New Books in Southeast Asian Studies

Two decades ago, a group of Indonesian agricultural workers began occupying the agribusiness plantation near their homes. In the years since, members of this remarkable movement have reclaimed collective control of their land and cultivated diverse agricultural forests on it, repairing the damage done over nearly a century of abuse. Countering Dispossession, Reclaiming Land: A Social Movement Ethnography (U California Press, 2024) is their story. David E. Gilbert offers an account of the ways these workers-turned-activists mobilized to move beyond industrial agriculture's exploitation of workers and the environment, illustrating how emancipatory and ecologically attuned ways of living with land are possible. At a time when capitalism has remade landscapes and reordered society, the Casiavera reclaiming movement stands as an inspiring example of what struggles for social and environmental justice can achieve.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Between 1565 and 1815, the so-called Manila galleons enjoyed a near-complete monopoly on transpacific trade between Spain’s Asian and American colonies. Sailing from the Philippines to Mexico and back, these Spanish trading ships also facilitated the earliest migrations and displacements of Asian peoples to the Americas. Hailing from Gujarat, Nagasaki, and many places in between, both free and enslaved Asians boarded the galleons and made the treacherous transpacific journey each year. Once in Mexico, they became “chinos” within the New Spanish caste system.Dr. Diego Javier Luis chronicles this first sustained wave of Asian mobility to the early Americas. Uncovering how and why Asian peoples crossed the Pacific, he sheds new light on the daily lives of those who disembarked at Acapulco. There, the term “chino” officially racialized diverse ethnolinguistic populations into a single caste, vulnerable to New Spanish policies of colonial control. Yet Asians resisted these strictures, often by forging new connections across ethnic groups. Social adaptation and cultural convergence, Luis argues, defined Asian experiences in the Spanish Americas from the colonial invasions of the sixteenth century to the first cries for Mexican independence in the nineteenth.The First Asians in the Americas: A Transpacific History (Harvard University Press, 2024) speaks to an important era in the construction of race, vividly unfolding what it meant to be “chino” in the early modern Spanish empire. In so doing, it demonstrates the significance of colonial Latin America to Asian diasporic history and reveals the fundamental role of transpacific connections to the development of colonial societies in the Americas.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Ryan Wolfson-Ford’s provocative new book, Forsaken Causes: Liberal Democracy and Anticommunism in Cold War Laos (U Wisconsin Press, 2024), is an intellectual history of Laos during the Cold War. The book challenges the established view that Cold War Laos was a plaything of foreign powers, particularly France, the United States, and North Vietnam. It does so by mining the writings of the Lao intellectual elite to produce a revisionist history of Laos that clearly shows the Lao as agents of their own history. The book also reveals a little-known fact of history that for much of the period from 1945 to the communist Pathet Lao’s seizure of power in 1975, Laos had one of the most flourishing multi-party democracies in Southeast Asia. Lao nationalism, anti-communism, and democracy thrived, and these political ideas were largely homegrown.Patrick Jory teaches Southeast Asian History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. He can be reached at: p.jory@uq.edu.au.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

The basement of a veteran shopping mall located in the central business district of Singapore affords opportunities to a group of amateur and semi-professional musicians, of different ethnicities, ages, and generations to make a sonic way of life. Based on five years of deep participatory experience, this multi-modal (text, musical composition, social media, performance) sonic ethnography is centered around a community of noisy people who make rock music within the constraints of urban life in Singapore. The heart and soul of this community is English Language rock and roll music pioneered in Singapore by several members of the 1960s legendary "beats and blues" band, The Straydogs, who continue to engage this community in a sonic way of life.In Sonic City: Making Rock Music and Urban Life in Singapore (NUS Press, 2021), Ferzacca draws on Bruno Latour's ideas of the social--continually emergent, constantly in-the-making, "associations of heterogeneous elements" of human and non-human "mediators and intermediaries"--to portray a community entangled in the confounding relations between vernacular and national heritage projects. Music shops, music gear, music genres, sound, urban space, neighborhoods, State presence, performance venues, practice spaces, regional travel, local, national, regional, and sonic histories afford expected and unexpected opportunities for work, play, and meaning, in the contemporary music scene in this Southeast Asian city-state. The emergent quality of this deep sound is fiercely cosmopolitan, yet entirely Singaporean. What emerges is a vernacular heritage drawing upon Singapore's unique place in Southeast Asian and world history.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

What can airports, busses, and submarine internet cables tell us about the local and national politics in the Philippines? And how do they position the country within the broader regional and global geopolitical struggles over economic development and political influence? Listen to John Sidel as he talks to Petra Alderman about the political economy of transport, telecommunications, and infrastructure in the Philippines, the different monopolies, oligopolies and cartels that characterise them, and their geopolitical significance to China, Japan and the United States.John Sidel is Sir Patrick Gillam Chair in International and Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Director of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre. He is a specialist on Southeast Asia and has conducted extensive research in Indonesia and the Philippines on a range of topics, including local power, subnational authoritarianism, the political role of Islam, reform advocacy campaigns and coalitions.Petra Alderman is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Leadership for Inclusive and Democratic Politics at the University of Birmingham and Research Fellow at CEDAR.The People, Power, Politics podcast brings you the latest insights into the factors that are shaping and re-shaping our political world. It is brought to you by the Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation (CEDAR) based at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. Join us to better understand the factors that promote and undermine democratic government around the world and follow us on Twitter at @CEDAR_Bham!Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Through a creative focus on skin, in Experiments in Skin: Race and Beauty in the Shadows of Vietnam (Duke UP, 2021), Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu examines the ongoing influence of the Vietnam War on contemporary ideas about race and beauty. Framing skin as the site around which these ideas have been formed, Tu foregrounds the histories of militarism in the production of US biomedical knowledge and commercial cosmetics. She uncovers the efforts of wartime scientists in the US Military Dermatology Research Program to alleviate the environmental and chemical risks to soldiers' skin. These dermatologists sought relief for white soldiers while denying that African American soldiers and Vietnamese civilians were also vulnerable to harm. Their experiments led to the development of pharmaceutical cosmetics, now used by women in Ho Chi Minh City to tend to their skin, and to grapple with the damage caused by the war's lingering toxicity. In showing how the US military laid the foundations for contemporary Vietnamese consumption of cosmetics and practices of beauty, Tu shows how the intersecting histories of militarism, biomedicine, race, and aesthetics become materially and metaphorically visible on skin.Yadong Li is a PhD student in socio-cultural anthropology at Tulane University. He is interested in the anthropology of time, hope studies, and post-structuralist philosophy. If you are interested in any of these topics, feel free to contact him by email: yli88@tulane.edu / lydooooong@gmail.com.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Malaysian Chinese (Mahua) literature is marginalized on several fronts. In the international literary space, which privileges the West, Malaysia is considered remote. The institutions of modern Chinese literature favor mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Within Malaysia, only texts in Malay, the national language, are considered national literature by the state. However, Mahua authors have produced creative and thought-provoking works that have won growing critical recognition, showing Malaysia to be a laboratory for imaginative Chinese writing.Highlighting Mahua literature’s distinctive mode of evolution, Cheow Thia Chan demonstrates that authors’ grasp of their marginality in the world-Chinese literary space has been the impetus for—rather than a barrier to—aesthetic inventiveness. He foregrounds the historical links between Malaysia and other Chinese-speaking regions, tracing how Mahua writers engage in the “worlding” of modern Chinese literature by navigating interconnected literary spaces. Focusing on writers including Lin Cantian, Han Suyin, Wang Anyi, and Li Yongping, whose works craft signature literary languages, Chan examines narrative representations of multilingual social realities and authorial reflections on colonial Malaya or independent Malaysia as valid literary terrain. Delineating the inter-Asian “crossings” of Mahua literary production—physical journeys, interactions among social groups, and mindset shifts—from the 1930s to the 2000s, he contends that new perspectives from the periphery are essential to understanding the globalization of modern Chinese literature. By emphasizing the inner diversities and connected histories in the margins, Malaysian Crossings: Place and Language in the Worlding of Modern Chinese Literature (Columbia UP, 2022) offers a powerful argument for remapping global Chinese literature and world literature.Cheow Thia Chan is assistant professor of Chinese studies at the National University of Singapore. His research interests include modern Chinese literature, Singapore and Malaysian Chinese Literature, Southeast Asian Chinese Studies, Diaspora Studies, and Urban Studies.Li-Ping Chen is a teaching fellow in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Aquaculture is the fastest-growing protein production industry globally, with Vietnam one of the top producers and exporters of seafood products. In Vietnam, aquaculture is seen as a means of protecting rural livelihoods threatened by the consequences of climate change on agriculture. But climate change also drives the emergence of marine bacterial pathogens, causing considerable losses to aquaculture production. Traditionally, pathogen blooms have been treated with antimicrobials – but this has resulted in the emergence and spread of antimicrobial resistance in aquaculture settings. So how can we combat these bacterial pathogens without fostering antimicrobial resistance whilst also continuing to produce the seafood needed to meet the world’s protein needs?Dr Carola Venturini is an expert research microbiologist and lecturer at the Sydney School of Veterinary Sciences at the University of Sydney. Her work investigates solutions to the crisis posed by the global rise in antimicrobial resistance in bacteria causing severe infections, with a particular focus on One Health/One World approaches. Her primary research areas are anti-microbial resistance transmission routes and mechanisms, impact of antibiotic use on gut health, and the design of bacteriophage-based applications against multidrug resistant pathogens, including in aquaculture settings in Australia and Vietnam.Dr Natali Pearson is Curriculum Coordinator at the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, a university-wide multidisciplinary center at the University of Sydney, Australia. Her research focuses on the protection, management and interpretation of underwater cultural heritage in Southeast Asia.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Petra Alderman, author of 'Branding Authoritarian Nations', explores how a military junta deployed nation-branding to promote domestic political legitimacy in military-ruled Thailand. She discusses the convergence of business and politics in nation branding, the influence of branding on citizens, and the branding efforts of the military regime in Thailand. The podcast also delves into the post-election period and rebranding efforts in Thailand.

Cosmetic surgery was once associated with a one-size-fits-all approach, modifying patients to conform to a single standard of beauty. As this surgery has become more accessible worldwide, changing beauty trends have led to a proliferation of beauty standards for members of different racial groups.In Refashioning Race: How Global Cosmetic Surgery Crafts New Beauty Standards (University of California Press, 2023) Dr. Alka V. Menon enters the world of cosmetic surgeons, journeying from a sprawling convention centre in Kyoto to boutique clinics in the multicultural countries of the United States and Malaysia. She shows how surgeons generate and apply knowledge using racial categories and how this process is affected by transnational clinical and economic exchanges. Surgeons not only measure and organise but also elaborate upon racial differences in a globalised field of medicine. Focusing on the role of cosmetic surgeons as gatekeepers and producers of desired appearances, Refashioning Race argues that cosmetic surgeons literally reshape race—both on patients' bodies and at the broader level of culture.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies