New Books in Southeast Asian Studies

Since the fall of the Indonesian New Order regime in 1998 there has been a steady rise of Islamic popular culture in the nation. Muslim consumers and producers have cultivated a mediated domain where they can encounter commercial entertainment though the prism of spiritual reflection and piety. In Gender and Islam in Indonesian Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), Alicia Izharuddin, Women's Studies in Religion Program Research Associate at Harvard Divinity School, explores the development of the Islamic film genre with a specific focus on gender representation. Indonesian cinema throughout the New Order era focused on Muslim characters, both men and women, frequently framing them in nationalistic ideals. But after the record success of 2008’s film, Ayat-Ayat Cinta (Verses of Love), the viewing preferences of Indonesian Muslim audiences were met with a slew of Islamically themed films. These often contained the repetition of formulaic tropes and symbols deemed Islamic in order to sell out the box office. In our conversation we discussed the characteristics of the film Islami genre, the importance of gender analysis and feminist methodologies, the role of women as actors and filmmakers, idealized masculinities, the public piety of celebrity actresses, producing a “Good Muslim”/ “Bad Muslim” narrative dichotomy, films about the famous Wali Songo saints, and mediated public Islamic values in contemporary Indonesia.Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. He is the author of Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Cinematic Lives of Muslims, and is the editor of the forthcoming volumes Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (ILEX Foundation) and New Approaches to Islam in Film (Routledge). You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kpeterse@odu.edu.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Can justice heal? Must there be justice in order to heal? Is there such a thing as justice, something to be striven for regardless of context?Alexander L. Hinton thinks through these questions in a pair of new books. The two are companion pieces, each using Cambodia in a different way as a lens through which to look at the notion of transitional justice. In The Justice Facade: Trials of Transition in Cambodia (Oxford University Press, 2018), he argues there is something deeply mistaken in the way thinkers and practitioners have imagined and employed transitional justice in the past half-century. Justice, Hinton argues, is much more deeply embedded in localities and particularity than conventional notions of transitional justice allow. Rather than striving toward a universal notion of justice, what is needed is a deeply rooted sense of the way local actors, organizations and values understand and respond to calls for justice. Transitional justice requires a thorough understanding of local societies, of the way that global and local institutions intersect and interact.In Man or Monster?: The Trial of a Khmer Rouge Torturer (Duke University Press, 2016), Hinton turns his eye toward a more granular question of justice. Hinton witnessed most of the trial of Duch, the Khmer Rouge commander of the S-21 prison. The book takes us through the trial day by day, carefully observing not just the words spoken, but the manner and responses of witnesses and judges. In doing so, Hinton asks us to wonder how we should understand someone like Duch, someone who oversaw the murder of thousands of people yet presented himself as trapped by orders and by context. Using the words of the prosecutor and defense attorneys, he wonders whether we should better understand Duch as a man or as a monster, and asks what it would mean if we accepted his essential humanity.Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. He’s the author of four modules in the Reacting to the Past series, including The Needs of Others: Human Rights, International Organizations and Intervention in Rwanda, 1994, published by W. W. Norton Press.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

As you may know, university presses publish a lot of good books. In fact, they publish thousands of them every year. They are different from most trade books in that most of them are what you might called "fundamental research." Their authors--dedicated researchers one and all--provide the scholarly stuff upon which many non-fiction trade books are based. So when you are reading, say, a popular history, you are often reading UP books at one remove. Of course, some UP books are also bestsellers, and they are all well written (and, I should say, thoroughly vetted thanks to the peer review system), but the greatest contribution of UPs is to provide a base of fundamental research to the public. And they do a great job of it.How do they do it? Today I talked to Kathryn Conrad, the president of the Association of University Presses, about the work of UPs, the challenges they face, and some terrific new directions they are going. We also talked about why, if you have a scholarly book in progress, you should talk to UP editors early and often. And she explains how! Listen in.Marshall Poe is the editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@gmail.com.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Wang Gungwu has long been recognized as a world authority on the history of China and the overseas Chinese. His work has been inspired by his own experience growing up Chinese in Southeast Asia, but with strong family, educational, and indeed emotional connections to China. In his new memoir, Home Is Not Here (NUS, 2018), he recollects his upbringing in British Malaya at a time of great political turmoil, which included the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War, and the Japanese invasion and occupation of Malaya. Following World War II his studies in China at the National Central University in Nanjing were cut short by the imminent victory of the Chinese Communist Party in China’s civil war. This book is an intimate reflection on the themes of family, education, language, Chinese identity, and the search for a sense of home during a tumultuous period in Southeast Asian and Chinese history.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.auSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

By now we all know that Vietnam is a country, not a war. But how have decades, and even centuries, of war impacted the land of this southeast Asian nation? Professor David Biggs of the University of California, Riverside, specializes in Vietnamese environmental history. In Footprints of War: Militarized Landscapes of Vietnam (University of Washington Press, 2018) he examines the impacts of warfare in the region around Hue in central Vietnam. Using cutting edge methodology drawn from GIS (graphic information system), aerial photography, and more traditional archival documents, Biggs finds legacies of war in the soil, water, and rain forests.Starting with 14th-century battles between the Cham states and the invading Viet and continuing through the Ming Dynasty’s occupation in the early 1400s, the Tayson Rebellion (1771-1802) and the French colonial occupation from the 1880s to 1954, Biggs argues for an important pre-history of wars prior to the American War of the 1960s to January, 1973. The book ends with the American military machines “creative destruction” and a discussion of the toxic war remnants that pollute former battlefields and military bases. Linking environmental history to social, military, and political history, Footprints of War excavates the layers of history that make up the landscape of central Vietnam. Our conversation about the book reveals his deep understanding of Vietnamese culture and his original conceptualization of the meaning of war in the country.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, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, he can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

The things that make people academics -- as deep fascination with some arcane subject, often bordering on obsession, and a comfort with the solitude that developing expertise requires -- do not necessarily make us good teachers. Jessamyn Neuhaus’s Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers (West Virginia University Press, 2019) helps us to identify and embrace that geekiness in us and then offers practical, step-by-step guidelines for how to turn it to effective pedagogy. It’s a sharp, slim, and entertaining volume that can make better teachers of us all.Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A Peoples History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017).Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

What happens when market-oriented policy reforms butt heads with a single-party state’s strictly maintained limits on political freedoms? That question sets the terms for Luxury and Rubble: Civility and Dispossession in New Saigon (University of California Press, 2016) by Erik Harms, an ethnography of two districts in Saigon, or Ho Chi Minh City, the one a gleaming model of high modernist urban planning and building through party state-endorsed private enterprise, the other a demolition site. Though the residents of both speak of civic duties and advocate for civil rights, in the one these are realized through the manner in which people choose to live, while in the other they are undermined through the ways in which they are dispossessed.Erik Harms joins us for this New Books in Southeast Asian Studies interview, to talk about detritus and condominiums, civility and civil society, liberalism and neoliberalism, the paradoxes of struggles for rights fought over contested land, the view from a suspension bridge, and the merits of open-access publishing through subvention.Luxury and Rubble is available for free download here.Do you have comments about this episode or any other on the New Books in Southeast Asian Studies channel? Perhaps you have suggestions for authors whom we ought to interview? If so, mail the hosts at nick.cheesman [at] anu.edu.au or p.jory [at] uq.edu.au. We look forward to hearing from you.Nick Cheesman is a fellow at the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University and in 2019 a visiting researcher at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University, and Ritsumeikan University, also in Kyoto.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

How can the history of rubber be used as a way to understand the history of 20th-century Vietnam? In this episode of New Books in History, Michael G. Vann talks about Rubber and the Making of Vietnam: An Ecological History, 1897-1975 (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), with Michitake Aso, an Associate Professor of history at SUNY Albany. This extremely well-researched study of Vietnamese rubber plantations from the colonial origins to their near destruction during the American war opens new insights into the development of contemporary Vietnam. Dr. Aso explains such things as the difference between environmental and ecological history, how rubber plantations symbolized a type of French colonial modernization, the changing nature of French science, and the role of plantations in the First and Second Indochina Wars.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, 2018).Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In this episode, we talk with Stephen Hamnett about Planning Singapore: The Experimental City(Routledge, 2019), a book he edited with Belinda Yuen.Two hundred years ago, Sir Stamford Raffles established the modern settlement of Singapore with the intent of seeing it become ‘a great commercial emporium and fulcrum’. But by the time independence was achieved in 1965, the city faced daunting problems of housing shortage, slums and high unemployment. Since then, Singapore has become one of the richest countries on earth, providing, in Sir Peter Hall’s words, ‘perhaps the most extraordinary case of economic development in the history of the world’. The story of Singapore’s remarkable achievements in the first half century after its independence is now widely known.Stephen Hamnett is Emeritus Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of South Australia and a Commissioner of the Environment, Resources and Development Court of South Australia. Belinda Yuen is Professorial Research Fellow and Research Director at the Lee Kuan Yew Centre for Innovative cities, Singapore University of Technology and Design.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

The political protests of the “Red Shirts” movement in Thailand in April-May 2010 ended in tragedy, with the security forces killing over 90 people and injuring thousands more. Thailand’s political protests have been studied from many different angles, but perhaps the most unusual approach to this subject is to be found in Benjamin Tausig’s book, Bangkok is Ringing: Sound, Protest, & Constraint(Oxford University Press, 2019). This book examines the protests and the associated violence from a sound studies perspective. The book is an ethnographic study of the sounds that accompanied the protests: music, rally speeches, sound trucks, mobile phone ringtones, whistle-blowers, hand-clappers, and much more. All these sounds, in Tausig’s words, “pulse with meaning”. A fascinating theoretical argument weaves the different sounds discussed in the book together: that constraints on movement in the political realm are reflected in constraints on movement in the sonic world. And towards the end of the book, in a Bangkok backstreet, Mark Zuckerberg makes an appearance.An audio version of Bangkok is Ringing: Sound, Protest, & Constraint is available here.Listeners to this episode might also enjoy listening to Tyrell Haberkorn talking about her new book,In Plain Sight: Impunity and Human Rights in Thailand (U. of Wisconsin Press, 2018) or, to Andrew Walker about his book, Thailand’s Political Peasants: Power in the Modern Rural Economy (U Wisconsin Press, 2012). Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies