The UBC History Empires and (Post-)Colonialisms in the Asia-Pacific Cluster features local non-UBC scholars who have recently published monographs to have informal discussions about a chapter or two of their book. We invite all faculty and graduate students with interests in modern Asia/-Pacific (broadly defined) and the themes of empire, colonialism, or postcolonialism/decolonization to join, regardless of discipline or department.
The UBC History Empires and (Post-)Colonialisms in the Asia-Pacific Cluster is pleased to invite you to a seminar by Dr. Adrian de Leon on his new monograph, Bundok: A Hinterland History of Filipino America. This seminar will be held on January 15, 12:30-2:00pm in Buchanan Tower 1133. Lunch will be provided.
Dr. Adrian de Leon is the 2023-2024 Jack and Nancy Farley Distinguished Visiting Scholar in History at Simon Fraser University, and an Assistant Professor of U.S. History at New York University. Dr. de Leon’s book explores how:
“From the late eighteenth century, the hinterlands of Northern Luzon and its Indigenous people were in the crosshairs of imperial and capitalist extraction. Combining the breadth of global history with the intimacy of biography, Adrian De Leon follows the people of Northern Luzon across space and time, advancing a new vision of the United States’s Pacific empire that begins with the natives and migrants who were at the heart of colonialism and its everyday undoing. From the emergence of Luzon’s eighteenth-century tobacco industry and the Hawaii Sugar Planters’ Association’s documentation of workers to the movement of people and ideas across the Suez Canal and the stories of Filipino farmworkers in the American West, De Leon traces “the Filipino” as a racial category emerging from the labor, subjugation, archiving, and resistance of native people.”
Interested participants are should read the Preface, Introduction, and Chapter 4 ‘They Are by Nature and Custom Head Hunters’ of Bundok in preparation for discussions. Reading materials will be provided by the convenors a week beforehand.
If you are interested in joining the cluster, please contact Quinton Huang (qhuang98@student.ubc.ca) to be added to the mailing list, and please direct other inquiries to Ryan Sun (rchsun29@student.ubc.ca).
