Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Eric C. Thompson, Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology & Anthropology at the National University of Singapore, who will discuss the writing of a book The Story of Southeast Asia.

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

About the Talk

In this talk, the author discusses the writing of The Story of Southeast Asia (NUS Press, 2024). The book is a historical anthropology of the region and its people. While using a historical-chronological structure, it outlines a series of themes that have created the region as we know it today: migration and settlement, trade and industry, state building (and state avoidance), adoption of popular religions, gender and kinship relationships, contested sovereignty, and modernity. Although written in a clear narrative language with a broad (popular, undergraduate) audience in mind, the book touches on many ongoing debates in Southeast Asian studies and other disciplines and makes arguments (mostly implicit or in passim) for the framing of these debates (e.g. around periodization, agency, identity, and gender/kinship). The author will discuss several of these (and invites discussion of others): What were the motivations of writing the book and the positionality of the author? Why attend to an exceptionally longue durée? What are the “strange parallels” between the adoption and spread of Theravada, Islam, Confucianism, and Christianity in the region? How does Southeast Asia make us rethink the relationship between modernity and gender relations? How can we (and should we) put colonialism in its place? And of course, what in the heck was Sriwijaya?

About the Speaker

Eric C. Thompson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the National University of Singapore. He holds a PhD in sociocultural anthropology from the University of Washington and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of California Los Angeles. He is the author of Unsettling Absences: Urbanism in Rural Malaysia (2007) and The Story of Southeast Asia (2024), co-author of Awareness and Attitudes toward ASEAN (2007) and Do Young People Know ASEAN? (2016), and co-editor Southeast Asian Anthropologies (2019) and Asian Smallholders: Persistence and Transformation (2019) among other publications.

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Chie Ikeya, Associate Professor of History, Director of the Institute for Research on Women, and Co-Director of Global Asias at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, who will discuss the marriage laws in Southeast Asia.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at the The Kahin Center, 640 Stewart Ave. It is co-sponsored by the Department of History. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

About the Talk

First debated in the legislature in 1927 when Burma, also known as Myanmar, was a province of British India, the Buddhist Women’s Special Marriage and Succession Act (1954) has been praised as the first and only law in existence to protect the rights specific to Buddhist women. In 2015, the Act was revised as one of four controversial laws euphemistically known as “National Race and Religion Protection Laws.” I trace the history and afterlife of this legislation and compare it to British, Dutch, and Japanese colonial laws on mixed marriage; the anti-miscegenation laws of the U.S.; national marriage laws throughout Asia; and the anti-conversion laws in India that have been enacted in the name of religious freedom. Across these disparate contexts, I argue, marriage laws have functioned to alienate Asian migrants and settlers as perpetual, unassimilable foreigners. They have served to protect the “purity” of the ruling/majority group by empowering state and social control of women’s sexual, reproductive, and property rights in the name of protecting women. I suggest that a transregional analysis of the legal regulation of intermarriage and conversion illuminates connections in the historical articulations of law, race, religion, and gender that have enforced inequalities across imperial and national divides. It brings into sharp focus the segregationist and patriarchal tendencies of nations and regions, such as Burma and Southeast Asia, long identified with racial and religious pluralism and female autonomy, thereby unsettling the segregation of area studies itself.

About the Speaker

Chie Ikeya is Associate Professor of History, Director of the Institute for Research on Women, and Co-Director of the Global Asias Initiative at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She is the author of two monographs, InterAsian Intimacies across Race, Religion, and Colonialism (Cornell University Press, September 2024) and Refiguring Women, Colonialism, and Modernity in Burma (University of Hawai’i Press, 2011). Her research has been funded by several institutions including the Japan Foundation, Mellon Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Toyota Foundation.

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Shaoling Ma, Associate Professor of Asian Studies at Cornell University, who will discuss the computerization of Southeast Asia.

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

About the Talk

There has been no comprehensive history of computerization in Southeast Asia between the 1950s and the 1980s, and my talk will offer some explanations as to why this is not a bad thing. To tell a history of computerization in any geopolitical region is to simultaneously conceive of the computerization of the region, that is, of how the classification, imaging, and prediction of human-natural-and-machine systems increasingly shape actionable and optimizable knowledge of its peoples, and natural and built environments. In the case of Southeast Asia, a critical assessment of such a history shows how accounts written during this period cast the region as the receiving end of foreign hardware technologies and know-how, or as a resource frontier for the collection of environmental, demographic, agricultural, industrial, and other “raw” data, is still only a story half-told. At stake is to go further in grasping how such developmentalist histories inadvertently and invaluably theorize the roles that political states, economies, and cultures play in the growing, global perception of software as hardware- and machine-independent, an ideology that made it possible to position local Southeast Asian communities as part of a computational, planetary order. Conceived as preliminary notes—referencing the “training data” in my title—drawn from what can only be a non-totalizing project, this talk will highlight select computer applications in the fields of education and consulting, environmental sensing, and agricultural and land informatics. By examining how universities, states, and consultancy firms rationalize software development as national self-reliance; how a 1977 Final Report on Computer Processing of Remote Sensing Data prepared by the Asian Institute of Technology for the Committee for Coordination of Investigations of the Lower Mekong Basin interpret and retrain data from LANDSAT satellite imageries; and the language of modern, informatics management in the Malaysian Rubber Industries Development Authority’s implementation of a computer support system, I hope to show how these anecdotes, partial and eclectic as they are, paradoxically commit to thinking of Southeast Asia on a large, abstract, and reflexive scale.

About the Speaker

Shaoling Ma is an interdisciplinary scholar and critical theorist of global Chinese history, literature, and media in the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell University. She is the author of The Stone and the Wireless: Mediating China, 1861-1906 (Duke UP, 2021), and is currently working on a second book manuscript on a theory and cultural history of computational environments in East and Southeast Asia. She serves as Book Review Editor (film/media studies/drama) for MCLC: Modern Chinese Literature and Culture.

Talk by Al Haj Khalifah U Aye Lwin (Religions for Peace Myanmar, Masjid Sujud Shah Utica NY)

Myanmar has a track record of forging unity in multiplicity, and Muslims have been an integral part of Myanmar society since the Pagan dynasty. Rohingyas were, in fact, prominent citizens, just like other Myanmar Muslims from different origins. They were recognized as full-fledged Myanmar citizens even by the military before the coup. However, when the entire nation started to oppose despotic military dictatorship, the junta projected Islam as a danger to Burmese nationalism. Myanmar Muslims became soft targets and easy prey. Rohingyas were the hardest hit among the Myanmar Muslims. Their citizenship was stripped off, and tens of thousands of them were hounded out of the country. Genocide and ethnic cleansing were the order of the day. Rohingyas are targeted as a danger to Burmese Buddhist nationalism by the military, and native, often pious Myanmar Buddhists who have (often) been brainwashed and indoctrinated to hate them. Multifaith leaders in Myanmar were trying to alter the stereotyped rhetoric with the help of broad-minded leaders when the country was faced with yet another military coup. Nevertheless, faith-based leaders in Myanmar are determined and will continue to strive toward achieving this endeavor.

Talk by Guangtian Ha (Religion, Haverford College)

This talk draws from a book manuscript of the same title under preparation for Columbia University Press. Weaving together sources in classical Arabic, Persian, Chinese, and Bahasa Indonesia/Malay, and combining an array of methodologies from historiography to literary criticism to ethnography, From Baghdād to Baghpūr aims to excavate or reimagine a premodern global – global as in across the Indian Ocean, tying East Africa, Arabia and Persia to South, Southeast and East Asia (the problematic nature of these geographical terms is not lost on the present author) – history where multiple regimes of racialization overlap and heterogeneous conceptions of Blackness intersect. The majority of the sources the book draws on are from late antique and medieval times – if one is to adopt, not without misgivings, European historiographical terms for periodisation. By examining entangled histories and listening to entwined tongues, From Baghdād to Baghpūr asks if there could be a space where an inchoate premodern history is possible of a certain “Black Pacific” that predates modernity yet lays the ideational, if not also the political and economic, foundation for the rise of the Black Atlantic in later times. In this presentation, I will first lay out the general framework of the book, clarify a few key concepts whose theoretical articulations remain (constructively) disputed within Asian studies and medieval studies, and offer several concrete examples to demonstrate the kinds of sources I utilize for the project and the manner whereby I approach them. I aim less to draw definitive conclusions than to open up new avenues of research and new spaces for alternative imaginations.

Talk by Yasmine Flodin-Ali (Religious Studies, University of Pittsburgh)

Twentieth-century Muslims used Islam to articulate resistance to systems of domination, from British colonial rule in India to Jim Crow laws in the United States. This article maps the moral geographies promoted by three early twentieth-century Muslim American movements: the Moorish Science Temple of America, the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, and the Islamic Mission of America. Despite stark differences between these groups— the MSTA had their own version of the Qur’an, the Ahmadiyya began as a minority theological movement in South Asia, and the Islamic Mission was a Sunni group— they all appealed to an imagined, unified Muslim world, through which an all-encompassing Muslim identity would solve the problem of racial inequality. Imagining a more just world meant investing in sacred spaces, from establishing mosque spaces to theorizing cities such as Chicago and New York as Mecca to idealizing Asia and Africa as homelands, connective nodes of Islamic civilization and liberation.

Talk by Kim Searcy (History, Loyola University Chicago)

I will focus on the Sudanese Mahdiyya- 1885-1898. I will analyze how second-in-command, the Khalifa Abdallahi used Jihad as a symbol to articulate, their power, legitimacy, and authority, initially within the context of their war with the Turco-Egyptian forces and then within the context of establishing an Islamic state. The Turco- occupying the Sudan since 1821, and the Sudanese holyman, Muhammad Ahmad al-Mahdi declared a Jihad to end the occupation. Following the defeat of the Turco-Egyptian forces in 1885, the Mahdi's goal was to establish an Islamic state and continue the militant struggle throughout the Muslim world.

Talk by Bhavani Raman (History, University of Toronto)

The laws that authorize modern state impunity, such as martial law, sedition, disturbed areas, and preventive detention, were first given statutory authority by a colonial corporation, the East India Company consolidating its conquest of India. Why was this the case and why has this history been forgotten by historians of law, colonialism, and South Asia? While the British East India Company's conquest of India through techniques of pacification, property rights, and culturally inflected governance are well-documented, it is less widely known that it was unable to successfully define treason through its entire existence. My paper recounts this history, focusing in particular on the Company criminal legal system which was predicated on Islamic legal principles. Islamic legal practitioners in these courtrooms challenged the Company’s desire to punish treason with death, thereby challenging the colonial regime's claims to sovereignty and plunging it into periodic crises. The Company responded by installing the statutory foundations of emergency and state security. Yet its inability to sufficiently define treason has left us a prism of legal debate and an unfinished state authority through which to understand the present and the past of the relationship between right to rebellion and racialized state violence.

Talk by Kaveh Yazdani (History, University of Connecticut)

How, when, and why did the Parsis of Gujarat become among the foremost brokers and entrepreneurs in 18th -and 19th-century India? What are the different phases of their ascendancy and success, especially concerning their socio-economic activities in Gujarat? In order to shed light on these questions, first, I briefly touch upon the early history of Zoroastrians in Gujarat, including their socio-economic activities between the 10th and 17th centuries. Then, I shortly examine some of the devastating effects of the famine of 1630-31. The main focus, however, is on the socio-economic rise of the Parsis in Gujarat between the late 17th and 19th centuries, including some of the tensions that ensued from within and without their community. Lastly, I also discuss some of the negative views circulating about Parsis in the late 18th and early 19th centuries through the examples of Joseph Tieffenthaler (1710–1785) and Abu Taleb (1752–1806).

Talk by Ayse Polat (Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Cornell Society for the Humanities Cambridge University, PhD)

How do the circulation and distribution of arms shape social relations, conflicts, and hierarchies? Is arms trafficking a means of contesting the established order of things, or cementing it? This paper discusses the Ottoman government’s dis/armament of Circassian settlers - muhajirin - in the Golan Heights. The arrival of Circassian refugees in the Golan marked an expansion of Ottoman settlement policy to Syria in 1878. From thereon, growing refugee settlements constituted an experiment in settler capitalism that reshuffled the ethnic and religious composition of the region. The settlers instituted and expanded a new regime of private property and agrarian production, predicated on the exclusion of their neighbors and exploitation of their slaves. The exclusivity and inviolability of settlers’ property engendered conflict within and outside of this refugee community, as inter- and intra-communal relations were brutalized by the illicit introduction, circulation, and distribution of arms. This paper brings together the history of an arms smuggler and a corrupt governor, to explore the economy of arms in the late Ottoman Golan. It evidences how the Ottoman government introduced and distributed arms into the Golan settlements, only to lose control over their illicit circulation and use. It argues that the economy of arms trafficking helped unsettle these violent intimacies between settlers and natives, and masters and slaves, without challenging and indeed, cementing, a securitarian order based on the primacy of private property.