In this episode, we talk with Stephen Hamnett about Planning Singapore: The Experimental City (Routledge, 2019), a book he edited with Belinda Yuen . Two hundred years ago, Sir Stamford Raffles established the modern settlement of Singapore with the intent of seeing it become ‘a great commercial emporium and fulcrum’. But by the time independence was achieved in 1965, the city faced daunting problems of housing shortage, slums and high unemployment. Since then, Singapore has become one of the ri...
Oct 07, 2019•52 min•Ep. 24
The political protests of the “Red Shirts” movement in Thailand in April-May 2010 ended in tragedy, with the security forces killing over 90 people and injuring thousands more. Thailand’s political protests have been studied from many different angles, but perhaps the most unusual approach to this subject is to be found in Benjamin Tausig ’s book, Bangkok is Ringing: Sound, Protest, & Constraint (Oxford University Press, 2019) . This book examines the protests and the associated violence fro...
Sep 30, 2019•41 min•Ep. 55
Nicholas Walton’s Singapore Singapura: From Miracle to Complacency (Hurst, 2019) is far more than a portrait of the rise of a resource-poor nation that has become a model of economic development, governance and management of inter-communal relations. Part travelogue, part history, Walton charts the opportunities and pitfalls confronting small states that have become particularly acute in an era of identity politics and civilizational leadership. Potential threats include not only the Singapore’s...
Sep 27, 2019•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 80
How do you understand mindfulness? Is your understanding limited by your own culture’s definition of what mindfulness is? These are some of the questions you will ask yourself while reading Remembering the Present: Mindfulness in Buddhist Asia (Cornell University Press). In today’s podcast, Prof. Julia Cassaniti takes us on a tour of three Theravada Buddhist countries (Thailand, Myanmar and Sri Lanka) to show us how mindfulness is understood in this region and what this, in turn, can teach the W...
Aug 12, 2019•1 hr 38 min•Ep. 53
In the preface to In Plain Sight: Impunity and Human Rights in Thailand (University of Wisconsin Press, 2018) Tyrell Haberkorn asks, echoing Pakavadi Veerapaspong, if and when it might one day be possible to write a book on “memories of dictatorship” in Thailand. Concluding that today a clear end to dictatorship is not in sight, she invokes Howard Zinn to insist that nevertheless, “We must not accept the memory of states as our own… it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus has suggested...
Jul 23, 2019•46 min•Ep. 54
Chika Watanabe ’s Becoming One: Religion, Development, and Environmentalism in a Japanese NGO in Myanmar (University of Hawaii Press, 2019) is a rich ethnographic study of the work of a Japanese NGO called the Organization for Industrial, Spiritual and Cultural Advancement. Watanabe’s deep dive into the daily workings of OISCA explores the “moral imagination” of constructing unity based on a distinctly Japanese-marked set of ideals and practices within the confines of an unusual Japanese NGO wor...
Jul 15, 2019•58 min•Ep. 282
Thanks to the international tourism industry most people are familiar with the spectacular ruins of Angkor, the great Cambodian empire that lasted from about the 9th to the early 15th century. We are especially familiar with those haunting images of the face of King Jayavarman VII, represented in the stone sculptures of the Bayon temple in Angkor Thom. Archaeologists and historians tend to relate the history of the Angkorean era through the dynasties of great kings. These are, of course, all mal...
Jul 04, 2019•43 min•Ep. 53
Paul Thomas Chamberlin has written a book about the Cold War that makes important claims about the nature and reasons for genocide in the last half of the Twentieth Century. In The Cold War's Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace (Harper, 2018), Chamberlin reminds us that the Cold War was not at all Cold for hundreds of millions of people. He argues that the Soviet Union and the US competed fiercely over the states and people living in a wide swath of land starting in Manchuria, running sout...
Jun 13, 2019•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 90
In Returns of War: South Vietnam and the Price of Refugee Memory (New York University Press, 2018), Long T. Bui examines the complicated relationship between the Vietnamese diasporic community and its home country, the former South Vietnam. Central to Bui’s argument is his use of Richard Nixon’s definition of Vietnamization as a way to frame the postwar afterlives of South Vietnamese refugees, their descendants, and those remaining in Vietnam today. While Nixon used this term as a military strat...
Jun 07, 2019•51 min•Ep. 36
Thailand is one of the world’s last remaining military dictatorships, and the last in Asia. While we are familiar with the Thai military’s frequent interventions in Thai politics, we know rather less about its external security role. As rivalry between the superpowers, the United States and China, has grown in recent years, Thailand’s strategic position in the East Asian region has become increasingly important. But what do we know about Thailand’s “strategic culture”? How does the country’s sec...
May 07, 2019•46 min•Ep. 52
Michael Walzer once began a book with the advice of a former teacher to “always begin negatively”. Tell your readers what you are not going to do and it will relieve their minds, he says. Then they will be more inclined to accept what seems a modest project. Whether or not Ward Keeler had this writing strategy firmly in mind when he wrote the preface to The Traffic in Hierarchy: Masculinity and Its Others in Buddhist Burma (University of Hawaii Press, 2017), it’s the one he adopts, and with the ...
Apr 01, 2019•50 min•Ep. 51
In the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic. How can publishers and authors contribute to this process? This podcast addresses this issue. We interview Professor Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick , whose book, The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance (forthcoming with MIT Press ) is undergoing a Massive Online Peer-Review (MOPR) process, where everyone can make comments o...
Mar 19, 2019•32 min•Ep. 15
More than forty year after its end the Vietnam War casts a long shadow over our understanding of Vietnam’s modern history. But the acute focus on the war has perhaps distorted our understanding of modern Vietnam. Christopher Goscha ’s award-winning new book, Vietnam: A New History (Basic Books, 2016), brilliantly paints a picture of an ancient, diverse, and complex country which had already begun to modernize before the arrival of the French (let alone the Americans) and which was itself an impe...
Feb 26, 2019•44 min•Ep. 50
In his recent monograph, The Buddha’s Wizards: Magic, Protection, and Healing in Burmese Buddhism (Columbia University Press, 2018), Thomas Patton examines the weizzā , a figure in Burmese Buddhism who is possessed with extraordinary supernatural powers, usually gained through some sort of esoteric practice. Like the tantric adept in certain other Buddhist traditions, the weizzā can use his skills both to manipulate human affairs in the present world and to help people progress towards Buddhist ...
Feb 11, 2019•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 43
At an often-stressful time in global affairs, and with the very idea of the ‘international community’ seemingly under threat, it can be beneficial to look at the 'global order’ from its disorderly fringes. Andray Abrahamian ’s North Korea and Myanmar: Divergent Paths (McFarland, 2018) does precisely this, comparing and contrasting North Korea’s and Myanmar’s long careers as ‘pariah’ states during the 20th and 21st centuries, and offering a convincing account of how one – Myanmar – has to some ex...
Jan 28, 2019•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 256
Recent economic crises have made the centrality of debt, and the instability it creates, increasingly apparent. In Beyond Debt: Islamic Experiments in Global Finance (University of Chicago Press, 2018), anthropologist Daromir Rudnyckyj illustrates how the Malaysian state, led by the central bank, is seeking to make the country’s capital Kuala Lumpur the central node of global financial activity conducted in accordance with Islam. Beyond Debt tracks efforts to re-center international finance in a...
Jan 24, 2019•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 103
Since the late 1990s Thai cinema has come to global attention with movies like the famous ghost film, Nang Nak , and more recently the evocative films of director Aphichatpong Weerasethakul, who won a Palme D’Or award at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival. A perennially popular theme in Thai cinema is that of haunting by a female ghost. In this unique, unusual book, Ghostly Desires: Queer Sexuality and Vernacular Buddhism in Contemporary Thai Cinema (Duke University Press, 2016), Arnika Fuhrmann hone...
Jan 22, 2019•43 min•Ep. 49
If you want to read just one book to properly understand capitalism, let it be Tania Li’s award-winning 2014 book Land’s End: Capitalist Relations on an Indigenous Frontier (Duke University Press, 2014). This might seem like a strange choice: how can a study of a faraway and possibly exotic indigenous place shed light on “our” own global realities of jobless growth and rising inequality? But it can, and it does. The book is a masterpiece of social scientific scholarship and critical political pr...
Jan 07, 2019•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 26
From Indonesia’s declaration of independence in 1945 up until today, the relationship between Indonesian nationalism, Islam, and modernity has been a key subject of debate. One of the central figures in this debate was the great writer, journalist, public intellectual – and pious Muslim from Minangkabau, West Sumatra, Haji Abdul Malik Karim Amrullah, better known by his pen-name, Hamka. Largely self-taught, Hamka was one of Indonesia’s most prolific writers. Between the 1920s and his death in 19...
Dec 13, 2018•45 min•Ep. 48
McKenzie Wark ’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century (Verso, 2017) introduce readers to important work in Anglophone cultural studies, psychoanalysis, political theory, media theory, speculative realism, science studies, Italian and French workerist and autonomist thought, two “imaginative readings of Marx,” and two “unique takes on the b...
Dec 06, 2018•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 14
Over the course of the 1930s, Vietnamese author Vũ Trọng Phụng published eight novels, hundreds of works of narrative nonfiction, stories, plays, essays and articles. He was a best-selling writer in his own day who sharpened his acute literary talents, Peter Zinoman observes in the opening pages of Vietnamese Colonial Republican: The Political Vision of Vu Trong Phung (University of California Press, 2014), “as a lower-class, untraveled, half-educated, opium addicted, colonized subject from a re...
Nov 19, 2018•46 min
People of various political stripes in many countries (particularly those countries where various political stripes are allowed) have been arguing about the Vietnam War for a long time. The participants in these debates were (and are) always quick to assign blame in what seems to be an endless attempt to justify “their side” and vilify “the other side.” In this context, Max Hastings’ new book Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975 (HarperCollins, 2018) comes as something of a relief, for he essenti...
Nov 06, 2018•52 min•Ep. 455
This interview is the fourth and and final interview in a short series of podcasts about the mass violence in Indonesia. Earlier this year I talked with Geoff Robinson, Jess Melvin and Kate McGregor and Annie Pohlman about their works. All of them have written thoughtful, carefully researched and richly detailed analyses of the violence. Each of them shared a similar interest in the causes and nature of the violence. While their approaches varied, each attempted to shed new light on events which...
Oct 22, 2018•1 hr 13 min
China’s growing presence in all of our worlds today is felt most keenly by those living directly on the country’s borders. They, together with the Chinese people who also inhabit the borderlands, are parties to a dazzling array of of China-driven transformations unfolding on a vast scale in economics, politics, culture, kinship and other spheres. Consequently, Juan Zhang and Martin Saxer ’s edited volume The Art of Neighbouring: Making Relations Across China’s Borders (Amsterdam University Press...
Oct 18, 2018•59 min
The dramatic fall and destruction of Ayutthaya at the hands of the Burmese in 1767 has been the subject of films, television shows, songs and books for popular audiences and classrooms, many of them aimed at stoking nationalist sentiment among the citizens of contemporary Thailand and Myanmar by invoking a sense of historical animosity and vengefulness. But what was Ayutthaya before its downfall? How did it become so successful, and if it was such a success, why did it collapse so quickly when c...
Oct 03, 2018•48 min
It’s not often that you run across a smoking gun. Jess Melvin did, at an archive in Banda Aceh. Since the massacres in Indonesia in 1965-66, academics, journalists, politicians and military officials have argued about the motivations for the killing. With little documentation to draw from, these debates relied on careful analysis of context and circumstance. The result was widespread disagreement about how centralized the killing was and whether the killing was planned in advance. Melvin, in her...
Oct 01, 2018•54 min
Jan M. Padios ‘ new book A Nation on the Line: Call Centers as Postcolonial Predicaments in the Philippines (Duke University Press, ) sheds light on the industry of offshore call centers in the Philippines, and attempts to understand the narratives cast upon call center workers as laborers whose main resource is their ability to relate to their Western-and specifically American-clientele. What does it mean when we see relatability as a national resource? How are Filipino workers reshaped by this...
Sep 10, 2018•1 hr 4 min
Today we are joined by Gerald Gems , Professor of Kinesiology at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois, and the author of several books on sports history including Sport in American History: From Colonization to Globalization (2017), Sport and the American Occupation of the Philippines (2016), and Blood and Guts to Glory: A History of Sports (2014). Gems is also the former president of the North American Society for Sport History, the former vice-president of the International Society fo...
Aug 14, 2018•57 min
Dr. Valerie Francisco-Menchavez ‘s new book, The Labor of Care: Filipina Migrants and Transnational Families in the Digital Age (University of Illinois Press, 2018) traces how globalization, neoliberalism and new technology have reshaped migrant care work from the Philippines. The book is the result of five years of research interviewing migrant women and participating in their communities, as well as intermittent trips to the Philippines where Dr. Francisco-Menchavez spent time speaking with th...
Aug 13, 2018•1 hr 2 min
From the sidelines of the Asian Studies Association of Australia’s biennial conference, where she presented the inaugural keynote address of the Association of Mainland Southeast Asia Scholars, Katherine A. Bowie , joined New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to talk about Of Beggars and Buddhas: The Politics of Humor in the Vessantara Jataka in Thailand (University of Wisconsin Press, 2017). Bowie at first hated the Vessantara Jataka: a story in which women and children are objects to be given a...
Jul 27, 2018•45 min
