Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Taomo Zhou, Associate Professor of Chinese Studies, National University of Singapore.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at The Kahin Center, 640 Stewart Ave. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

Abstract
Motherhood—one of the most important and yet mundane social institutions—is central to our understanding of the latter half of the twentieth century. This talk focuses on a left-wing Indonesian activist in the Afro-Asian movements, Francisca Casparina Fanggidaej (1925–2013), a mother of seven who endured decades of forced separation from her family. Based on a close reading of Fanggidaej’s diaries, personal letters, and oral history interviews with her family and friends, I discuss the politics of maternal absence in Indonesia and China—two leading countries in the Afro-Asian movements. I explore how these two countries shaped the public and self-perceptions of non-residential mothers through their welfare provisions and reproductive policies; and how a transnational figure like Fanggidaej navigated motherhood within frameworks of revolutionary anticolonialism in Indonesia, state socialism in China, and the global rise of capitalist neoliberalism, which ultimately displaced the Third World internationalist vision once championed by both nations. I argue that the fall of Third World internationalism signaled not only a missed opportunity to reconfigure global geopolitics, but also a lost chance to redefine motherhood—not as the individualized enterprise of the birth mother alone but as a communal effort involving an assemblage of caretakers regardless of kinship or gender.

About the Speaker
Taomo Zhou is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chinese Studies and Dean’s Chair in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore. Her first book, Migration in the Time of Revolution: China, Indonesia and the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2019), won a Foreign Affairs “Best Books of 2020” award and an Honorable Mention for the 2021 Harry J. Benda Prize from the Association for Asian Studies. Taomo is currently working on her second book project tentatively entitled “Made in Shenzhen: A Global History of China’s First Special Economic Zone,” which is under advance contract with Stanford University Press. She is also researching on motherhood during the Cold War.