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Category Archives: Friday Colloquium
WEBINARS 2020-21
New York Global Asia and Co-sponsored are listed separately under side tabs.
The Pandemic in Global Asia Webinar Series is here.
Here are NYU-SHANGHAI Global Asia Webinars. All the NYUSH recordings are here: https://cga.shanghai.nyu.edu/events/videos/
FOR OTHER RELATED WEBINARS, SEE SPECIAL EVENTS.
The Global Asia Colloquium
The Colloquium meets on Fridays, 4:00-6:45. With Wine and Cheese,
in 701 KJCC (53 Washington Square South). Any change of time or venue will be announced on the schedule.
Come One and Come All !!
We often have two presentations: 4:00-5:15 and 5:30-6:45.
The Colloquium is venue for discussing Global Asia research in a wide range of disciplines. It is also a graduate course in History open to students in any discipline in the Inter-University Doctoral Consortium.
The Global Asia Colloquium is substantially funded by a grant to NYU Centers for Global Asia in New York, Abu Dhabi, and Shanghai by the Luce Foundation.
April 26 Global Asia Colloquium
The Global Asia Colloquium
Fridays 4:00-6:45. 701 KJCC (53 Washington Square South).
26 April 2019
Commodities, Consumption, and Capitalism
4:00-5:15. Eric Tagliacozzo, Cornell University, “How the Indian Ocean Spice Trade Made the World Modern”
Abstract: The quest for spices brought the world together in ways that we only recognize now. Though spices have been in circulation since Antiquity, it really was roughly from the “Contact Age” forward (circa 1500 CE) that they began to play a vital role in connecting the world’s scattered societies. Prior to that, the Mediterranean Basin and India were thinly connected by spices; further to the east, India and Southeast Asia were too, as were Southeast Asia and China further east from that. Venice built an empire on the control of spices from Asia, and Istanbul did the same after the age of the Venetians was gone. This presentation looks at these old histories as an engine for global connection. The barks and seeds of the Indian Ocean ended up launching the beginnings of the imperial age, when European state-making projects under the guise of “East India Companies” eventually carved up much of the known world. We will follow this process and learn a bit about the objects of this unparalleled affection—the spices themselves—along the way.
Eric Tagliacozzo is Professor of History at Cornell. He is the author of a history of smuggling in Southeast Asia (Yale, 2005) which won the AAS’s Harry Benda Prize in 2007, and a monograph on the pilgrimage to Mecca from that region (Oxford, 2013). He is also the editor or co-editor of ten other volumes. He is currently finishing a book on the history of the sea in Asia, from Istanbul to Yokohama. He is the Director of the Comparative Muslim Societies Program (CMS), as well as Cornell’s Modern Indonesia Project (CMIP), and serves as editor of the journal INDONESIA.
5:30-6:45 Johan Mathew, Rutgers University, “Working under the Influence: Narcotics Consumption in Colonial Asia and Africa”
Abstract: In some ways the opiate crisis consuming headlines in the United States today is a radically new phenomenon, but in other ways it is a very old story. What is strikingly new is the willingness of cultural and political elites in the US to identify with the struggles of the “white working class,” and recognize the roots of drug consumption in the crisis of economically moribund communities. However the consumption of narcotics as a means of anesthetizing the pain of a capitalist economy is at least as old as the plantation. This paper seeks to explore the pain that Asian and African laborers endured and the socio-chemical relief they sought in the consumption of cannabis and opium. I turn specifically to the consumption of cannabis in South Africa and British India and the consumption of opium in the Philippines and Burma to attempt to trace this connection between new forms of labor and narcotics consumption. The tentative argument is that narcotics provided relief from the physical pain of repetitive and intensifying labor, but also that the sociality of consumption provided relief from the mental strain of loneliness in a migrant labor regime.
Johan Mathew is an Assistant Professor of history at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, and is the author of Margins of the Market: Trafficking and Capitalism across the Arabian Sea (University of California Press, 2016). He is currently at work on a new project tentatively entitled Opiates of the Masses: A History of Humanity in the Time of Capital, which explores how human bodies adapted to the demands of industrial labor through the consumption of narcotics.
April 12 Global Asia Colloquium. Barry McCarron
GLOBAL ASIA COLLOQUIUM
Fridays, 4:00-6:45. With Wine and Cheese. (unless otherwise indicated) we meet in
701 KJCC (53 Washington Square South). Come One and Come All !!
April 12. Barry McCarron (NYU), “Mobility, Empire, and Exclusion in the Pacific World: The Irish and Chinese Experience in Comparative Perspective
Abstract:
This talk explores the nature and significance of relations between Irish and Chinese people in the Pacific world since the late eighteenth century, which will enrich understanding of some of the major historical processes examined in the NYU Global Asia Colloquium such as mobility, connectivity, and territoriality. Nineteenth-century Western imperialism, mining booms, and the construction of transcontinental railroads brought large numbers of Irish and Chinese people into contact in the Pacific world including major Pacific port city environments such as Shanghai, Hong Kong, Melbourne, Sydney, San Francisco, and Vancouver, where both groups experienced contrasting experiences in terms of mobility (both spatial and social).
Between the late eighteenth century and the early twentieth century, thousands of Irish people served in China on behalf of the United States and the British Empire. Irishmen played a significant role in the gunboat diplomacy that gave rise to the first of a series of “unequal treaties” that granted foreign powers concession and privileges in China. In their wake came a stream of Irish diplomats, soldiers, administrators, consular officials, and police, to name but a few, who helped expand and maintain the century-long treaty port system that undermined China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. Other Irish, most notably Robert Hart, were leading players in China’s integration into a Euro-American-dominated international system that demanded new modes of trade and foreign relations. Hart was the most influential foreigner in China soon after becoming Inspector-General (1863-1908) of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service (1854-1950), a largely Western-staffed Chinese government organization (with an Irish-born Inspector-General for 62 years of its 96-year existence) that produced revenues key to China’s state-building efforts, served as an intermediary between Chinese and foreign officials, and helped China adjust to Western imperialism and a global capitalist economy.
While Irish people were a major part of the treaty system that opened China’s door to Western imperialism, they were also among the most vocal advocates of closing the door on Chinese immigration to the United States and the British Empire in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. The mid-nineteenth-century gold rushes in California, New South Wales, Victoria, Otago, and British Columbia brought tens of thousands of Irish and Chinese into close proximity and direct contact. Both groups contributed to the rapid growth of these resource-rich and labor-scarce white settler societies by extracting precious metals such as gold, silver, and copper and laboring in a variety of industries such as agriculture, manufacturing, and transcontinental railroad construction. At the same time, the Irish diaspora was also a major force behind anti-Chinese movements that gave rise to Chinese immigration restriction laws in the Anglophone settler world and caused major friction in China’s relations with the United States and Britain.
Despite the historical significance of Irish and Chinese cross-cultural contacts and exchanges in the Pacific world, scholars have yet to examine the full range of relations between both groups. This talk, drawing on multinational archival research including Chinese-language sources in my forthcoming book project, examines Irish and Chinese cross-cultural encounters and comparative experiences in the Pacific world and links these research findings with broader questions about the forces of mobility, connectivity, and territoriality that shaped the modern Pacific world.
Global Asia Colloquium | April 5 | Gyan Prakash | Co-sponsored by South Asia NYU
The Global Asia Colloquium
APRIL 5, 2019, 4:00-6:45.
701 KJCC (53 Washington Square South). With Wine and Cheese.
A Book Launch of US Edition for Gyan Prakash’s new book,
Emergency Chronicles: Indira Gandhi and Democracy’s Turning Point
with discussion by Manu Bhagavan (Hunter College, CUNY), Manu Goswami (NYU), Meghna Chaudhuri (NYU), and Sanjay Ruparelia (The New School)
On the night of June 25, 1975, Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency in India, suspending constitutional rights and rounding up her political opponents in midnight raids across the country. In the twenty-one harrowing months that followed, her regime unleashed a brutal campaign of coercion and intimidation, arresting and torturing people by the tens of thousands, razing slums, and imposing compulsory sterilization on the poor. Emergency Chronicles provides the first comprehensive account of this understudied episode in India’s modern history. Gyan Prakash strips away the comfortable myth that the Emergency was an isolated event brought on solely by Gandhi’s desire to cling to power, arguing that it was as much the product of Indian democracy’s troubled relationship with popular politics.
Drawing on archival records, private papers and letters, published sources, film and literary materials, and interviews with victims and perpetrators, Prakash traces the Emergency’s origins to the moment of India’s independence in 1947, revealing how the unfulfilled promise of democratic transformation upset the fine balance between state power and civil rights. He vividly depicts the unfolding of a political crisis that culminated in widespread popular unrest, which Gandhi sought to crush by paradoxically using the law to suspend lawful rights. Her failure to preserve the existing political order had lasting and unforeseen repercussions, opening the door for caste politics and Hindu nationalism.
Gyan Prakash is the Dayton-Stockton Professor of History at Princeton University. His many books include Mumbai Fables: A History of an Enchanted City (Princeton), Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labor Servitude in Colonial India, and Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton). He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
*Abstract and bio retrieved from Princeton University Press, 2019
Global Asia Colloquium | March 29 | Barry Flood
Barry Flood (IFA, Art History)
“Architecture as Archive:
India, Ethiopia and a Twelfth-century World System”
The talk presents new research that highlights connections between medieval Ethiopia, Arabia and India that were previously unsuspected. Building on Janet Abu-Lughod’s Before European Hegemony (1991), which argued for the emergence of a ‘world system’ fostered by Mongol rule, it considers the possibility of an emergent world system in the century before the advent of the Mongols, and the role of Ethiopia within it.
[Here is link to useful reading]
Global Asia Colloquium | March 15 | Sunil Amrith and Francis Bradley
Global Asia Colloquium
Spring 2019
4:00-6:45 in 701 KJCC (53 Washington Square South) with wine and cheese
March 15, 2019. Sunil Amrith and Francis Bradley
on
Mobility and Territoriality Around the Indian Ocean, 1750-1950
4:00- 5:15. Francis Bradley, Pratt Institute
Title: Mecca to Southeast Asia: The Patani Islamic Knowledge Networks
Abstract: In the nineteenth century, Mecca became far more accessible to Muslims around the globe. A contingent of exiles from Patani, a Malay kingdom that once comprised territory on both sides of the current Malay-Thai border and that had been conquered by Siam in the 1780s, came to play a leading role in the dissemination of religious texts throughout Southeast Asia. This paper focuses on the influential Patani shaykh Daud b. ‘Abd Allah al-Fatani (1769-1847), author of over 40 works, whose circle of students returned and founded the pondok system of education in Malaya with his texts as the core books and spread the texts into other connected areas in Southeast and South Asia, the Middle East, and southern Africa.
5:15-5:30. Break
5:30-6:45. Sunil Amrith, Harvard University
Title: “Space, Inequality, and the Bay of Bengal’s First Migration Crisis”
Abstract: My presentation will examine why modern citizenship in South and Southeast Asia was built upon the disavowal of migration. This history has enduring consequences in the region today: witness the protracted and violent conflicts that have consumed Sri Lanka and Burma since the 1980s, to all of which the issue of citizenship has been central, or the enduring marginalization and discrimination faced by minorities in Malaysia. This is the central paradox I hope to explore: it was precisely because a world of circulating migrant labor seemed so starkly an illustration of the inequalities and the violence of colonial capitalism, by the 1930s, that so many postcolonial states stepped in to regulate or even to prevent it; yet, in doing so, new laws had a devastating effect on the lives of millions of people who had built their lives upon mobility. While focusing on the political history of struggles over migration in the 1930s and 1940s, I hope to bring in the spatial and even ecological dimension of this, arguing (from my new book, Unruly Waters), that one corollary to the sense of enclosure that set in across the Indian Ocean, was a newfound struggle to control natural resources, and water above all.
READINGS on File Here.
Global Asia Colloquium | April 19 | Conflict, Mobility, and Empire
GLOBAL ASIA COLLOQUIUM
April 19, 2019, 4:00-6:45
KJCC 701 (53 Washington Square South, 7th Floor)
with wine and cheese
CONFLICT, MOBILITY, and EMPIRE
4:00-5:15. Manu Vimalassery (Barnard College), author of Empire’sTracks: Indigenous Nations,Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad (UCal Press, 2019)
Title: “Empire’s Tracks”
Empire’s Tracks boldly reframes the history of the transcontinental railroad from the perspectives of the Cheyenne, Lakota, and Pawnee Native American tribes, and the Chinese migrants who toiled on its path. In this meticulously researched book, Manu Karuka situates the railroad within the violent global histories of colonialism and capitalism. Through an examination of legislative, military, and business records, Karuka deftly explains the imperial foundations of U.S. political economy. Tracing the shared paths of Indigenous and Asian American histories, this multisited interdisciplinary study connects military occupation to exclusionary border policies, a linked chain spanning the heart of U.S. imperialism. This highly original and beautifully wrought book unveils how the transcontinental railroad laid the tracks of the U.S. Empire.
5:30-6:45. Heather Streets-Salter (Northeastern University), author of World War One in Southeast Asia: Colonialism and Anti-Colonialism in an Era of Global Conflict (Cambridge 2017)
Title: “Opportunity, Mobility, and Anticolonialism in Southeast Asia during the Great War.”
Abstract: In 1914, small but significant numbers of anticolonial revolutionaries living in and moving through Southeast Asia saw the war between the Allied and Central powers as an opportunity. Members of the Indian diasporic group called Ghadr and the Viet Nam Restoration Association, especially, saw the enmity between their colonial oppressors and Germany as a chance to gain the financial and material backing they needed to finally win control over their territories. This talk focuses on the ways members of both groups sought to use independent Siam as a base for undermining colonial rule in India and Indochina. More generally, it explores the ways the peculiar geography and geopolitical configuration of Southeast Asia encouraged enemies of the Allies to use the neutral states that surrounded their colonies to foment revolution.
Heather Streets-Salter is Professor and Director of World History Programs at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. She received her Ph.D. in History from Duke University in 1998. She is the author of World War One in Southeast Asia: Colonialism and Anticolonialism in an Era of Global Conflict (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Martial Races: The Military, Martial Races, and Masculinity in British Imperial Culture, 1857-1914 (Manchester University Press, 2004), Traditions and Encounters: A Brief Global History (McGraw-Hill, 2006) with Jerry Bentley and Herb Ziegler (now in its fourth edition), and Empires and Colonies in the Modern World (Oxford University Press, 2015) with Trevor Getz. Her next project is called The Chill Before the Cold War: Communism and Anti-Communism in Colonial Southeast Asia in the Interwar Period.