President Trump’s Opinion of Le Minh Khai
At the recent APEC meeting in Vietnam, President Donald Trump of the USA was apparently asked what he thought of Le Minh Khai by two reporters from The Guardian. I’m…
Popular Music in Twentieth Century Southeast Asia: A New Book!!
One topic that has received very little attention by historians is twentieth-century Southeast Asian popular culture, especially popular culture in the 1950s-1980s. There is a new publication, however, that seeks to at least partially remedy this situation by providing an overview of popular music in Southeast Asia in the twentieth century.
The book is called Popular Music in Southeast Asia: Banal Beats, Muted Histories (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017) and was written by Bart Barendregt, Peter Keppy and Henk Schulte Nordholt. Further, there is an open access version of the book that is free to download and read.
A Conversation With Nhà Sàn Collective (Parts 1 and 2/of 7)
The eighth Engaging With Vietnam conference, held in Honolulu in October 2016, focused on the theme of “Engaging With Vietnam through Scholarship and the Arts.”
Our inspiration for that conference came from our realization that many people in the arts world in Vietnam are asking a lot of the same questions that academics ask, and are doing so in very sophisticated ways. We therefore wished to highlight this intersection between the arts and scholarship.
In preparation for the conference, Engaging With Vietnam conference founder Phan Lê Hà and I met in the summer of 2016 with Nguyễn Quốc Thành and Trương Quế Chi, two artists and curators from Nhà Sàn Collective, an art space in Hanoi.
Our conversation went on for well over an hour and it covered numerous topics, from discussing some of Nhà Sàn Collective’s projects to highly philosophical discussions about the contradictions between activism and the arts, and the difficulty over overcoming the limitations of discourse.
A 20th-Century Vietnamese Origin Story (Part 1)
In the summer of 2016 I gave a talk at Nhà Sàn Collective, an art space in Hanoi, on some of the historical ideas that the South Vietnamese philosopher/historian, Lương Kim Định, produced in the 1960s.
This was the abstract for that talk:
“Virtually every human society today has a story about where it came from, or what we can call an ‘origin story.’ In the case of Vietnam, one could say that the story about Thần Nông, Kinh Dương Vương, Lạc Long Quân and the Hùng Kings is a kind of origin story. However, there was a new origin story that emerged in the 20th century that argued that the ancestors of the Vietnamese were agriculturalists (người nông nghiệp) who migrated into the region to get away from pastoralists (người du mục) to the north. This talk will examine how and why this ‘alternative origin story’ emerged in the 20th century.”
Modern Southeast Asian History Seminar: The Cold War (Week 8)
While I’m not particularly interested in political history, I always find it important to keep up with developments in that field, as new scholarship can dramatically change long-held beliefs.
This week we looked at some new scholarship on the beginnings of the Cold War in Southeast Asia, and also took a look at some writings on the Bandung Conference. With China investing heavily in Africa these days, there is a growing interest among some scholars to look at the history of Afro-Asian interactions, and the Bandung Conference is an obvious topic of interest.
I predict that there will be some interesting scholarship that will emerge in the next few years on this topic, and so we took a brief look at the Bandung Conference to get a sense of what that was all about.
Modern Southeast Asian History Seminar: Everyday Technology (Week 7)
Everyday, or common, forms of technology, such as radios, televisions, and sewing machines have had an enormous impact on human societies. Examining Southeast Asian history by looking at how various everyday technologies have been adopted and utilized can lead to fascinating insights.
This is the topic we covered in this week of the seminar. The reading list is below.