Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Vicente L. Rafael, (Professor of History and Southeast Asian Studies, University of Washington in Seattle), who will discuss authoritarian imaginary in the Contemporary Philippines.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at the Rockefeller Hall 374. Lunch will be served, and this talk is co-sponsored by the Department of History. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

About the Talk

President Rodrigo Duterte's term ended in May 2022 amid a violent drug war and the hardships of the COVID pandemic. Yet, surveys indicated that the president’s astronomic popularity did not suffer significantly. His job approval rating remained high—as much as 91% according to one poll--even as the majority of the people had become increasingly pessimistic about the state of the country.

Why this massive popularity amid the most catastrophic of conditions? How was it that a mass murderer continued to register such highly positive ratings? Why did his governance by fear meet with such widespread approval? Or is it the case that by focusing on Duterte, we’ve missed something much more fundamental, namely the persistence of structures of power that envelop and enable the survival of sprawling urban communities where his support was most evident? How did his authoritarian imaginary circulate and reinforce existing notions of community? That is, how did a certain fantasy about sovereign power—the power to decide who shall live and who shall die—oscillate between ruler and ruled? Indeed, is there something about the construction of community that preceded and will continue beyond Duterte’s regime-- something about the logic and logistics of living together--that also create the conditions for cultivating violence and spreading death?

About the Speaker

Vicente L. Rafael is Professor of History and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is the author most recently of The Sovereign Trickster: Death and Laughter in the Age of Duterte (2022) as well as several other works on the history and cultural politics of the colonial and post-colonial Philippines. Recently, he also co-edited with Phrae Chittiphalangsri, Of Peninsulas and Archipelagos: the Landscape of Translation in Southeast Asia (2023).

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Meredith Weiss, (Professor, Department of Political Science, Rockefeller College of Public Affairs & Policy), who will discuss Malaysia's dominant-party system.

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

About the Talk

Malaysia’s 15th general election in November 2022 decisively ended the country’s dominant-party system. What might take its place, however, remains hazy—how competitive, how polarized, how politically liberal, and how stable an order might emerge will take some time to become clear. The opposition Pakatan Harapan (Alliance of Hope), having secured a plurality of seats, but with a sharply pronounced ethnic skew, formed a coalition government with the previously dominant, incumbent Barisan Nasional (National Front) and smaller, regional coalitions. This settlement resolved an immediate impasse, but relied upon obfuscation of real programmatic, ideological, and identity differences, raising questions of longer-term durability or results. Examining this uncertainty suggests three broad queries, with resonance well beyond Malaysia. The first is the fragmentation and reconsolidation of Malaysian party politics, and how party dominance transforms or falls. The second is the extent to which its dominant party defined or confirmed Malaysia as electoral authoritarian, and whether we should consider it still to be so. And the third is what possibilities Malaysia’s apparent party-system deinstitutionalization opens up for structural reform beyond parties. Does the deterioration of that system—more than simply the previous dominant party’s electoral loss—clear the way for more far-reaching liberalization? All told, Malaysia’s incremental dismantling of its dominant-party system does not also spell the end of electoral authoritarianism. Party and party-system deinstitutionalization leave the system in flux, but illiberal reconsolidation is as plausible as progressive structural reform.

About the Speaker

Meredith L. Weiss is Professor of Political Science in the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs & Policy at the University at Albany, State University of New York (SUNY). In four 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)—numerous articles, and a dozen edited or co-edited volumes, she addresses issues of social mobilization, civil society, and collective identity; electoral politics and parties; and governance, regime change, and institutional reform in Southeast Asia, especially Malaysia and Singapore. She is the inaugural Director of the SUNY/CUNY Southeast Asia Consortium (SEAC) and co-edits the Cambridge Elements series on Southeast Asian Politics & Society.

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.