The Names of Water: China’s Nanyang Project and Other Vernacular Imaginaries of the Southern Seas
Thursday, May 1, 2025 12:15pm to 2pm
About this Event
Gatty Lecture Series
Join us for a talk by Dr. Rachel Leow from University of Cambridge. Dr. Leow is an Associate Professor in Modern East Asian History at Faculty of History, University of Cambridge.
This Gatty Lecture will take place at the The Kahin Center, 640 Stewart Ave. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.
About the Talk
Southeast Asia and the maritime worlds which surround it have always been a zone of dense inter- and intra-Asian mobilities, among which the entangled histories of diasporic, settling, embedded and indigenous Chinese communities across the region have been especially significant. Its waters have been known by many names, testifying to its complex nature as a space of overlapping diasporas, empires and flows. Yet the historiographies of this region reflect its fragmentation. Histories of one nation-state seem to exist in parallel to each other, or in a national vacuum; even when studying the region's many transnational migrants and diasporas, different flows are rarely brought into dialogue; beyond European encounter, entanglements between migrant and indigenous groups—and the complex hierarchies of race, gender and culture between them—remain underexplored; linguistic silos remain formidable. This lecture critically examines the historical construction of “Southeast Asia” as a bounded geographic and disciplinary category, and offers the Southern Seas as a capacious alternative. It explores a range of competing names of water, and the vernacular political and intellectual projects they represent — from Chinese and Japanese oceanic, colonial and neo-imperial projects to Chinese migrant creole imaginaries and Malay revolutionary socialist visions — and in doing so, reveals a complex intellectual and political seascape that challenges contemporary national and regional boundaries, and pushes migrant histories beyond commerce, capital and commodities into the realm of ideas. In asking how might we do justice to the expansive migratory histories trapped within the siloed geographies of the Southern Seas, it calls for a rethinking of what it means to study ‘Chinese diaspora’ in Southeast Asia.
About the Speaker
Rachel Leow is Associate Professor of Modern East Asian History at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Murray Edwards College. Her first book, Taming Babel: Language in the Making of Malaysia, explored the ethnolinguistic constructions of Chineseness and Malayness over the colonial-postcolonial transition in Malaysia; it was published in 2016 and won the 2018 Association for Asian Studies Harry J. Benda Prize. Her recent work explores transregional and transnational connections between China and Southeast Asia, and her research has been published in academic venues, including Twentieth-Century China, Itinerario, the Journal of World History, Modern Asian History, as well as in literary venues such as the LA Review of Books China Channel and the Mekong Review, and in film. With her collaborator Professor Emma Teng, she is currently co-editing the Oxford Handbook of Asian Migration and Diaspora, c. 1300s-2000s, and her next monograph, tentatively titled Southern Seas: Chinese encounters on diaspora's horizons, is under joint contract with University of California Press and Penguin Allen Lane.
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