Light refreshments will be provided. Please register for the event for cat ering purposes.

This event has been postponed to April 16\, 2024\, from 5:00 to 7:30 pm PT. Dr. Leow will appear virtual ly via Zoom.

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This e vent is organized and hosted by the Department of History and co-sponsored by the Department of Asian Studies\, the Public Humanities Hub\, the Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Program\, the Center for Migration Studies\, t he Center for Chinese Research\, and the Center for Southeast Asian Researc h.

Talk Abstract

How should we write a his tory of a space whose conventional geographies have been overdetermined by nation-states and national historiographies? The "areas" which our academic specialisms\, institutions and politics call "China" and "Southeast Asia" often seem unnaturally separated from each other\, on opposite sides of vas t historiographical and even disciplinary chasms. This is\, I suggest\, at the expense of the numerous Asian actors and communities who have historica lly defined the region's more natural horizons through itinerance\, migrato ry and diasporic movement\, encounter and entanglement. This lecture takes a deep dive into one episode in 1949\, telling the story of two individuals whose connected lives were violently sundered by hardening borders between China and Southeast Asia\, and whose fates offer a lens both onto the long historical entanglements of this space\, as well as their violent foreclos ure in an era of mass racialized deportation\, nationalism\, revolution and civil war.

Presenter Bio

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Dr. Rachel Leow is Associate Professor of Moder n East Asian History at the University of Cambridge\, and a Fellow of Murra y Edwards College. Her first book\, Taming Babel: Language in the Making of Malaysia\, explored the ethnolinguistic constructions of Chineseness and Mal ayness over the colonial-postcolonial transition in Malaysia\; it was publi shed in 2016 and won the 2018 Association for Asian Studies Harry J. Benda Prize. Her recent work explores transregional and transnational connections between China and Sout heast Asia\, and her next monograph\, Diaspora’s Horizons\, is under contra ct with Allen Lane.