What can diasporas teach us about the history of Southeast Asia as a region dominated by narratives of hospitality and receptiveness to other cultures and peoples? In this talk, Nurfadzilah Yahaya (Assistant Professor of History, National University of Singapore) will describe how the Arab diaspora in Southeast Asia demarcated their own legal jurisdictions by anchoring the kinship obligations and commercial interests that they had developed over several centuries across the Indian Ocean. During the nineteenth century, links between homeland and destination faded into the background in the colonial period as the diasporic elite remade their lives in Southeast Asia often according to new colonial molds. This lecture will look at emblems of diasporic lives in the form of legal sources to explore the relationship between indigenous Southeast Asians, diasporas, and colonial authorities.

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