links for 2010-02-03

• Words in Motion: Toward a Global Lexicon
  stalking words across the world! a book I wish I could have been awesome enough to write, & so one I'll have to content myself with just reading.
  (tags: dukeuniversitypress carolgluck books toread linguistics etymology world history)
• Bernard Williams: Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy.
  "Can the notions of truth and truthfulness be intellectually stabilized, in such a way that what we understand about truth and our chances of arriving at it can be made to fit with our need for truthfulness? I believe this to be a basic problem for present-day philosophy."
  (tags: philosophy bernardwilliams historyofideas wisdom truth truthmaking)
• The Nation: Real Or Imagined? || The Warwick Debates
  An important series of debates on nations and nationalism was held at Warwick University on 24 October 1995. They brought together two of the best known authorities (teacher and student!) to address what was perhaps the defining debate of 1990s scholarship on nationalism: the question of whether the nation is a wholly modern phenomenon, or something based in more ancient social affiliations. Here is Anthony Smith's opening address, and the complete transcript of Ernest Gellner's reply.
  (tags: nationalism history historiography theory)

late to the party

but I just got Google Wave, & was immediately thrilled by all the possibilities. After digging around to see what wonderful things people were doing with it so far, the thought that occurred to me was: what a spectacular way to read books with other people! like a book club, but so much more focused and specific, with so much potential to pursue lines of thought one wouldn’t reach even in the most intense group discussions — with an archive of notes, to boot. I need to think about this more (maybe see some examples? butwhere?) but I feel like it could be awesome, with the right sorts of participants.

quotables, & contortions about racial thinking

When the archive seems easily to give access to what one expects of it, the work is all the more demanding. One has to patiently give up one’s natural ’sympathy’ for it and consider it an adversary to fight, a piece of knowledge that isn’t to annex but to disrupt. It is not simply a matter of undoing something whose meaning is too easy to find; to be able to know it, you have to unlearn and not think you know it from a first reading.

– Arlette Farge, Le Gout de l’Archive

On first reading, I thought that “natural sympathy” in my own work meant the natural inclination to take colonial records at face value and think with the racial categories they created for Malaysia. It’s become commonplace to claim that the colonial state created Malays, Chinese and Indians out of Bataks, Bugis, Cantonese, Hokkiens, Tamils and Sikhs. But in truth, in the archive I’ve spent so much time resisting the colonial state’s Malays, Chinese and Indians that it’s possible I’ve replaced one natural sympathy for another. Colonial officials referred to the Malays without compunction. I can’t say ‘the Malays’ without adding, even if only in my mind, the scare quotes, and I can’t keep the twinge of mockery out of my voice — The Malays? The Chinese? What are these Malays, these Chinese, these constructed categories?

But I sometimes forget to remember these identities have become real to many people who are to themselves and each other uncomplicatedly ‘us Chinese’ or ‘we Malays’, and subscribe to every naturalized stereotype about them that I instinctively reject. Today, many Indians, Chinese and Malays self-identify as Indians, Chinese and Malays. Those categories, even if created, are largely true. Perhaps my own hesitancy is more academic than my natural sympathies allow me to understand. Are these, my now-natural sympathies, then something to fight against in the archive? When I read Cabinet papers from the 1950s that declare that “The Chinese, living mainly in the towns, are cleverer and more efficient than the Malays and outdistance them in most occupations”, and those scare quotes immediately leap up in my mind, is this resisting the natural inclination to take colonial categories at face value? Or is it simply another sort of sympathy which my immersion in academic history and present historiographical trends has inculcated, and is equally one to be resisted? argh

links for 2010-01-22

• Banyan: The books of slaughter and forgetting | The Economist
  on the incomplete Indonesian Reformasi — at least in the case of book censorship — it seems to me that the kneejerk paranoia of many Southeast Asian governments with regard to accounts of the recent past is something that needs explaining
  (tags: southeastasia censorship indonesia books)

links for 2010-01-19

• The Mansion on O Street | Washington, District Of Columbia | Atlas Obscura
  more DC destinations. (PS: I take recommendations)
  (tags: washington gohere museum)
• Politics and Prose | An independent bookstore in Washington, DC since 1984
  note to self: visit this bookshop in DC (this summer!)
  (tags: washington bookshop gohere)

links for 2010-01-18

• Illustration Art: Frank Brangwyn (1867-1956)
  this is so glorious – and tragic that the tragedy of war rendered his art irrelevant to an ugly modern world
  (tags: frankbrangwyn art modernpressures)
• The Anatomy of Salary Negotiations « Productive Geek Forums
  in case the whole academia thing doesn't work out, sigh
  (tags: jobs future)
• Harvard University Press: The Politics of Large Numbers : A History of Statistical Reasoning by Alain Desrosières
  note to self: look this book up
  (tags: books toread statistics seeinglikeastate tyrannyofthecensus)

sticks and stones

Image source: The Guardian

Malaysia is in the news again for the usual reasons: nine churches firebombed by radical Muslims in the last week, on account of a rising controversy over the use of the word ‘Allah’ by Christians. A Catholic weekly paper, The Catholic Herald, was ordered by the government to cease publishing its Malay-language edition until the courts resolved the question of its use of the word ‘Allah’ to mean the God of the Christian faith. The question was resolved in High Court, which ruled in favour of the Herald. A week after the ruling, nine churches were torched over three days. Molotov cocktails were involved. The High Court ruling has been suspended pending appeal.

This semantic quibble can seem baffling to non-Malaysians, but the sad truth is that the event is wholly explicable within the context of Malaysian social dynamics. It seems to me that the trouble arises out of a potent (Molotov) cocktail of two factors: 1) the troubling relationship that exists between ‘Malay’ and ‘Muslim’ in Malaysia, and 2) the relationship that this hybrid ‘Malay-Muslim’ has with the rest of Malaysian society. First, some thoughts on the word Allah; then, on the Molotov cocktail of Malaysian society.

links for 2010-01-09

• Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don't Go – Advice – The Chronicle of Higher Education
  harrowing Chronicle article for the day (2)
  (tags: academia humanities phd future tragedy)
• The Trials of Tony Judt – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education
  harrowing Chronicle article for the day (1)
  (tags: tonyjudt intellectuals academic tragedy loss)

Cliopatria Awards 2009

I’m delighted to have won a Cliopatria Award (2009) in the category of ‘Best Post’, for my article on the Belitung Wreck (Curating the Oceans: The Future of Singapore’s Past, 14 July 2009). Many thanks for the votes — I had a lot of fun writing it. (Pirates! scandal! intrigue on the high seas!) And thanks of course to the folks over at the ISEAS Nalanda-Sriwijaya Center who arranged the visit to the wreck. (Those guys are doing fascinating intra-Asian work in general, by the way — if you work in this area, keep your eye on their CFPs).

The whole fascinating list of award winners can be found at HNN.

washington, here I come

I’ve just been selected to attend the National History Center’s Decolonization Seminar [PDF] in Washington DC this July! It’s a four-week summer program for 15 grads or recent grads, to discuss the history of decolonization in the twentieth century with some of the doyens of imperial scholarship (eg. the towering & brilliant Wm. Roger Louis of OHBE fame). I’m ridiculously excited. Access to all the main repositories of Washington! A month of intense writing and discussion with people working on exciting things! All expenses paid! The Library of Congress!!!1!!11!1 I’ve used far more exclamation marks in this paragraph than are good for anybody’s health!1!1!11!!!2

On a more serious note, I was thrilled in the first place to find out that such a seminar existed, let alone one that tied so beautifully in with the themes of my own research. My time at Cambridge, interacting with a wonderfully bright group of world history grads, has taught me that there’s so much to be gained from looking at the same thing from many different points of view. I mean this in the particular sense of empire, a topic for which there seems to exist relatively few intra-empire studies (comparing countries colonized within a single empire) and even fewer inter-empire studies (comparing one empire with another). But I also mean in the general sense of an intellectual approach to problems: the conviction that one can’t approach research solipsistically, but must fashion it out of dialogue — with other areas of study, other disciplines, other viewpoints, other people. The seminar seems just perfect, on both counts. I’m looking forward it immensely.

Also did I mention the Library of Congress? (SLOBBER).