Remixing the Past: The Peopling of Asia (According to Kim Định)
In is 1970 work, Việt Lý Tố Nguyên, Lương Kim Định presented an outline of his understanding of the early history of East Asia. The main point that Kim Định…
Remixing the Past: Milk & Passion in a Time of War
This morning I was browsing through the digitized video and audio files that the Virtual Vietnam Archive at Texas Tech University has placed online and decided to make a “mashup”…
Playing with the Past: Chầu Văn meets Hip Hop
Chầu văn is a type of Vietnamese music that one can hear during spirit séances, when mediums contact spirits. The ethnomusicologist, Barley Norton, has written a wonderful book about this…
Traveling Back in Time to Jam with Ros Sereysothea
As an historian, not only do I enjoy learning about the past, but I also have a strong desire to travel back in time to visit certain places at certain…
Sampling the Past: A Duy Khánh Remix
I have been learning a lot about making music in the digital age recently, and one aspect of making music today that I find fascinating is the fact that people…
Remixing the Past: The Vietnam Hula
I remember having a conversation on Facebook with some friends/readers in which we talked about the connections in the 1960s between Hawaii and Saigon. In particular, we were talking about…
Remixing the Past: Murdered Chinese in 1900 Sarawak
In reading issues of the Sarawak Gazette from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, I repeatedly come across references to Chinese either killing themselves or getting murdered. Life for Chinese laborers…
Remixing the Past: Of Pigs and Men in 1920s Sarawak
Partly because I’ve been spending a lot of time in a forest that is inhabited by wild boars, and partly because sometimes when I’m out there I think about some…
Reframing and Remixing the Southeast Asian Past
I have started making “soundscapes” to accompany blog posts that I write about historical events or phenomena in Southeast Asian history. I am not sure why I started to do…
Remixing the Past: Eating a Frenchman in 1900 Southeast Asia
I just came across an amazing story from the early twentieth century in a newspaper from Hawaii, The Pacific Commercial Advertiser. The article is entitled “The Awful Fate of a…