Trans-Asia Graduate Student Conference (TAGS)

TAGS Keynote Lecture

Third World Feminism and the Crisis of Authoritarianism

April 4, 12:00 PM — 1:30 PM 

Ingraham 19 

Zoom link

Dr. Durba Mitra 

Richard B. Wolf Associate Professor of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality

Harvard University

Abstract:

This talk offers a glimpse into the vast intellectual history of Third World feminisms in the decolonizing world in the 1970s and 1980s, with a focus on connections across postcolonial South Asia. I critically engage the possibilities and limits of the feminist epistemological revolution that emerged in the dark shadow of an earlier era of utopian internationalism, globalism, and non-alignment of the 1950s and 1960s. Third World feminists created a new internationalist imaginary in response to widespread disenchantment in the decolonizing world with the nationalist project and rising neocolonial governments bolstered by economic and military interventions. Women seized the means of knowledge production, critiquing postcolonial inequality and rising authoritarianisms by imagining radically just visions of the future.

TAGS Keynote Lecture

Internationalist Southeast Asias in Conjunctures

April 5, 12:00 PM — 1:30 PM 

Ingraham 19 

Zoom link

Dr. Thiti Jamkajornkeiat 

Assistant Professor of Pacific and Asian Studies

University of Victoria

Abstract:

The strongest methodological and historiographical legacy of Southeast Asian studies hasbeen the imperative to forge regional interconnections among various meaningful dynamics. Animating this imperative, earlier scholarship concentrated on establishing the region’s autonomy (cf. Oliver Wolters and John Smail) amidst the tempestuous Cold War funding politics. As the field navigated the transnational turn following the end of the Cold War, Southeast Asianists began to adopt a transoceanic approach to the region (cf. Anthony Reid and Tim Harper) and sought alternative frames to methodological nation-statism exemplified by the late works of Ben Anderson on global anarchism and Jim Scott on Zomia. With the rise of critical refugee studies and Filipinx American studies (cf. Yến Lê Espiritu and Martin Manalansan IV) as outgrowths of ethnic studies in the mid-2010s, the field became more receptive to the Global Asias approach that connects the region with the diasporas.

With a commitment to this legacy of fostering regional interconnections, and acknowledging recent methodological developments in the field, I have been attempting to design an analytical framework in which my research on left internationalism in global Southeast Asia can be meaningfully situated. This talk, therefore, presents my experiment-in-progress called “Internationalist Southeast Asias” (abbreviated as ISA), which intends to connect internationalist praxes arising from multiple Southeast Asian struggles against systemic forms of oppression. The ISA further politicizes the conceptual architecture of “Global Asias” by aligning its support for activist research—an inheritance of ethnic studies—with left materialist causes. In developing the ISA, I draw on political economy-oriented scholarship that illuminates the histories of capitalist development in the region—much of which comes from outside North America and falls beyond the purview of the preeminent Cornell-Yale lineages of Southeast Asian Studies. I recalibrate Gillian Hart’s “Global Conjunctural Frame” prototype to chart the conjunctural moments in 20th and 21st-century Southeast Asia and to historicize divergent forms of Southeast Asian internationalism within these moments. Hence, the ISA captures the complex entanglement between war, capital, and internationalism that manifests through the dialectics between oppression and resistance in five conjunctures: high imperialism (1900s-1920s), the interwar years (1930s), the Malaya-Bandung-Vietnam moment (1950s-1960s), the refugee-debt-financial crises (1980s-90s), and the trade war or new cold war (2010s-2020s).