New Books in Southeast Asian Studies

How do transnational Filipino families remain connected through mobile media technologies?In (Im)mobile Homes: Family Life at a Distance in the Age of Mobile Media (Oxford UP, 2022), Earvin Charles B. Cabalquinto explains the different ways in which smartphones, messaging apps, and social media facilitate transnational connectivity. He explains how relationships of care, intimacy, and connection to the homeland are established through digital routines shaped by power relations and familial expectations. Aside from providing an overview of the book’s key themes, the podcast goes deep into the methodological complexities of documenting intimate lives through mobile phone technologies as well as the ethical challenges of writing intimate portraits of Filipinos’ everyday lives.Earvin Charles B. Cabalquinto is a lecturer at Deakin University in Australia.Like this interview? You may also be interested in: Elizaveta Friesem, Media is Us: Understanding Communication and Moving Beyond Flame (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021) Zoetanya Sujon, The Social Media Age (SAGE, 2021). Nicole Curato is a Professor of Sociology in the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra. She co-hosts the New Books in Southeast Asia Studies channel.This episode was created in collaboration with Erron C. Medina of the Development Studies Program of Ateneo De Manila University.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In March 2022 the U.S. government announced its determination that genocide was committed by the Myanmar military against Rohingya communities in Myanmar’s Rakhine State in 2017. What will this mean for the roughly one million Rohingya refugees living in neighboring countries, for Rohingya IDPs in Rakhine, and for post-coup Myanmar? In this episode, part two of a two-part series, Terese Gagnon speaks with Kyaw Zeyar Win about this long-awaited determination and the possible implications for Rohingya both within and outside post-coup Myanmar. Click here to listen to part one of the series covering the securitization of Rohingya and roots of the 2017 genocide.Kyaw Zeyar Win is a Project Coordinator at the International Republican Institute in Washington D.C. He is an expert in international relations and human rights with a focus on Myanmar. He holds a master’s in IR from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University where he was an Open Society Fellow. He is author of the chapter “Securitization of the Rohingya in Myanmar” from the book Myanmar Transformed? People, Places and Politics. Terese Gagnon is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Copenhagen and the Nordic Institute of Asian studies researching Karen food, seed, and political sovereignty.You might also be interested in these related podcasts: --Karen Sanctuaries Memory, Biodiversity and Political Sovereignty--The Politics of Protest in Myanmar--What Remains: Textiles from Tuol SlengThe 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, 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

Indonesian citizens, and those of neighbouring Southeast Asian countries, have long suffered recurring haze pollution caused by peatland fires in Indonesia. To avoid these forest fires, and reduce the environmental harm and negative health impacts that transboundary haze gives rise to, Indonesia needs to restore its degraded peatlands. President Joko Widodo started this task in 2016 when he established the Peatland Restoration Agency, tasked with rehabilitating 2 million hectares of degraded peatland. What has this ad hoc body achieved since then, and where will it go from here?In this episode, Dr Natali Pearson is joined by Dr Rini Astuti to discuss why peatland fires are a particularly acute issue in Southeast Asia, and how Indonesia can play a crucial role in effectively mitigating transboundary haze in the region.About Rini Astuti:Dr Rini Astuti is a Research Fellow at Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University. Rini is also the Global Public Voices Fellow for the Mario Einaudi Center on International Studies at Cornell University. Her research focuses on environmental governance and climate change in the Southeast Asia region (Indonesia in particular). She previous worked at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, where she was part of the multidisciplinary team researching forest & peatland fire and transboundary haze in Southeast Asia.For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In Subversive Archaism: Troubling Traditionalists and the Politics of National Heritage (Duke UP, 2022), Michael Herzfeld explores how individuals and communities living at the margins of the modern nation-state use nationalist discourses of tradition to challenge state authority under both democratic and authoritarian governments. Through close attention to the claims and experiences of mountain shepherds in Greece and urban slum dwellers in Thailand, Herzfeld shows how these subversive archaists draw on national histories and past polities to claim legitimacy for their defiance of bureaucratic authority. Although vilified by government authorities as remote, primitive, or dangerous—often as preemptive justification for violent repression—these groups are not revolutionaries and do not reject national identity, but they do question the equation of state and nation. Herzfeld explores the political strengths and vulnerabilities of their deployment of heritage and the weaknesses they expose in the bureaucratic and ethnonational state in an era of accelerated globalization.Iqra Shagufta Cheema writes and teaches in the areas of digital cultures, postmodernist postcolonial literatures, transnational digital feminisms, gender and sexuality studies, and global south film studies. Follow them on Twitter.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Working on Southeast Asia, one thing we tend to hear a lot of is the notion that civil society is shrinking, and that authoritarianism is on the rise. In fact the rise of anti-democratic and anti-liberal forces and ideas seems to be on the rise around the world, not just in the region.Joining Dr Natali Pearson on SSEAC Stories, Professor Garry Rodan argues that contrary to popular claims, civil society is not generally shrinking in Southeast Asia. It is instead transforming, resulting in important shifts in the influences that can be exerted through it. Drawing from his book Civil Society in Southeast Asia: Power Struggles and Political Regimes (Cambridge University Press, 2022), he argues that political and ideological differences in Southeast Asia have sharpened as anti-democratic and anti-liberal social forces compete with democratic and liberal elements in civil society.About Garry Rodan:Garry Rodan is an Honorary Professor of Political Science & International Studies at The University of Queensland, Emeritus Professor of Politics & International Studies at Murdoch University, and an elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia. His research thematically analyses dynamic regime struggles between authoritarian, liberal and democratic forces and ideologies in Southeast Asia. He gives special analytical attention to the underlying political economy foundations of these struggles. Garry is the author of Civil Society in Southeast Asia: Power Struggles and Political Regimes (Cambridge University Press, 2022) and Participation without Democracy: Containing Conflict in Southeast Asia, (Cornell University Press, 2018).For more details on Garry Rodan’s publications, go here.For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Michael Francis Laffan’s Under Empire: Muslim Lives and Loyalties Across the Indian Ocean World, 1775–1945 (Columbia University Press, 2022) traces a tapestry of historical actors, empires, and ideas across the Indian Ocean world. Starting with an imam banished from eastern Indonesia to the Cape of Good Hope in 1780 to build a new Muslim community with a mix of fellow exiles, enslaved people, and even the men tasked with supervising his detention. To nineteenth-century colonial chroniclers who invent the legend of the “loyal Malay” warrior, whose anger can be tamed through the “mildness” of British rule. And a Tunisian-born teacher who arrived in Java from Istanbul in the early twentieth century becomes an enterprising Arabic-language journalist caught between competing nationalisms. Telling these stories and many more, Michael Laffan offers a sweeping exploration of two centuries of interactions among Muslim subjects of empires and future nation-states around the Indian Ocean world. Under Empire follows interlinked lives and journeys, examining engagements with Western, Islamic, and pan-Asian imperial formations to consider the possibilities for Muslims in an imperial age. It ranges from the dying era of the trading companies in the late eighteenth century through the period of Dutch and British colonial rule up to the rise of nationalist and cosmopolitan movements for social reform in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Laffan emphasizes how Indian Ocean Muslims by turn asserted loyalty to colonial states in pursuit of a measure of religious freedom or looked to the Ottoman Empire or Egypt in search of spiritual unity. Bringing the history of Southeast Asian Islam to African and South Asian shores, Under Empire is an expansive and inventive account of Muslim communal belonging on the world stage.Michael Francis Laffan is professor of history and Paula Chow Chair in International and Regional Studies at Princeton University. He is the author of Islamic Nationhood and Colonial Indonesia (2003) and The Makings of Indonesian Islam (2011) as well as the editor of Belonging Across the Bay of Bengal (2017).Kelvin Ng co-hosted the episode. He is a Ph.D. candidate at Yale University, History Department. His research interests broadly lie in the history of imperialism and anti-imperialism in the early-twentieth-century Indian Ocean circuit.Tamara Fernando co-hosted the episode. She is a Past & Present postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Historical Research, London, and an incoming assistant professor in the history of the global south at SUNY Stony Brook University. Her present book project, Of Mollusks and Men, is a history of pearl diving across the Persian Gulf, the Gulf of Mannar and the Mergui archipelago. She is interested in histories of science, environment, and labour across the Indian Ocean.Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at PrincetonUniversity, Near Eastern Studies Department. His research focuses on the intersection of law, the occult, 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 welcomeSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

The Asmat are an indigenous people of Indonesian Papua and are renowned for their artistic carving flair and complex life-cycle rituals. They also have big ambitions that reach as far as the Vatican. Over the past five decades, pressures from the state, religious authorities, and the global art market, have led to profound cultural changes and a widespread sense of predicament, dysphoria and disempowerment among the Asmat.In this episode of SSEAC Stories, Dr Natali Pearson is joined by Dr Roberto Costa to discuss the social changes experienced by the Asmat people, and the material and ethical alternatives they are developing in response to a wide range of socio-cultural, religious, and ecological predicaments.About Roberto Costa:Roberto Costa (PhD in Anthropology, 2021) currently works as a sessional academic at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Sydney and the School of Social Sciences at Macquarie University. He has published in the areas of politics, religion, ethics, materiality and human-non-human relations, mainly on his research in Indonesia and Papua/Melanesia. His research interests also include digital activism, phenomenology, and visual and sensory anthropology, the latter stemming from his prior educational formation as a musician. His present project focuses on rewriting his doctoral thesis into a book. In his doctoral research, he looked at the efforts of the Asmat, a people group in the south of Indonesian Papua, to actualise material and ethical alternatives to socio-cultural, religious and ecological predicaments.For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In March of 2022 the U.S. government announced its determination that genocide was committed by the Myanmar military against Rohingya communities in Myanmar’s Rakhine State in 2017. What will this mean for the roughly one million Rohingya refugees living in neighboring countries, for Rohingya IDPs in Rakhine State, and for post-coup Myanmar? In this episode Terese Gagnon speaks with Kyaw Zeyar Win about this long-awaited determination. In this conversation we hear from Zeyar about the violent origins of the Rohingya genocide, rooted in the long history of securitization of Rohingya in Myanmar. Terese and Zeyar discuss the possible implications of the genocide determination for Rohingya both within and outside of post-coup Myanmar.Kyaw Zeyar Win is a Project Coordinator at the International Republican Institute in Washington D.C. He is an expert in politics, international relations, and human rights with a focus on Myanmar. He holds a master’s in international relations from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University where he was an Open Society Fellow. He has previously worked at organizations including Voice of America and Amnesty International. He is author of the chapter “Securitization of the Rohingya in Myanmar” from the book Myanmar Transformed? People, Places and Politics.Terese Gagnon is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies at University of Copenhagen in the "The Politics of Climate and Sustainability in Asia”. She holds a PhD in anthropology from Syracuse University. Her dissertation is about Karen food, seed, and political sovereignty across landscapes of home and exile.Links to related podcasts:https://nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast/podcasts/karen_sanctuaries/https://nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast/podcasts/the-politics-of-protest-in-myanmar/https://nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast/podcasts/what-remains-textiles-from-tuol-sleng/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, 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

The Vietnamese victory over the French forces at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, which ended almost a century of French colonial rule in Indochina, is one of the most famous events in the history of anticolonialism. How were the Vietnamese communists able to achieve this remarkable victory over a much more powerful colonial force? This is the question Chris Goscha seeks to answer in his new book, The Road to Dien Bien Phu: A History of the First War for Vietnam (Princeton UP, 2022). In doing so, Goscha re-enters the vexed debate about the relative importance of nationalism and communism in Vietnam’s struggle against foreign powers. And he puts forward a compelling argument about the importance of “war communism” to the Vietnamese victory over the French.Chris Goscha is Professor of History and International Relations at the University of Quebec at Montreal, Canada, and a prize-winning author of works on the modern history of Vietnam.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

What explains the uneven meatification of diets in three of Asia’s core ‘emerging economies’? How and why is meat consumption changing today, and what role have American fast-food chains played? To discuss these questions and more, Helene Ramnæs, coordinator for the Norwegian Network for Asian Studies, is joined by Marius Korsnes, Kenneth Bo Nielsen and Arve Hansen.Asian diets include considerably more meat now than in the recent past, but meat is a contested issue. China and Vietnam have experienced some of the world’s most dramatic meat booms but vegetarianism increases and concerns for unsafe production methods and negative health effects have made people cautious about the meat they eat. While India defies global meat trends, contemporary India is not as vegetarian as it claims, and a large beef sector exists in an uneasy relationship with Modi’s hindu-nationalist regime.Marius Korsnes specialises in Science and Technology Studies at the Department for Interdisciplinary Studies of Culture at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). His work focuses on sustainable consumption and production and he is PI of the ERC project: “A Middle Way? Probing Sufficiency through Meat and Milk in China”Kenneth Bo Nielsen is a social anthropologist working on social movements and the political economy of development in India. In addition to working and teaching at the University of Oslo, he also leads the Norwegian Network for Asian Studies with Arve Hansen.Arve Hansen is a human geographer at the Centre for Development and the Environment at the University of Oslo, teaching and researching consumption and sustainability, and with a particular interest in meat and meat avoidance. He also leads the Norwegian Network for Asian Studies with Kenneth Bo Nielsen.Karen Lykke Syse and Arve Hansen: Changing Meat Cultures Food Practices, Global Capitalism, and the Consumption of AnimalsThe 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, 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