[Recording] Cosmopolitan Currents in the Making of Modern Southeast Asia

Recorded 9/23/21

Organizer: New York Southeast Asia Network, NYU Wagner, APEC Study Center

Join NYSEAN for a lively conversation with John Sidel, Martina Nguyen, and Rianne Subijanto about their new books. The discussion was moderated by NYSEAN co-founder John Gershman.

Bios:

Martina Thucnhi Nguyen is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Baruch College, City University of New York. A historian of modern Southeast Asia, her research focuses on colonialism, intellectual life, social and political reform, and gender in twentieth-century Vietnam. Her first book, On Our Own Strength: The Self-Reliant Literary Group (Tu Luc Văn Đoàn) and Cosmopolitan Nationalism in Late Colonial Vietnam, was published in 2021 as part of Columbia University’s Weatherhead East Asian Studies Institute book series. She is currently working on her second book, a gender history of how Vietnamese during the late colonial period actively constructed ideologies of sexual difference and wove these gendered categories into the very fabric of Vietnamese national identity.

John Sidel is the Sir Patrick Gillam Professor of International and Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He is the author of several books on Southeast Asia, most recently and relevantly Republicanism, Communism, Islam: Cosmopolitan Origins of Revolution in Southeast Asia (Cornell University Press, 2021).

Rianne Subijanto is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Baruch College, City University of New York. She received a B.A. in English from Universitas Indonesia, an M.A. in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University, and a Ph.D. in Communication and Graduate Certificate in Critical Theory from the University of Colorado Boulder. A specialist in communication technology, social emancipation, and the history of colonialism in Indonesia and Southeast Asia, she has conducted archival research in the Netherlands, Indonesia, Britain, the United States, and Russia. Her current book project, provisionally titled “Revolutionary Communication: Enlightenment at the Dawn of Indonesia,” examines the communicative sociotechnical systems of resistance produced by ordinary people in the early communist anti-colonial struggles in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) in the 1920s. This book project won an Honorable Mention for the 2016 Margaret A. Blanchard Doctoral Dissertation Prize from the American Journalism Historians Association.