Denise Cruz ‘s Transpacific Femininities: The Making of the Modern Filipina (Duke University Press, 2012) traces representations of Filipinas in literature and popular culture during periods of transitional power in the Philippines, from the transition from Spanish to American colonial power, then to Japanese Imperialism, then to independence and the Cold War, and then to contemporary global capital. Professor Cruz questions how these disruptions in power destabilized the elite classes, and prov...
Nov 04, 2014•1 hr 1 min
What is justice for a man who supervised the interrogation and killing of thousands? Especially a man who now claims to be a Christian and to be, at least in some ways and cases, repentant for his crimes? Thierry Cruvellier has written a fascinating book about the trial of ‘Duch’ the director of the S-21 prison and interrogation center in Cambodia during the rule of the Khmer Rouge. Cruvellier watched virtually the entire trial and interviewed many of the participants and observers. The Master o...
Oct 31, 2014•1 hr 1 min
Singapore has a well-deserved reputation as a state that stifles dissent and polices activism. But as Lynette Chua shows in Mobilizing Gay Singapore: Rights and Resistance in an Authoritarian State (National University of Singapore Press, 2014), repressive government nowhere goes unchallenged, even if the forms that resistance takes are not manifest. Turning away from social movement theory that tends to valorize public protest and other forms of highly visible contentious politics, Chua tells a...
Oct 15, 2014•1 hr 6 min
In a foreword to Tyrell Haberkorn ‘s first book, Revolution Interrupted: Farmers, Students, Law and Violence in Northern Thailand (Wisconsin University Press, 2011), Thongchai Winichakul observes, “Haberkorn writes to prevent the fading of life to oblivion, recounting stories that bring the forgotten back to life.” She does this and more. By recalling the forgotten story of farmers who risked and paid with their lives to struggle against repressive forces in the mid-1970s during a period of inte...
Sep 13, 2014•58 min
Tine Gammeltoft ‘s new book explores the process of reproductive decision making in contemporary Hanoi. Haunting Images: A Cultural Account of Selective Reproduction in Vietnam (University of California Press, 2014) develops an anthropology of belonging, paying special attention to the ways that women and their communities understand and make decisions based on ultrasound imaging technologies. In the course of making life-and-death decisions, the subjects of Gammeltoft’s book confronted ethicall...
Jul 22, 2014•1 hr 9 min
Are Islam and feminism inherently at odds? Is there a contradiction between piety and gender justice? This is the guiding theme for Rachel Rinaldo , professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia, in her book Mobilizing Piety: Islam and Feminism in Indonesia (Oxford University Press, 2013). After more than eighteen months of fieldwork in the contemporary nation with the highest Muslim population, Indonesia, she found that global discourses on Islam and feminism were constantly in dialogue ...
Jun 23, 2014•1 hr 4 min
Reading Peter Maguire and Mike Ritter ‘s book Thai Stick: Surfers, Scammers and the Untold Story of the Marijuana Trade (Columbia Press, 2013) is the most fun I have had doing this podcast. Maguire makes a point during the interview that police officers preferred to arrest marijuana smugglers because they were so laid back and safe to handle. You get the same feeling reading his account of the members of the roaming hippy/surfer community who fund their lifestyle through ‘scams’, that is, smuggl...
Mar 29, 2014•40 min
While it has become typical to see Filipina/o migrants working in nursing or domestic work in the United States, many are surprised to see Filipina/os doing the same work in Hong Kong, Israel, and Dubai. Indeed, Filipina/o workers are ubiquitous around the globe, and may be the world’s first truly global labor force. In Robyn Rodriguez ‘s new book, Migrants for Export: How the Philippine State Brokers Labor to the World (University of Minnesota Press, 2010),Rodriguez explores labor brokerage as ...
Oct 30, 2013•1 hr 1 min
There is a city in the Southern hills of Vietnam where honeymooners travel each year to affirm their love at high altitude, breathing in the alpine air and soaking in the legacies of French colonialism. Developed by the French in the nineteenth century, Dalat remains a contemporary tourist destination fully equipped with a “Valley of Love”, an artificial lake with paddleboats, and cowboys. It is also the subject of Eric Jennings ‘ Imperial Heights: Dalat and the Making and Undoing of French Indo...
Oct 29, 2013•1 hr 2 min
Genocide studies has been a growth field for a couple of decades. Books and articles have appeared steadily, universities have created programs and centers and the broader public has become increasingly interested in the subject. Nevertheless, there remain some aspects of the field and some geographic regions that remain dramatically understudied. Deborah Mayersen and Annie Pohlman’s new edited collection Genocide and Mass Atrocities in Asia: Legacies and Prevention (Routledge, 2013) is an excel...
Oct 27, 2013•59 min
Indonesia is often highlighted as having the right kind of Islam, ‘moderate’ and ‘peaceful.’ Whether that remains true (if it ever was a reality) will be tested in the future but what about the past? How did we end up with this picture of Islam in Indonesia? Michael Laffan , Professor of History at Princeton University, explores this question in his new book, The Makings of Indonesian Islam: Orientalism and the Narration of a Sufi Past (Princeton University Press, 2011). From a plethora of sourc...
Jul 22, 2013•53 min
I’m not sure what it would feel like to interview a leader of a genocidal regime. Asking why people decide it is right and necessary to kill many thousands is one of the standard questions in genocide studies. But it is one most of us face at a distance, in the classroom, while listening to a radio broadcast, or when present at a moment of remembrance personal or public. Gina Chon and Sambeth Thet, co-authors of Behind the Killing Fields: A Khmer Rouge Leader and one of his Victims (University o...
Aug 25, 2012•1 hr
Borneo is an island where three very different nation-states meet: Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei. The Indonesian province of Kalimantan occupies most of the island; of the rest, all except one percent is taken up by the Malaysian provinces of Sabah and Sarawak. The tiny but wealthy Sultanate of Brunei occupies that one percent. So, people living in the northern parts of the island have lots of borders to cross. It’s almost like having your own mini-continent; and one that the outside world doe...
May 31, 2011•1 hr 8 min
The Spanish-American War was not only the beginning of a new imperial period for the United States, David Silbey observes in his book A War of Frontier and Empire: The Philippine-American War, 1899-1902 (Hill and Wang, 2008), it was also the point at which the Filipino people first began to conceive of themselves as a nation. Where Americans sought to conquer, control, and pacify their newly-purchased possessions, a nascent nationalist movement sought to create some sense of unity from the hundr...
Apr 08, 2011•59 min
My uncle fought in Vietnam. He flew F-105 Thundercheifs , or “Thuds.” He bombed the heck out of an area north of Hanoi called “Thud Ridge.” He’d come home on leave and tell us that it was okay “over there” and not to worry. I didn’t because I was sure “we” would win and my uncle would come home a hero. Of course, neither of these things happened (though my uncle did come home). Since then, I’ve read many books about the war In an effort to try to figure out “what happened,” which is to say why i...
Mar 14, 2011•1 hr 26 min
What to think about the Vietnam War? A righteous struggle against global Communist tyranny? An episode in American imperialism? A civil war into which the United States blindly stumbled? And what of the Vietnamese perspective? How did they–both North and South–understand the war? Mark Bradley and Marilyn Young have assembled a crack team of historians to consider (or rather reconsider) these questions in Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars: Transnational and International Perspectives (New York: Ox...
Mar 14, 2011•1 hr 12 min
The thing about empire building is that when you’re done building one, you’ve got to figure out what to do with it. This generally involves the “extraction of resources.” We tend to think of this in terms of things like gold, oil, or rubber. But people can be “extracted” as well. The French empire of the later nineteenth century offers a case in point. Havingfound themselves in a very nasty war with the Germans, the French decided that it might be useful to enlist their African and Southeast Asi...
Nov 03, 2008•1 hr 2 min
U.S. forces invade a distant country in order to disarm an international threat to American security. They fight well, and win every major battle decisively. They become occupiers, and find themselves engaged in a low-level guerrilla war against a determined though shadowy enemy. The American-backed government has a tenuous hold on power, and it is unclear whether it can survive without significant U.S. military aid. Nevertheless, the American political climate favors rapid withdrawal. The U.S. ...
Sep 19, 2008•1 hr 7 min
