East Asia Program Lecture Series presents "Book Talk: Seeing China’s Belt and Road."

Speaker: Rachel Silvey, Professor, Department of Geography & Planning, University of Toronto

Description: Launched in 2013, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is China's signature trillion-dollar global policy. Based on infrastructure development assistance and financing, the BRI quickly set in motion a possible restructuring of the global economy and indeed the world order. In Seeing China's Belt and Road, Edward Schatz and Rachel Silvey assemble leading field researchers to consider the BRI from different "downstream" contexts, ranging from Central and Southeast Asia to Europe and Africa. By uncovering perspectives on the BRI from Chinese authorities, local businesses, state bureaucrats, expatriated migrants, ordinary citizens, and environmental activists, Seeing China's Belt and Road shows the BRI's dynamic, multidimensional character as it manifests in specific sites. A timely analysis of the BRI, this book moves beyond polarized debates about China's rise and offers a grounded assessment of the dynamic complexity of changes to the world order.

About East Asia Program

As Cornell’s hub for research, teaching, and engagement with East Asia, the East Asia Program (EAP) serves as a forum for the interdisciplinary study of historical and contemporary East Asia. The program draws its membership of over 45 core faculty and numerous affiliated faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students from eight of Cornell’s 12 schools and colleges.

Speaker: Kathlene Baldanza, Associate Professor of History and Asian Studies, Penn State University

Description: In China, Korea, and Vietnam, the genre of “biographies of exemplary women” (列女傳) served both to celebrate individual women for their virtue and to promote widow chastity more broadly. The dozen or so biographies of women collected in Đại Nam hành nghĩa liệt nữ truyện (大南行義列女傳) are quite similar on the surface to Chinese and Korean examples. A closer reading shows elements that are perhaps unique to Vietnam, and certainly reflect the political situation during the Minh Mạng reign period (1820-1839), when many of these biographies were collected.

About Cornell Classical Chinese Colloquium

The group meets monthly during the semester to explore a variety of classical Chinese texts and styles. Other premodern texts linked to classical Chinese in Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese have also been explored. Presentations include works from the earliest times to the 20th century. Workshop sessions are led by local, national, and international scholars. Participants with any level of classical Chinese experience are welcome to attend.

At each session, a presenter guides the group in a reading of a classical Chinese text. Attendees discuss historical, literary, linguistic, and other aspects of the text, working together to resolve difficulties in comprehension and translation.

No preparation is required; all texts will be distributed at the meeting.Refreshments will be served.

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Dr. Rachel Leow from University of Cambridge. Dr. Leow is an Associate Professor in Modern East Asian History at Faculty of History, University of Cambridge.

This Gatty Lecture will take place on Zoom, but will only be open to current Cornell students, faculty, and staff. Please register using your Cornell email address. It will be held at 6pm Eastern Time, not the usual 12:15pm. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

About the Talk

Southeast Asia and the maritime worlds which surround it have always been a zone of dense inter- and intra-Asian mobilities, among which the entangled histories of diasporic, settling, embedded and indigenous Chinese communities across the region have been especially significant. Its waters have been known by many names, testifying to its complex nature as a space of overlapping diasporas, empires and flows. Yet the historiographies of this region reflect its fragmentation. Histories of one nation-state seem to exist in parallel to each other, or in a national vacuum; even when studying the region's many transnational migrants and diasporas, different flows are rarely brought into dialogue; beyond European encounter, entanglements between migrant and indigenous groups—and the complex hierarchies of race, gender and culture between them—remain underexplored; linguistic silos remain formidable. This lecture critically examines the historical construction of “Southeast Asia” as a bounded geographic and disciplinary category, and offers the Southern Seas as a capacious alternative. It explores a range of competing names of water, and the vernacular political and intellectual projects they represent — from Chinese and Japanese oceanic, colonial and neo-imperial projects to Chinese migrant creole imaginaries and Malay revolutionary socialist visions — and in doing so, reveals a complex intellectual and political seascape that challenges contemporary national and regional boundaries, and pushes migrant histories beyond commerce, capital and commodities into the realm of ideas. In asking how might we do justice to the expansive migratory histories trapped within the siloed geographies of the Southern Seas, it calls for a rethinking of what it means to study ‘Chinese diaspora’ in Southeast Asia.

About the Speaker

Rachel Leow is Associate Professor of Modern East Asian History at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Murray Edwards College. Her first book, Taming Babel: Language in the Making of Malaysia, explored the ethnolinguistic constructions of Chineseness and Malayness over the colonial-postcolonial transition in Malaysia; it was published in 2016 and won the 2018 Association for Asian Studies Harry J. Benda Prize. Her recent work explores transregional and transnational connections between China and Southeast Asia, and her research has been published in academic venues, including Twentieth-Century China, Itinerario, the Journal of World History, Modern Asian History, as well as in literary venues such as the LA Review of Books China Channel and the Mekong Review, and in film. With her collaborator Professor Emma Teng, she is currently co-editing the Oxford Handbook of Asian Migration and Diaspora, c. 1300s-2000s, and her next monograph, tentatively titled Southern Seas: Chinese encounters on diaspora's horizons, is under joint contract with University of California Press and Penguin Allen Lane.

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Dr. Andrew Mertha from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, who will discuss Khmer Rouge, revolution, and leadership struggles. Dr. Andrew Mertha is the George and Sadie Hyman Professor of China Studies at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

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 1979, the Vietnamese army seized Phnom Penh, toppling Pol Pot's notoriously brutal regime. Yet the Khmer Rouge did not disintegrate. Instead, the movement continued to rule over swathes of Cambodia for almost another two decades even as it failed to become a legitimate governing organization. In this talk, I argue that the Khmer Rouge's successes and failures were both driven by a refusal to dilute its revolutionary vision. Rather than take the moderate tack required for viable governance, it pivoted between only two political strategies: united front and class struggle. Through the stories of three key leaders—Ieng Sary, Son Sen, and Ta Mok—I track the movement's shifting from one strategy to the other until its dissolution in the 1990s.

About the Speaker

Andrew Mertha is the George and Sadie Hyman Professor of China Studies, Director of the China Studies Program, and Director of the SAIS China Research Center at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). From 2019 to 2021, Mertha served as the Vice Dean for Faculty Affairs and International Research Cooperation at SAIS. He is formerly a professor of Government at Cornell University and an assistant professor of Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis. Mertha is the author of Brothers in Arms: Chinese Aid to the Khmer Rouge, 1975-1979 (Cornell University Press, 2014) and the editor of May Ebihara’s Svay: A Cambodian Village, with an Introduction by Judy Ledgerwood (Cornell University Press/Cornell Southeast Asia Program Press, 2018). His forthcoming book, Bad Lieutenants: The Khmer Rouge, United Front, and Class Struggle, 1970–1997, will be published by Cornell University Press in May 2025. Mertha is on the Editorial Committee for the Journal of Comparative Politics, The China Quarterly, and Asian Survey. He is vice president of the Center for Khmer Studies (CKS), a member of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, and an alumnus of the NCUSCR Public Intellectuals Program, 2008-2010. He received his PhD from the University of Michigan and is originally from New York City.

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Michael Kirkpatrick Miller from Cornell University, who will discuss Ambonese masculinity and colonialism. Michael Kirkpatrick Miller is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Cornell University.

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 the East Indies, Dutch colonial culture mythologized and racialized the men of the Spice Islands, namely the men from Ambon, as a “martial race.” According to the Dutch colonial state, the Ambonese needed to be cultivated as loyal colonial subjects, collaborating soldiers. During the late nineteenth century, and especially during and after the Aceh War, Christian Ambonese men were actively recruited into the Dutch colonial army, aiding the Dutch in deepening their empire through conquest and the quelling of unrest across the Indonesian archipelago. This talk attempts to unravel the discourse of martialness placed upon these indigenous soldiers in order to understand how this ideology of Ambonese masculinity was experienced by the Ambonese outside of their home island in the early twentieth century. Through an analysis of Dutch-language sporting magazines and the Malay-language popular press in cities with a major colonial army presence, I argue that Ambonese loyalty, and indeed Ambonese “martialness” was never fully accepted by Ambonese soldiers, and instead was contingent on the Dutch colonial state’s economic support of the soldiers and their families. While Dutch reporters constantly praised the fitness, athleticism, and fierceness of Ambonese football teams in Dutch-language magazines, Ambonese men in Malay-language newspapers complained about their station within the Dutch army, keeping one foot placed on the side of the nationalist revolutionaries in Ambon. Further, stadium-wide brawls between Ambonese teams and European teams in colonial Batavia undergirded Dutch anxieties that these soldiers would become revolutionaries fighting against, not with, the colonial state. Indeed, as one Dutch sporting magazine put it, the Ambonese footballers needed to be “under constant and good leadership” from a European coach. Finally, I also consider what non-Ambonese Indonesians wrote about their experiences living near Ambonese barracks on the islands of Java and Sumatra and what they thought of Ambonese footballers and Ambonese football teams. The discourse of the fierce, martial, Ambonese footballer was a critical site of debate about empire and revolution in colonial Indonesia. This racialized discourse of the Ambonese as more fit and more athletic than other Indonesian ethnic groups continues in Indonesia today.

About the Speaker

Michael Kirkpatrick Miller is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Cornell University, where he studies histories of masculinity, empire, and animals in Southeast Asia and the Pacific. At Cornell, he teaches courses on the global history of food, the history of animals, and the history of masculinity. His research has been funded by the US Department of State, the American Institute for Indonesian Studies (AIFIS), and the Library of Congress.

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Martina Thucnhi Nguyen from Baruch College at City University of New York, who will discuss Nguyễn Văn Vĩnh's gendered writing strategy. Dr. Nguyen obtained PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Currently, Dr. Nguyen serves as Associate Professor of History at Baruch College at City University of New York.

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 1907, a series of articles titled “Women’s words” (Nhời Đàn Bà) appeared in Đăng Cổ Tùng Báo (Old Lantern Miscellany) under the name Đaò Thị Loan. Loan was arguably one of the earliest female voices in the modern Vietnamese vernacular press, covering a wide range of women’s issues such as concubinage, childbirth, hygiene, etiquette, and parenting. As it turns out, Đào Thị Loan was not a woman, but in fact, a man writing under a female pseudonym. And not just any man, but Nguyễn Văn Vĩnh, one of the most illustrious Vietnamese intellectuals of the early 20th century. Vĩnh would go on to write this column under the same pseudonym in two subsequent journals he founded, Đông Dương Tạp Chí (Indochina Journal, 1913-14) and Trung Bắc Tân Văn (Central and Northern News, 1915-17). In this 10 year period, Vĩnh penned over 100 articles on women’s issues, one of his most sustained bodies of writing. This paper delves into the column’s content and context to argue that Vĩnh’s adoption of a female persona–that is, writing betwixt and between genders–can be read as both a political and creative act, one which projected an idealized vision of modern Vietnamese gender relations that ultimately benefited men.

About the Speaker

Martina Thucnhi Nguyen is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Baruch College, City University of New York. An historian of modern Southeast Asia, her research focuses on colonialism, intellectual life, social and political reform, and gender in twentieth century Vietnam. Her first book, On Our Own Strength: The Self-Reliant Literary Group (Tu Luc Văn Đoàn) and Cosmopolitan Nationalism in Late Colonial Vietnam, was published in 2021 by University of Hawai’i Press as part of Columbia University’s Weatherhead East Asian Studies Institute book series. She is currently working on her second book, a gender history of patriarchy, examining how Vietnamese during the late colonial period actively constructed ideologies of sexual difference and wove these gendered categories into the very fabric of Vietnamese national identity.​