Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Tom Pepinsky, (Walter F. LaFeber Professor of Government and Public Policy and Director, Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University), who will discuss the decolonial turn in Southeast Asian studies.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at the Rockefeller Hall 374. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

About the Talk

The decolonial turn in Southeast Asian studies raises fundamental questions about the production of knowledge about the region, and the role of Western institutions, foreign scholars, and externally-oriented conceptual models in construction Southeast Asia as a field of study. In this presentation, Tom Pepinsky will speak frankly about how scholars who share a normative commitment to decolonization should wrestle with these questions. Decolonization can be understood through at least four partially-overlapping perspectives: individual, institutional, ideational, and rhetorical. Thinking comparatively across world regions and academic disciplines, and reflecting on the position of the Cornell Southeast Asia Program as a central node in a global network of knowledge production, he will argue for a pragmatic and explicitly political approach to Southeast Asian studies—at Cornell and beyond. He will conclude by speculating about the possibility of a Southeast Asian studies that transcends a Western preoccupation with itself, reflecting on old debates about the possibility of an autonomous history of Southeast Asia, but in a new era with a new purpose. The goal of this lecture is to welcome scholars into an open and collective discussion about the past, present, and future of the field.

About the Speaker

Thomas Pepinsky is the Walter F. LaFeber Professor in the Department of Government and Brooks School of Public Policy at Cornell University, and Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. He specializes in comparative politics and international political economy, with a special interest in Southeast Asia. He is the author, most recently, of Piety and Public Opinion: Understanding Indonesian Islam (Oxford University Press, 2018, with R. William Liddle and Saiful Mujani), and Pandemic Politics (Princeton University Press, 2022, with Shana Kushner Gadarian and Sara Wallace Goodman). His current research addresses identity, politics, and political economy in comparative and international politics.

Talk by Divya Cherian (History, Princeton University)

What did it mean to be Hindu in pre-colonial India? Through a discussion of everyday life and local politics in the kingdom of Marwar in the eighteenth century, this presentation will show that an alliance between existing landed elites and a newly ascendant mercantile class remade the category “Hindu.” A key element of this new articulation of an early modern Hindu identity was vegetarianism and an embrace of non-violence. Based on extensive research into the administrative records of the region, this presentation will show how political mobilizations of the ethical ideal of non-harm fashioned not just a new Hindu identity but also a more starkly defined “Untouchable.” These findings challenge the projection of dyadic conceptions of Hindu and Muslim onto the pre-colonial past and demonstrates the centrality of caste to the early-modern Hindu self and its imagination of inadmissible others.

Divya Cherian is a historian of early modern South Asia. She is an assistant professor at the Department of History at Princeton. Her book, Merchants of Virtue: Hindus, Muslims, and Untouchables in Eighteenth-Century South Asia (University of California Press, 2023), offers a fine-grained study of pre-colonial reconfigurations of the Hindu Self and its inadmissible Others pursued through local politics, state law, and bodily practice. Cherian is now working on her next book project, which is a history of "magic," sex, and political life in pre- and early colonial India.

As part of the Migrations Summer Institute, join us for a conversation with Moon-Ho Jung (Professor and Harry Bridges Endowed Chair in Labor Studies, Department of History, University of Washington) about his most recent book, Menace to Empire: Anticolonial Solidarities and the Transpacific Origins of the U.S. Security State. The book addresses these questions:

Why was the United States so obsessed with “Asians and radicals” in the early twentieth century?How was the U.S. security state borne out of the threat of transpacific revolutionary movements?How might we research and write multi-sited anti-imperial histories?The conversation will be moderated by Mark John Sanchez (Assistant Professor, Department of Asian Studies, Vanderbilt University).

Register to join us on Zoom.

Talk by Kalyani Ramnath (History, University of Georgia)

For more than 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 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 assistant professor of history at University of Georgia. She received her Ph.D. from Princeton University and was a Prize Fellow in Economics, History, and Politics at Harvard University.