New Books in Southeast Asian Studies

The Golden Voice: The Ballad of Cambodian Rock's Lost Queen (Life Drawn, 2023) is very well-reseraech graphic novel based on the life of beloved Cambodian singer Ros Serey Sothea, whose “Golden Voice” helped define Cambodia’s Golden Age of music until her mysterious disappearance in the killing fields of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. Developed in partnership with Sothea’s family. There is a saying in Cambodia: Music is the soul of a nation. Perhaps no one embodied that spirit more than Ros Serey Sothea, a young woman who would forever change the landscape of Cambodian music as the Queen with the Golden Voice. From a humble rice farmer to nationally recognized singer, Sothea’s success captured the hearts of the Khmer people. Throughout her career, she recorded over 500 songs, her signature angelic voice soaring over genres from traditional ballads to psychedelic rock and beyond. As the Cambodian civil war raged, Sothea's singing career continued to flourish, even when she served in the army as one of the country's first female paratroopers. After years of bloody conflict, the communist Khmer Rouge seized control, murdering artists and destroying their music, bringing Cambodia's golden age into a dark era of silence. Sothea’s fate is unknown. Ros Serey Sothea's golden voice lives on in the popular music of Cambodia to this very day. Gone but not forgotten, her legacy continues to inspire. The Golden Voice tells the story of Sothea’s life, developed alongside the surviving family who knew her, and accompanied by an interactive soundtrack.Gregory Cahill is an Emmy Award winning television producer for the CBS entertainment talk show The Talk. His previous TV credits include 24, Mad Men, and Medium. In 2006, Cahill wrote and directed a short film titled The Golden Voice, depicting Ros Serey Sothea's final days under Khmer Rouge. After years of research, he began work on a graphic novel also titled The Golden Voice, depicting Ros Serey Sothea's life story. The Golden Voice: The Ballad of Cambodian Rock's Lost Queen is his first book.Kat Baumann is an illustrator and comics creator from Southern Minnesota who graduated from the Visual Arts department of the Perpich Center for Arts Education in 2009, received my bachelor’s in Studio Art in 2013 and interned at Helioscope (formerly Periscope) Studio in 2014. She decided to become a comic artist at a young age when she was heavily influenced by Japanese manga and South Korean manhwa.Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Bookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter, founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the most revolutionary new organizations in the book world. Bookshop has found a way to retain the convenience of online book shopping while also supporting independent bookstores that are the backbones of many local communities. Andy Hunter is CEO and Founder of Bookshop.org. He also co-created Literary Hub.Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Inequality has always been key to understanding Indonesia’s development. But this is a multidimensional issue, and one that has manifested in vastly different ways in Indonesia over the years: from low and stable inequality, to the aspiration to inequality, to the relationship between inequality and collective violence. The way we understand inequality is contingent on what objects (of inequality) we are looking at, how it is conceptualised, and how it is measured.Zulfan Tadjoeddin, Associate Professor in Development Studies at Western Sydney University (WSU) shares the thinking he has on these issues. Inequality has been central to Zulfan’s research on political economy of development, about which he has published two books.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

From spectacular deaths in a drag musical to competing futures in a call center, Filipino Time: Affective Worlds and Contracted Labor (Fordham UP, 2021) examines how contracted service labor performed by Filipinos in the Philippines, Europe, the Middle East, and the United States generates vital affects, multiple networks, and other lifeworlds as much as it disrupts and dislocates human relations. Affective labor and time are re-articulated in a capacious archive of storytelling about the Filipino labor diaspora in fiction, musical performance, ethnography, and documentary film. Exploring these cultural practices, Filipino Time traces other ways of sensing, making sense of, and feeling time with others, by weaving narratives of place and belonging out of the hostile but habitable textures of labortime. Migrant subjects harness time and the imagination in their creative, life making capacities to make communal worlds out of one steeped in the temporalities and logics of capital.Allan Punzalan Isaac is a professor of American studies and English at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. He is the author of American Tropics: Articulating Filipino America, which received the Association for Asian American Studies Cultural Studies Book Award, and Filipino Time: Affective Worlds and Contracted Labor. He has taught at LaSalle University in Manila as a Senior Fulbright Scholar.Alize Arıcan is a Society of Fellows Postdoctoral Scholar at Boston University and an incoming Assistant Professor of Anthropology at CUNY—City College, focusing on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration. You can find her on Twitter @alizearican.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

How serious an issue is digital repression in Thailand? Who is behind it? And what effects does it have on Thai people? Listen to Janjira Sombatpoonsiri as she talks to Petra Alderman about this issue in the context of contemporary Thailand and the 2020-2021 student-led protests.Janjira Sombatpoonsiri is an Assistant Professor and Project Leader at the Institute of Asian Studies, Chulalongkorn University (Thailand), and a Research Fellow at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies.The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, the University of Helsinki and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo.We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dkTranscripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcastSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

What explains the varying treatment of ethnic minorities in Southeast Asia? Why have some states in the region been far more successful than others in handling relations with minorities? And why have countries like Thailand had far more challenging experiences with certain ethnic minorities than with others?In this podcast about Ethnicity and Politics in Southeast Asia (Cambridge UP, 2022), co-author Jacob Ricks is in conversation with Duncan McCargo about the key issues and arguments raised in this short but provocative book.Amy H. Liu is a professor of government at University of Texas, Austin, while Jacob I. Ricks is associate professor of political science at Singapore Management University. Duncan McCargo is a professor in the public policy and global affairs programme at Nanyang Technological University. This book conceptually disaggregates ethnicity into multiple constituent markers – specifically language, religion, and phenotype. By focusing on the interaction between these three ethnic markers, Liu and Ricks explore how overlap between these markers can affect whether a minority integrates within a broader ethnic identity; successfully extracts accommodation as unique group; or engages in a contentious and potentially violent relationship with the hegemon. The argument is tested through six case studies: (1) ethnic Lao in Thailand: integration; (2) ethnic Chinese in Thailand: integration; (3) ethnic Chinese in Malaysia: accommodation; (4) ethnic Malays in Singapore: accommodation; (5) ethnic Malays in Thailand: contention; and (6) ethnic Chinese in Indonesia: contention.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

For more than a 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: Law, Migration, and Decolonization in South and Southeast Asia, 1942-1962 (Stanford UP, 2023) 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 an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Georgia, with research and teaching interests in legal history, histories of migration and displacement, transnational history, and questions of archival method.Kelvin Ng is a PhD candidate at the Department of History at Yale University. His research work brings together the social history of migration and the intellectual history of internationalism in four linked Indian Ocean spaces: British India, Republican China, British Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies. His dissertation examines three intertwined strands of anti-imperial thought—communist internationalism, pan-Islamism, and anti-caste radicalism—in relation to an oceanic political economy of unfree labor and uneven development.Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. His research focuses on the intersection of law, the occult sciences, and the environment across the Western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Editors of 'Civil Society Elites, Field Studies from Cambodia and Indonesia' discuss the dynamics within civil society groups, the expansion of political space in Indonesia and the shrinking of political space in Cambodia, the shift towards formal authoritarianism in Cambodia, and ongoing research on civil society leads in Europe.

What can we learn from Indonesia about democratic resilience and backsliding? Why should we think of Indonesian democracy as a useful example? And what are the three key lessons we can learn from it? In this episode, Dan Slater talks to Petra Alderman about the state of Indonesian democracy and the key ingredients that have kept it going so far.Dan Slater is James Orin Murfin Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan. He specialises in the politics and history of dictatorship and democracy, with a regional focus on Southeast Asia.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.If you would like to learn more about Indonesian democracy and its lessons, read Dan’s article ‘What Indonesian Democracy Can Teach the World’ in the Journal of Democracy.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

This remarkable and timely ethnography explores how fishing communities living on the fringe of the South China Sea in central Vietnam interact with state and religious authorities as well as their farmer neighbors – even while handling new geopolitical challenges. The focus is mainly on marginal people and their navigation between competing forces over the decades of massive change since their incorporation into the Socialist Republic of Vietnam in 1975. The sea, however, plays a major role in this study as does the location: a once-peripheral area now at the center of a global struggle for sovereignty, influence and control in the South China Sea.The coastal fishing communities at the heart of this study are peripheral not so much because of geographical remoteness as their presumed social ‘backwardness’; they only partially fit into the social imaginary of Vietnam’s territory and nation. The state thus tries to incorporate them through various cultural agendas while religious reformers seek to purify their religious practices. Yet, recently, these communities have also come to be seen as guardians of an ancient fishing culture, important in Vietnam’s resistance to Chinese claims over the South China Sea.The fishers have responded to their situation with a blend of conformity, co-option and subtle indiscipline. A complex, triadic relationship is at play here. Within it are various shifting binaries – e.g. secular/religious, fishers/farmers, local ritual/Buddhist doctrine, etc. – and different protagonists (state officials, religious figures, fishermen and -women) who construct, enact, and deconstruct these relations in shifting alliances and changing contexts.Edyta Roszko's Fishers, Monks and Cadres: Navigating State, Religion and the South China Sea in Central Vietnam (NIAS/University of Hawaii Press, 2021) is a significant new work. Its vivid portrait of local beliefs and practices makes a powerful argument for looking beyond monolithic religious traditions. Its triadic analysis and subtle use of binaries offer startlingly fresh ways to view Vietnamese society and local political power. The book demonstrates Vietnam is more than urban and agrarian society in the Red River Basin and Mekong Delta. Finally, the author builds on intensive, long-term research to portray a region at the forefront of geopolitical struggle, offering insights that will be fascinating and revealing to a much broader readership.Adam Bobeck is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His PhD is entitled “Object-Oriented Azadari: Ontology and Ritual Theory”.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies