodbye to radicalism. Based on Chinese-language sources and interviews with leading intellectuals, Realistic Revolution covers th e major debates of this period on radicalism in history, culture, and politics from a transnational perspective, tracing intellectual exchanges as China repositioned itself in Asia and the world.
Jessica Hinchy, Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India: The Hijra, c. 1850-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).
This book, the first in-depth history of the Hijra community, illuminates the colonial and postcolonial governance of gender and sexuality and the production of colonial knowledge. It reveals how the colonial state equated gender disorder with political disorder and is highly relevant to contemporary Indian debates on gender, sexuality and law.
Ngoei Wen-Qing, Arc of Containment: Britain, The United States, and Anticommunism in Southeast Asia (Cornell 2019)
Arc of Containment shows how the pro-US trajectory of Southeast Asia after the Pacific War was far more characteristic of the wider region's history than American policy failure in Vietnam. Indeed, by the early 1970s, five key anticommunist nations—Malaya, Singapore, Philippines, Thailand, and Indonesia—had quashed Chinese-influenced socialist movements at home and established, with British and U.S. supp ort, a geostrategic arc of states that contained the Vietnamese revolution and encircled China.
Zhou Taomo, Migration in the Time of Revolution: China, Indonesia, and the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2019) examines how two of the world's most populous countries interacted between 1945 and 1967, when the concept of citizenship was contested, political loyalty was in question, identity was fluid, and the boundaries of political mobilization was blurred. Based on archival materials that are no longer available from the Chinese foreign ministry archives, this book shows migration and the political activism of the Chinese diaspora were important historical forces in the making of governmental relations between Beijing and Jakarta during the Cold War.
Thursday, November 14
4:30-6:00pm
This year has seen major contributions to Asian Studies from the History department with the publication of four books. Come join us to hear what these books have to say, how they are shaping new directions in Asian History, and to celebrate their achievements with the authors.
Moderated by Assoc. Professor Farish Ahmad-Noor.
Els van Dongen, Realistic Revolution: Contesting Chinese History, Culture, and Politics after 1989 (Cambridge University Press, 2019)
Between 1989 and 1993, with the end of the Cold War, Tiananmen, and Deng Xiaoping’s renewed reform, Chinese intellectuals said goodbye to radicalism. Based on Chinese-language sources and interviews with leading intellectuals, Realistic Revolution covers th e major debates of this period on radicalism in history, culture, and politics from a transnational perspective, tracing intellectual exchanges as China repositioned itself in Asia and the world.
Jessica Hinchy, Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India: The Hijra, c. 1850-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).
This book, the first in-depth history of the Hijra community, illuminates the colonial and postcolonial governance of gender and sexuality and the production of colonial knowledge. It reveals how the colonial state equated gender disorder with political disorder and is highly relevant to contemporary Indian debates on gender, sexuality and law.
Ngoei Wen-Qing, Arc of Containment: Britain, The United States, and Anticommunism in Southeast Asia (Cornell 2019)
Arc of Containment shows how the pro-US trajectory of Southeast Asia after the Pacific War was far more characteristic of the wider region's history than American policy failure in Vietnam. Indeed, by the early 1970s, five key anticommunist nations—Malaya, Singapore, Philippines, Thailand, and Indonesia—had quashed Chinese-influenced socialist movements at home and established, with British and U.S. supp ort, a geostrategic arc of states that contained the Vietnamese revolution and encircled China.
Zhou Taomo, Migration in the Time of Revolution: China, Indonesia, and the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2019) examines how two of the world's most populous countries interacted between 1945 and 1967, when the concept of citizenship was contested, political loyalty was in question, identity was fluid, and the boundaries of political mobilization was blurred. Based on archival materials that are no longer available from the Chinese foreign ministry archives, this book shows migration and the political activism of the Chinese diaspora were important historical forces in the making of governmental relations between Beijing and Jakarta during the Cold War.