New Books in Southeast Asian Studies

In the wake of Ken Burns’ most recent series, The Vietnam War, America’s fascination with the conflict shows no sign of abating. Fortunately the flood of popular retellings of old narratives is supplemented by a number of well-researched and reasoned efforts aimed at garnering a better sense of how our presumptions about the Vietnam War are in need of reinterpretation and revision. Returning to New Books in Military History is historian Gregory A. Daddis, author of two recent accounts of the war that together offer a sharp reassessment of the American effort. In Westmoreland’s War: Reassessing America’s Strategy in Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2014) and Withdrawal: Reassessing America’s Final Years in Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2017) Daddis challenges many existing perceptions of the readiness and roles of MACV’s two most prominent commanders, Generals William Westmoreland and Creighton Abrams, as well as their struggles with the Washington defense establishment during the war. By centering his study on the strategic planning and its execution, Daddis not only acknowledges the centrality of Vietnamese agency in the outcome of the war, he also reveals how some historians have misjudged the war’s outcome to present flawed visions of possible victory.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Harrod Suarez‘s new book The Work of Mothering: Globalization and the Filipino Diaspora (University of Illinois Press, 2017) focuses on the domestic workers that make up around a third of all overseas Filipino/a workers, and whose remittances back to the Philippines contribute to about 9% of its GDP or around twenty billion dollars. These migrants circulate through the world serving in positions of nurture, care, and service. Suarez examines literary, film, and cultural representations of these figures as part and parcel of a broader historical movement that structures the Philippines under globalization. To understand the multiple sites and histories of these figures, Suarez employs a framework that he calls “the diasporic maternal,” which focuses on the various forms of care and service that these migrants occupy throughout the world. Through a reading method that Suarez calls “archipelagic reading,” Suarez attempts to trace the undercurrents of these narratives that expose the feelings, desires and strategies that exist outside of motherhood and maternal care.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

In 1898, the United States took control of the Philippines from the Spanish. The U.S. then entered into a brutal war to make the Filipinos submit to the new colonial power. The war and subsequent decades of U.S. rule meant a small, but continuous presence of American soldiers on the islands, which, unsurprisingly, produced a notable population of children born to Filipino mothers and American fathers. Nicholas Trajano Molnar’s new book, American Mestizos, the Philippines, and the Malleability of Race, 1898-1961 (University of Missouri Press, 2017), examines the contested racial identities of these children. The United States brought a strong and binary sense of racial hierarchy to the discussion. Yet, as Molnar shows, Filipino understandings of race prevented a simple application of American ideas. The children were defined as American Mestizos locally, but many simply lived as Filipinos. Molnar’s book examines the ongoing contest over this mixed nationality and mixed race populations identity. By examining the process of racial formation of a group that never cohered as a separate identity group, American Mestizos provides uncommon insight into, as the title suggests, the malleability of race, and does so in a very readable narrative. In this episode, Molnar discusses the insights of American Mestizos about this history of racial identity in the Philippines and in the U.S. He explains some of the efforts within the Philippines and by U.S. policymakers to shape the racial identity of the Mestizos and the stakes of this debate for various segments of the U.S. military. Finally, he also discusses the research involved in the project. Christine Lamberson is an Assistant Professor of History at Angelo State University. Her research and teaching focuses on 20th-century U.S. political and cultural history. She’s currently working on a book manuscript about the role of violence in shaping U.S. political culture in the 1960s and 1970s. She can be reached at clamberson@angelo.edu.  Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Think of Christianity in Southeast Asia today and what might come to mind is the predominantly Catholic Philippines, or the work of the Baptist church among linguistic and cultural minorities in Myanmar, or any one of the thousands of Christian communities scattered throughout Indonesia. Tam T. T. Ngo‘s new book is about none of these relatively familiar groups and places, but instead about the quite recent emergence and rather rapid growth of evangelical Christianity among the Hmong in the upland areas of Vietnam, on the border of China. Her The New Way: Protestantism and the Hmong in Vietnam (University of Washington Press, 2016) is the first ethnography of Christian conversion in the borderlands of one of the only two formally communist states remaining in Southeast Asia today. Not only is the book remarkable for its collection and use of hard-to-get data from a wide array of sources in Vietnam and abroad, including extended periods of fieldwork in a Hmong village, but also for the story it recounts of conversion not by mission on the ground but via broadcast from the air. Tam Ngo joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to talk about Hmong converts and de-converts, family and neighborhood religious conflicts and their consequences, Pastor John Lee and the Far Eastern Broadcasting Company, the remittance of faith, ethnic relations and religious regulation in Vietnam, officials attempts through violence and persuasion to stop or reverse conversions, and the power of ethnography. You may also be interested in: * Bradley Camp Davis, Imperial Bandits: Outlaws and Rebels in the China-Vietnam Borderlands * Sebastian and Kirsteen Kim, A History of Korean Christianity Nick Cheesman is a fellow at the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University. He can be reached at nick.cheesman@anu.edu.auSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

The work of sociologist Norbert Elias has had a renaissance in recent times, with Steven Pinker, among others, using it to argue that interpersonal violence has declined globally as states have expanded and subdued restless populations. In Violence and the Civilising Process in Cambodia (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Roderic Broadhurst and his co-authors Thierry and Brigette Bouhours bring the declinist thesis to Southeast Asia. Coupling Elias’s approach with criminological theory, Broadhurst and the Bouhours argue that Cambodia’s experience over a 150 years is broadly consistent with what Elias found in Europe: that by monopolising force, generating chains of interdependence, and sensitising people to violence, states have an overall civilising effect. This is a startling and counterintuitive finding for a country whose name was not so long ago synonymous with genocide. But, Broadhurst and co-authors explain, the civilizing process is not linear. Asia like Europe has had its decivilising periods, and it might yet have some more. The overall trend, nevertheless, is away from violence and towards civility. Roderic Broadhurst joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to talk about state violence versus interpersonal violence, French colonial administration, postcolonialism and modernity, Sihanouk and the Khmer Rouge, Hun Sen and authoritarianism, and the challenges of doing historical sociology across multiple regime types and periods. You may also be interested in: Astrid Noren-Nilsson, Cambodia’s Second Kingdom: Nation, Imagination, and Democracy Abram de Swaan, The Killing Compartments: The Mentality of Mass Murder Nick Cheesman is a fellow at the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University. He can be reached at nick.cheesman@anu.edu.au. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

The government of the Philippines has for decades encouraged its citizens to seek work abroad and send money back to the country in remittances. But in recent years it has increasingly sought to entice Filipinos who have settled abroad to come home, not only for tourism but also for retirement. In Migrant Returns: Manila, Development, and Transnational Connectivity (Duke University Press, 2017), Eric J. Pido travels with Filipino Americans as they try to reimagine their lives and lifestyles in the gated communities and malls of Manila, and beyond. Along the way he encounters real estate agents, bureaucrats, investors and family members of returnees, or balikbayan, all in one way or another participating in attempts at selling an idea of home, one that for balikbayan from the US in particular evokes feelings both of homecoming and of a homeliness that they associate with their years spent on the other side of the Pacific. Eric J. Pido joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to talk about histories of departing from and returning to the Philippines, segregated suburbs and walled megacities, the balikbayan economy, returning migrants’ anxieties and hopes, medical tourism, and 1950s nostalgia. You may also be interested in: Megha Amrith, Caring for Strangers: Filipino Medical Workers in Asia Ulla Berg, Mobile Selves: Race, Migration, and Belonging in Peru and the US Nick Cheesman is a fellow at the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University. He can be reached at nick.cheesman@anu.edu.au.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Billed as “an exploration of the role of nationalist imaginings, discourses, and narratives in Cambodia since the 1993 reintroduction of a multiparty democratic system,” Cambodia’s Second Kingdom: Nation, Imagination, and Democracy (Cornell Southeast Asia Program, 2016) pays special attention to how competing nationalistic imaginings are a prominent part of contestation in the country’s post-war reconstruction politics. These imaginings, the book’s author Astrid Noren-Nilsson argues, constitute resources with which parties obtain popular support and win elections. In making her case, she draws on an impressive array of primary sources, including extensive interview data with members of Cambodia’s political elite. Duncan McCargo speaks with Astrid Noren-Nilsson for New Books in Southeast Asian Studies on the sidelines of the 2017 EuroSEAS conference at the University of Oxford, where Cambodia’s Second Kingdom was shortlisted for the EuroSEAS social science book prize. You may also be interested in: Sophal Ear, Aid Dependence in Cambodia: How Foreign Assistance Undermines Democracy Patrick Jory, Thailand’s Theory of Monarchy: The Vessantara Jataka and the Idea of the Perfect Man Duncan McCargo is Professor of Political Science at the University of Leeds and Visiting Professor of Political Science, Columbia University Nick Cheesman is a fellow in the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University. He can be reached at nick.cheesman@anu.edu.au.  Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

The relationship between religion and economic activity has attracted generations of scholars working in myriad settings. In recent years, many have turned to questions of how Islamic ideas are generative of economic activity, to Islamic finance and capital, and to the relationship between contemporary Islam and capitalism more broadly. In Corporate Islam: Sharia and the Modern Workplace (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Patricia Sloane-White builds on this work by asking “not only how the spread of global capitalism transforms the lives of Muslims… but how capitalism empowers the spread of Islam.” Drawing from interviews and ethnographic fieldwork over a seven-year period, and a wealth of knowledge from over two decades of research in Malaysia, Sloane-White argues that the “sharia space” of the today’s corporate Islamic workplace is a third domain between the public and the private in which employees must submit to the guidance of their professional and personal lives by men who insist that their businesses can and must be both profitable and pious. Patricia Sloane-White joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to talk about Malaysia’s self-styled men of the mosque and the market; the new nexus between Islamic scholars and CEOs; the decline of the bumiputera generation; sexuality, gendered divisions of labour, and the problem of patriarchy in the capitalist workplace everywhere. Listeners of this episode may also be interested in: Iza Hussin, The Politics of Islamic Law: Local Elites, Colonial Authority and the Making of the Muslim State Meredith Weiss, Student Activism in Malaysia: Crucible, Mirror, Sideshow Nick Cheesman is a fellow in the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University. He can be reached at nick.cheesman@anu.edu.auSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

Recent years have seen an upsurge in studies asking questions about, and in, borderlands. The topic is certainly not new to scholars of mainland Southeast Asia, but as Bradley Camp Davis shows in Imperial Bandits: Outlaws and Rebels in the China-Vietnam Borderlands (University of Washington Press, 2017), plenty of work remains to be done on the parallel processes of border and state formation in the region. Drawing on Chinese, Vietnamese and French written sources as well as hundreds of interviews with villagers in the uplands of Yunnan and northern Vietnam, Davis tells the story of a half-century of violence, trade and taxation at the hands of competing armed groups; of their alliances and wars with lowland states, and of the bandit as symbol in nationalist and local histories and memorials today. Bradley Camp Davis joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to discuss the malleability of bandits and banditry, Black Flags and Yellow Flags, the merits of oral traditions in study of history, and the place of the imperial bandit in movie and museum. You may also be interested in: Pamela McElwee, Forests are Gold: Trees, People and Environmental Rule in Vietnam Geraldo L. Cadava, Standing on Common Ground: The Making of a Sunbelt Borderland Nick Cheesman is a fellow at the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University and in 2016-17 a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He can be reached at nick.cheesman@anu.edu.au Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies

The conquest of the Philippines in 1942 brought thousands of Americans under the control of the empire of Japan. While most of them were interned or imprisoned for the duration of the war, a remarkable few evaded capture and fought on against the Japanese. In MacArthur’s Spies: The Soldier, the Singer, and the Spymaster Who Defied the Japanese in World War II (Viking, 2017), Peter Eisner describes the efforts of three of them John Boone, Claire Phillips, and Chick Parsons to incite an insurgency against the Japanese occupation. Facing long odds, they risked their lives to undermine Japan’s control, with Claire’s Manila nightclub supplying resources and information to Boone in the nearby countryside and the intelligence passed on to Chick and other officers working towards America’s return to the Philippines. Their efforts in association with that of others provided American and Filipino guerrillas with much-needed material, and smuggled in food and supplies to thousands of prisoners of war the Japanese held on Luzon. As Eisner reveals, while their efforts aided America’s eventual reconquest of the islands, it came at personal cost to them as it did for so many others, who faced detention, torture, and even death for their actions.Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/southeast-asian-studies