Southeast Asia: Text, Ritual and Performance

Comparative Postcolonial Theory and the Question of Chinese Empire
2017-02-23 11:10 - 12:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | HMNSS 2412
This lecture joins the recent calls to expand the Anglo-Franco focus of prevailing postcolonial theory by engaging with Asian empires as well as Sinophone perspectives situated in Southeast Asia. What might a more comparative or relational postcolonial theory look like? How might Sinophone studies contribute to a more globally-oriented postcolonial critique?

Shu-mei Shih is a professor of Comparative Literature, Asian Languages and Cultures, and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Among other works, her book, Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific (2007), has been attributed as having inaugurated a new field of study called Sinophone Studies. Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader (2013) is a textbook that she co-edited for the field. Besides Sinophone studies, her areas of research include comparative modernism, as in the book The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917-1937 (2001); theories of transnationalism, as in her co-edited Minor Transnationalism (2005); critical race studies, as in her guest-edited special issue of PMLA entitled “Comparative Racialization” (2008); critical theory, as in her co-edited Creolization of Theory (2011); Taiwan studies, as in her guest-edited special issue of Postcolonial Studies entitled “Globalization and Taiwan’s (In)significance” and the co-edited volume Comparatizing Taiwan (2015) and Knowledge Taiwan (2016). She is currently working on two monographs entitled Empires of the Sinophone and Comparison as Relation, and two co-edited volumes: Keywords of Taiwan Theory and World Studies: Theories and Debates.

From "The Trust Of The People" to "Obeying Your Elders"
2017-02-10 15:00 - 16:30 | HMNSS 1303
From “The Trust Of The People” to “Obeying Your Elders”:
Colonial-era Transformations in Elite Confucian Thought
Friday February 10
History Library HMNSS 1303
3pm – 430pm
Using evidence from the policy questions and responses on the Palace Examinations, as well as textbooks and educational policy manuals from the post-civil service examination era, this talk will trace how the nineteenth century classical canon–a diverse set of philosophical, political, poetic, and geomantic texts–was gradually narrowed in secondary educational curriculums into twentieth century Confucianism, which focused more narrowly on questions of moral upbringing and filial piety.
Wynn Gadkar-Wilcox is Professor of History and Non-Western Cultures at Western Connecticut State University. He is the author ofAllegories of the Vietnamese Past (2011), and the editor of Vietnam and the West: New Approaches (2010).
** students are VERY welcome and encouraged to attend**

Social Capital in Vietnam: Regional Variation and Local Development Trajectories
2017-01-13 15:10 - 16:30 | INTS 1111
Dr. Hy Van Luong
This talk will focus on the regional variation in social relational configuration in rural Vietnam. It compares and contrasts specifically kinship and association ties in the northern delta and the central coast of Vietnam on the one hand and those in southern Vietnam on the other. On the basis of data from 7 rural Vietnamese communities, the paper explores the linkage between social relational configurations and local development trajectories in rural Vietnam.
Dr. Hy Van Luong is Professor of Anthropology at University of Toronto. He has conducted extensive field research across urban and rural Vietnam since 1987 on kinship, gender, political economy, gifts and social capital, and sociocultural transformation. Professor Luong is the author and co-editor of nine books, as well as numerous chapters and articles in major edited volumes and academic journals on social organization, political economy, and discourse. His most recent monograph is entitled, Tradition, Revolution, and Market Economy in a North Vietnamese Village, 1925-2006 by University of Hawaii Press (2010).

Sponsored by SEATRiP and co-sponsored by Asian Studies and Anthropology.

Ideologizing Bird Music-Dance Traditions
2016-12-05 14:10 - 15:30
Maria Christine Muyco
University of the Philippines
Fulbright Scholar in Residence at UCR
Colloquium presentation sponsored by the Program in Southeast Asian Studies
“Ideologizing Bird Music-Dance Traditions”
My past research centers on the Panay Bukidnon of the Philippines and its ideology called sibod that manifests itself in the binanog (hawk-eagle expressive tradition). This ideology refers to sunú (music/movement structure), hampang (play on structures), santú (synchronization of elements), and tayuyon, which is a sense of mastery evident in the experience of ‘flow.’ Among the Panay Bukidnon, flow is to meet the goal of cultural sustenance and coexistence with one’s kalibutan, or environment/consciousness, in order to heal and to restore balance. The pursuit of this goal entails a commitment of communality and a consciousness of support from larger societies. The Panay Bukidnon use the term sibod even in sociopolitical negotiations involving ancestral land domain and settling disputes.
MARIA CHRISTINE MUYCO is Associate Professor and former Chair of the Composition and Theory Department of the College of Music at the University of the Philippines (UP). She obtained her PhD in Philippine Studies at UP in 2008, with Alternate Studies in Ethnomusicology/ Dance Theory at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) from 2006-2007. She is also a composer having earned her Master of Music (Composition) from the University of British Columbia and Bachelor of Music (Composition/Indigenous Music Performance) from UP. Her work on the music and dance traditions of the Panay Bukidnon, particularly about a local ideology called SIBOD, earned the UP best dissertation award in 2008. A book about this topic was recently published by the Ateneo de Manila Press. She is founder of Balay Patawili, Inc., a nongovernment organization that has produced/presented festivals, workshops, and performances, and has made other efforts to develop Panay Bukidnon culture. She is currently a Fulbright Scholar at UC Riverside.
For more information, contact Prof. Deborah Wong, deborah.wong@ucr.edu. Free and open to the public.

On the Cusp of History: Exploring Incipient Vietnamese Civilization
2016-11-04 15:00 - 16:30
The Department of Anthropology, University of California, Riverside presents:
On the Cusp of History: Exploring Incipient Vietnamese Civilization
Dr. Nam C. Kim, Associate Professor, Section Chair – Archaeology
Department of Anthropology, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Exploring the underpinnings of Vietnamese civilization requires an engagement with textual narratives, archaeological data, and even the various agendas of modern-day communities. Like elsewhere in the world, legend, memory, and text have been combined in Vietnam to construct, reconstruct, and detail ancient origins, thus exploring the temporal margins between “prehistory” and “history.” Increasingly, the archaeological enterprise has been used as a means to complement or challenge existing historical and conventional knowledge. Sitting on the cusp of history, ancient communities and settlements of the Red River Delta during the first millennium BCE provide a glimpse of what many consider to be incipient Vietnamese civilization. Of particular interest is the Co Loa site, which occupies a prominent place within the national imagination of Vietnam today. This lecture explores recent archaeological investigations of the site and how findings have contributed to ongoing research about early “Vietnam”. In doing so, it considers the potential complementarity between history and archaeology, while also highlighting some of the methodological challenges researchers face when dealing with the early history of Vietnam.
Nam C. Kim investigates past societies and their lifeways through archaeological research. He is interested in the emergence of early forms of urbanism and archaic states, particularly in Southeast Asia. Kim’s work also explores the links between the material record and the concerns of contemporary societies, as they relate to issues such as national identity and cultural heritage management. Beyond his work on Asian archaeology, his research explores the various evolutionary and cultural dimensions of organized violence, warfare, and peacemaking throughout human history.

Sponsored by Anthropology, Asian Studies, and SEATRiP

The Uprooted: The Systematic Removal of Mixed-Race Children in Colonial Vietnam
2016-10-26 16:00 - 17:30 | HMNSS 1303
HISTORY LIBRARY TALKS
public & students welcome; light reception @ 5:30pm
In the 1890s, French colonists in Indochina founded charity organizations to “protect” mixed-race children born to Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Lao mothers. Protection societies gave them room and board in French institutions, tuition to the colony’s elite schools and job replacement upon reaching adulthood. A close examination of protection society rhetoric, membership, and actions reveals that the societies helped managed the colony’s racial agendas in ways that the colonial government legally could not. While the societies’ efforts to “save” métis children did in fact help many of these children and their mothers by providing food, shelter, and an education, their program also had dire consequences for some including permanent separation from mothers and high incidence of suicide. This talk draws on oral histories and colonial records to explore the lives of these mixed-race children.

Christina Firpo is Associate Professor of Southeast Asian History and Women’s and Gender Studies at CalPoly University of San Luis Obispo, California. She is a author of The Uprooted (Hawaii, 2016) and has published numerous articles in such journals as Vietnamese Studies, French Colonial History, and the Journal of Social History. She is currently writing a book titled Negotiated Affections: Informal Economies of Clandestine Prostitution in Northern Vietnam, 1920-1954.
Co-sponsors:

Southeast Asian Studies Program (seatrip.ucr.edu)
Department of Ethnic Studies (ethnicstudies.ucr.edu)
Global Studies Program (globalstudies.ucr.edu)
