A community book read with Sumit Mandal, author of Becoming Arab: Creole Histories and Modern Identity in the Malay World and winner of the 2020 Benda Prize. This read is organized by the consortium for Graduate Education and Training in Southeast Asian Studies (GETSEA).

Sumit Mandal is a historian at the University of Nottingham Malaysia. He is currently doing research on Muslim shrines as inscriptions in the landscape of transregional histories of the Malay world. He is working towards a book from this research that is tentatively titled “Saints of the Southern Indian Ocean: Sacred Geographies, Popular Faith Practices, and the Politics of Islam from Jakarta to Cape Town.”

As the AAS Southeast Asia Council (SEAC) describes it: Sumit Mandal’s Becoming Arab: Creole Histories and Modern Identity in the Malay World (2018) is a powerful and important work of history, the result of prodigious archival research. Beyond its importance in challenging conventional understandings of the category ‘Arab’ in the Malay world, it suggests new ways of thinking about the project of colonial racial categorization more broadly. Mandal importantly argues that most scholarship assumes that racial categorizations deployed in postcolonial nations stemmed from colonial practices aimed at dividing populations in order to rule them. He upends this argument by breaking down what the category, Arab, meant in historical contexts prior to, during, and after Dutch colonial rule. In particular, Mandal’s argument that colonial racial categories are not ‘totalizing’ but are subject to reinterpretation and subversion, encourages the reader to think hard about the historical processes through which such racial categories come to exist, and shift over time. Working from Malay, Dutch, French, and English language sources, this is a book whose importance will center the field of Southeast Asian studies in broader conversations about creole histories and racializing area studies.

Learn about studying Burmese at Cornell, with an opportunity to ask the instructor and current students questions!

This event is a part of Southeast Asia Language Month! To participate and compete for a $100 Amazon gift card and other prizes, follow the steps below. This competition is only for current Cornell students.
1. Download the GooseChase App
2. Enter code 3KX9D9
(or search for "Southeast Asia Language Month")
3. Complete missions and attend events to earn points

Keynote Speaker: Nanjala Nyabola
Cornell Students: Critical Reflections

Nanjala Nyabola, author of Travelling While Black-Essays Inspired by a Life on the Move, will be in conversation with professors Rachel Beatty Riedl, Kim Yi Dionne, and postdoc Eleanor Paynter.

Nanjala Nyabola is a writer, political analyst, and activist based in Nairobi, Kenya. Nyabola writes extensively about African society and politics, technology, international law, and feminism for academic and non-academic publications. Her first book, Digital Democracy, Analogue Politics: How the Internet Era is Transforming Politics in Kenya (Zed Books, 2018), was described as "a must-read for all researchers and journalists writing about Kenya today." Nyabola's ground-breaking work opens up new ways of understanding the current global online era, reframing digital democracy from the African perspective.

Nyabola’s latest book, the critically acclaimed Travelling While Black; Essays Inspired by a Life on the Move, (available electronically from the Cornell Library) is a stark reminder that the world needs to be seen through the lens of others. Her work has featured in publications including African Arguments, Al Jazeera, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy (magazine), The Guardian, New African, The New Humanitarian, The New Inquiry, New Internationalist, and World Policy Journal.

Nyabola holds a BA in African studies and political science from the University of Birmingham, an MSc in forced migration and an MSc in African studies from the University of Oxford, which she attended as a Rhodes Scholar, and a JD from Harvard Law School.

Following the dialogue, students will present select prose, poems, and visual art published as part of Global Cornell's Race and Racism Across Borders, a call that asked students and alumni to reflect on the new knowledge gained about racial dynamics when they crossed a literal or figurative border.

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Rosalia Engchuan will present a Visual Culture Colloquium

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What are de-colonial strategies of visualizing, representing and acting on ecological crises, their causes, histories, and effects?

This lecture centers cinematic epistemologies from Southeast Asia in the study of climate change mitigation practices. Thinking with an archive of short films from Java, Indonesia this talk looks at situated issues pivoting around environmental crises—as experienced, made sense of, expressed, and acted upon by those who are affected by it. Using a processual gaze at the dialogical, social, and material nature of knowledge formation I will speculate on the inherent micro-political potential of cinematic practices, which lies not in putting forward alternative knowledges, but in alternative conventions of their production.

Rosalia Namsai Engchuan is a social anthropologist and filmmaker based between Berlin and Southeast Asia. Her PhD research at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany, looks at practices of community filmmaking in Indonesia, investigating how cinematic epistemologies produce and socialize knowledges. Her latest video work Complicated Happiness is a speculative research, pivoting around the Thai Park in Berlin, that aims to undo the underlying structures of colonialism, race, gender and class that shape the production of our worlds. Rosalia curates screenings and dialogical encounters with a focus on independent and experimental works from locales of the ‘epistemological’ South. She is the 2021 Goethe-Institut fellow at Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart.

Image credits: Still from Windswept (Sapu Angin), 2017 dir. by Cahyo Wulan Prayogo under Belangtelon Initiative

What is the human impact of U.S. war and foreign policy in Southeast Asia? How do refugees continue to make sense of war, empire, and national belonging?

This webinar brings together three leading scholars of critical refugee studies to explore these questions and more. Our panel will look at a range of humanitarian efforts, refugee and migration policies, and artistic/cultural practices and performances that have formed in the wake of U.S. wars in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. They’ll share their scholarly, curatorial, and community work focused on Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Hmong communities in the U.S. and beyond to reveal how critical refugee studies contribute unique ways of understanding issues of migration, movement, and memory work in our world today.

The three speakers will be:

Cathy Schlund-Vials, University of Texas at AustinMa Vang, University of California, Merced, and The Critical Refugee Studies CollectiveYến Lê Espiritu, University of California, San Diego