New Books in Southeast Asian Studies

Regional demand for renewable hydropower from the Mekong River and its tributaries in Laos is on the rise. In June 2022, Laos exported one hundred megawatts of hydropower to Singapore via Thailand and Malaysia – a historic milestone that further establishes Laos as the battery of Asia. However, these developments take place amid rising concerns for the ecological future of the transboundary Mekong River and the millions of people who depend on it.Joining Dr Natali Pearson on SSEAC Stories, Dr Ming Li Yong exposes how further hydropower development on the Mekong River could negatively affect ecosystems, resulting in decreased food security and jeopardising livelihoods in the river basin. She also discusses processes of public consultation and how they fail to consider local communities’ opinions on these contested projects.About Ming Li Yong:Ming Li is a Fellow at the East-West Center in Honolulu, Hawai’i. She researches transboundary water governance and hydropower development in the Mekong River Basin. Her research focuses on community-based natural resource management, civil society movements, public participation, and the institutional arrangements that influence the politics of water resources development in the Mekong region. She received her Ph.D. from The University of Sydney and has previously taught courses on environmental ethics, sustainability, and food at the School for Field Studies and Paññāsāstra University of Cambodia, and at the National Institute of Education in Singapore.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 the nineteenth century, one group of American merchants reported an odd request from the Vietnamese emperor. An envoy asked if the traders could help procure a commodity brought by a previous delegation: a precious good that turned out to be a bottle of Best Durham bottled mustard.That’s one small anecdote in Eric Tagliocozzo’s latest book, In Asian Waters: Oceanic Worlds from Yemen to Yokohama (Princeton University Press: 2022), which charts hundreds of years of history across Asia’s waters, from the South China Sea through the Persian Gulf. Eric weaves together historical research and on-the-ground fieldwork to show how Asia’s oceans can be a better way to understand the region than its land borders.In this interview, Eric and I talk about these Asian waters, stretching from the Middle East to East Asia, and the history and fieldwork that went into Eric’s book.Eric Tagliacozzo is the John Stambaugh Professor of History at Cornell University. His many books include Secret Trades, Porous Borders: Smuggling and States along a Southeast Asian Frontier, 1865–1915 (Yale University Press: 2009) and The Longest Journey: Southeast Asians and the Pilgrimage to Mecca (Oxford University Press: 2013).You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of In Asian Waters. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In 1998, the Belitung, a ninth-century western Indian Ocean–style vessel, was discovered in Indonesian waters. Onboard was a full cargo load, likely intended for the Middle Eastern market, of over 60,000 Chinese Tang-dynasty ceramics, gold, and other precious objects. It is one of the most significant shipwreck discoveries of recent times, revealing the global scale of ancient commercial endeavors and the centrality of the ocean within the Silk Road story.But this shipwreck also has a modern tale to tell, of how nation-states appropriate the remnants of the past for their own purposes, and of the international debates about who owns—and is responsible for—shared heritage. The commercial salvage of objects from the Belitung, and their subsequent sale to Singapore, contravened the principles of the 2001 UNESCO Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage and prompted international condemnation. The resulting controversy continues to reverberate in academic and curatorial circles. Major museums refused to host international traveling exhibitions of the collection, and some archaeologists announced they would rather see the objects thrown back in the sea than ever go on display.Shipwrecks are anchored in the public imagination, their stories of treasure and tragedy told in museums, cinema, and song. At the same time, they are sites of scholarly inquiry, a means by which maritime archaeologists interrogate the past through its material remains. Every shipwreck is an accidental time capsule, replete with the sunken stories of those on board, of the personal and commercial objects that went down with the vessel, and of an unfinished journey. In this moving and thought-provoking reflection of underwater cultural heritage management, Natali Pearson reveals valuable new information about the Belitung salvage, obtained firsthand from the salvagers, and the intricacies in the many conflicts and relationships that developed. In tracing the Belitung’s lives and afterlives, Belitung: The Afterlives of a Shipwreck (U Hawaii Press, 2022) shifts our thinking about shipwrecks beyond popular tropes of romance, pirates, and treasure, and toward an understanding of how the relationships between sites, objects, and people shape the stories we tell of the past in the present.Like this interview? If so, you might also be interested in: Elisabeth Kramer, The Candidate's Dilemma: Anticorruptionism and Money Politics in Indonesian Election Campaigns Edward Aspinall and Ward Berenschot, Democracy for Sale: Elections, Clientelism, and the State in Indonesia Professor Michele Ford is the Director of the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, a university-wide multidisciplinary center at the University of Sydney, Australia.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/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