RSS FeedUpcoming EventsGETSEA/Bophana Center Screening: Indigenous Film Filmmakers, April 9https://events.berkeley.edu/cseas/event/243731-getseabophana-center-screening-indigenous-film

In conjunction with the International Decade of Indigenous Languages, GETSEA, CSEAS, and the Bophana Center present four short films by Indigenous Cambodian filmmakers on the themes of “Healing, Memory & Care.” This is a simulcast event at over 20 universities across North America with Berkeley CSEAS as the primary host. 

Dull Trail (2020) - Directed by KHON Raksa, PEOU Mono & CHOEY Rickydavid, Bunong Language

My Wish (2021) - Directed by KASOL Sinoun, Jarai Language

Trung (2022) - Directed by Khamnhei HEA, Karvet Language

Alive Skin (2022) - Directed by Veasna OEM & Vantha RAT, Khmer Language

Each university will connect via Zoom with the filmmakers located at the Bophana Center in Phnom Penh, Cambodia for introductions and a post-screening discussion of the films. Read more about the event here.

If you require an accommodation for effective communication (ASL interpreting/CART captioning, alternative media formats, etc.) or information about campus mobility access features in order to fully participate in this event, please contact Alexandra Dalferro at adalferro@berkeley.edu with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7-10 days before the event.

https://events.berkeley.edu/cseas/event/243731-getseabophana-center-screening-indigenous-film
At a Crossroads: Marcos Jr., the Philippines, and A New Era of Great Power Competition in the Indo-Pacific, April 11https://events.berkeley.edu/cseas/event/243979-at-a-crossroads-marcos-jr-the-philippines-and-a

About the Talk: Perhaps no country better represents the dramatic shifts in the Indo-Pacific geopolitical landscape than the Philippines. Over the past decade alone, the longtime American ally (and former colony) transmogrified from a cheerleader for America’s Pivot to Asia to a most ardent critic of American primacy in Asia. While the Benigno Aquino III administration (2010-2016) enthusiastically welcomed growing American (and Japanese) military footprint in Southeast Asia, his populist successor, Rodrigo Duterte, instead openly courted both China and Russia and enthusiastically welcomed a post-American order in Asia. Once Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the namesake son of former Philippine dictator, came to power, however, he surprised both his allies and critics by adopting a new foreign policy synthesis, which combines increasingly robust security cooperation with the West (to defend the Philippines’ sovereign rights in the South China Sea) as well as active commercial diplomacy towards China (to boost infrastructure development and growth at home). In effect, Marcos Jr. has tried to optimize the Philippines’ newfound strategic sweetspot by trying to have the best of both worlds – albeit, with mixed results, so far.

The extremely erratic trajectory of Philippine foreign policy is also a reflection of radical changes within the Southeast Asian nation. Dubbed as “Asia’s oldest democracy”, the Philippines has struggled to consolidate its democratic gains following at least two major social upheavals in the past century alone, namely the EDSA I (1986) and EDSA II (2001) popular revolts, which toppled an aging dictator (Marcos Sr) and a budding strongman (Joseph Estrada), respectively. The emphatic return of the Marcos dynasty to the Malacañang Palace in 2022, following Duterte’s populist revolt six years earlier, underscores the depth of democratic deficit as well as the growing appeal of ‘disciplinary politics’ in one of the fastest-growing yet deeply polarized economies in Asia. And yet, the brewing conflict between the Marcos and Duterte dynasties provides a unique opportunity for the heavily marginalized progressive-liberal opposition to reinvent itself and claw its way back to the political mainstream. By adopting a two-level analysis, the talk seeks to shed light on both the Philippines’ fraught democratic trajectory as well as its high-stakes diplomacy vis-à-vis the superpowers. Crucially, it also analyzes how deepening US-China competition is dramatically affecting the fate of pivotal states across the Indo-Pacific region.

The talk will be moderated by Vinod Aggarwal, Distinguished Professor and Alann P. Bedford Endowed Chair in Asian Studies, Department of Political Science and Director of the Berkeley APEC Study Center.

About the Speaker: Richard Javad Heydarian is a senior lecturer at the University of the Philippines, Asian Center, and a columnist at the Philippine Daily Inquirer, a TV Host at OneNews/TV5 network, and has written for the world’s leading publications, including The New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, Foreign Affairs, and is a regular contributor to Aljazeera English, Nikkei Asian Review, South China Morning Post , and the Straits Times. His books include “Asia’s New Battlefield” (Zed, 2015), The Rise of Duterte: A Populist Revolt against Elite Democracy” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and “The Indo-Pacific: Trump, China, and the New Global Struggle for Mastery” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). He is also a regular contributor to leading global think tanks such as Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Brooking Institution, and Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). His forthcoming book is “Confronting China” (Melbourne University Press).

If you require an accommodation for effective communication (ASL interpreting/CART captioning, alternative media formats, etc.) or information about campus mobility access features in order to fully participate in this event, please contact Alexandra Dalferro at adalferro@berkeley.edu with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7-10 days before the event.

https://events.berkeley.edu/cseas/event/243979-at-a-crossroads-marcos-jr-the-philippines-and-a
Conference: Vietnam Centric Approaches to Vietnam’s Twentieth Century History, April 19https://events.berkeley.edu/cseas/event/243993-conference-vietnam-centric-approaches-to-vietnams

To mark the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, April 30, 1975, this conference, sponsored by the Department of History and CSEAS, features scholarship that centers Vietnamese individuals, communities, movements, institutions, and discourses in the history of twentieth century Vietnam. Topics in political, economic, social, cultural, and intellectual history will be explored. The focus on local actors and historical dynamics is intentional. With the 50th anniversary in mind, we are interested in new research emphasizing Vietnamese historical agency during the country’s mid-twentieth century military and political conflicts. We will feature, as well, presentations with similar Vietnam centric emphases set in the late colonial era and the post-war era. 

Friday, Apr 19, 2024

8:45 am: Welcome & opening remarks, Peter Zinoman, Professor, Department of History

9:00 - 10:45: Panel 1, DRV: Homefront and Battlefront

Tuong Vu, Professor, Political Science, University of Oregon

  • War and Society in North Vietnam, 1967-1974: Glimpses of Ordinary Life

Lương Thị Hồng, Institute of History, Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences

  • The Whispers in the Moonlight: Voices of North Vietnamese Women at War

Jason A. Picard, Founding Assistant Professor of Vietnamese History​ and Culture, College of Art and Sciences, VinUniversity

  • Tours of Duty: Inscribing Vietnamese Nationalism and Nation on the Hồ Chí Minh Trail, 1959-1975

10:45 - 12:30: Panel 2, The Vietnam Worker’s Party, Propaganda and Southern Communism

Phạm Hải Chung, Lecturer, University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vietnam National University

  • The Propaganda Pioneers: North Vietnam’s Political Cadres in the Vietnam War

Lê Antoine, PhD candidate, INALCO, affiliated with the Center for Southeast Asia (CASE), Temporary research and teaching attaché (ATER) at SciencesPo Paris – Le Havre Campus

  • The Southern Communists in the 1975 Offensive: New Insights on the Political and Military Balances Within the Revolutionary Side at the End of the Vietnam War

Cody Billock, PhD Candidate, Department of History, Ohio University

  • The COSVN Series: New Insights into the Communist Revolution in South Vietnam

12:30 - 1:30: Lunch

1:30 - 3:15: Panel 3, Emergent Fields in Vietnam Studies

Maria Baranova, PhD Candidate, Department of History, George Washington University

  • “Making it” in Colonial Indochina: A Case for Vietnam’s Lost Business History

Chu Duy Ly, PhD Candidate, National University of Singapore, & Lecturer, University of Social Sciences and Humanities - Vietnam National University Ho Chi Minh City

  • Constructing a Dam to Build a Nation: The Case of the Da Nhim Hydroelectric Power Dam in the Republic of Vietnam (1955-1975)

Alex-Thái Đ. Võ, Assistant Professor, Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University

  • Re-presenting the Republic: Unveiling the Republic of Vietnam’s Self-Image through Film Footage

Đỗ Thị Thanh Thủy, PhD Candidate, Department of Gender, Sexuality, Women’s Studies, Simon Fraser University

  • Vietnamese State Feminism: The Making, Remaking, and Unmaking of Vietnamese Women

3:15 - 3:45: Coffee break

3:45 - 5:15: Keynote, Van Nguyen-Marshall, Associate Professor of History, Trent University, Ontario, Canada

  • The Strange Case of the History of the Vietnam War

6:00 pm: Dinner reception for participants



Saturday, Apr 20, 2024

8:30 - 10:15: Panel 4, Vietnamese Communism(s): From Republican to Scientific Socialism

Charles Keith, Associate Professor of History, Michigan State University

  • Vietnamese Communism’s French Connection

Alec Holcombe, Associate Professor & Director of the Contemporary History Institute, Ohio University

  • The Role of Vu Dinh Hoe in the Making of Vietnam’s 1959 Constitution

Thanh Nguyen, Graduate student, Yale University, Department of History

  • Science, Development, and the Rearticulation of Vietnamese Socialism in the 1980s

10:15 - 12:00: Panel 5, Language and Power in the DRV

Yen Vu, Faculty member in Literature, Fulbright University Vietnam

  • Tran Duc Thao and The Dislocation of Language in Marxist Self-criticism

Vũ Thị Kim Hoa, Lecturer, University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vietnam National University; Phạm Hải Chung, Lecturer, University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vietnam National University; Đỗ Thị Nụ, Lecturer, Dai Nam University

  • Red Music as Propaganda Apparatus in the Vietnam War

Uyen Nguyen, Lecturer, Department of History/College of Humanities and Sciences, National University of Singapore

  • Memory, Madness, and Sorrows: Rethinking North Vietnamese Novels of the Postwar

12:00 - 1:00: Lunch

1:00 - 2:45: Panel 6, New Directions in RVN History

Alexander M. Cannon, Associate Professor of Music, Department of Music, University of Birmingham

  • “The Four Seas as Siblings”: Nguyễn Đăng Thục and Asian Cultural Unity in the Republic of Vietnam

Ryan Nelson, The Ohio State University DPAA Research Partner Fellow

  • Criminally Iconic: The Rise and Fall of Đại Cathay, Late 1950s to Mid-1960s

Diu-Huong Nguyen, Assistant Professor, Department of History, University of California, Irvine

  • Voices From the Center: Lập Trườngand “the Vietnam Problem”

Chi-Thien Bui, MA student, University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Ho Chi Minh City

  • Vietnamization of Liturgy: Catholics and the Reception of Vatican II Liturgical Reform in South Vietnam, 1962-1975

2:45 - 3:15: Coffee break

3:15 - 5:00: Panel 7, Representing the Postwar

Vinh Phu Pham, Assistant Professor in World Literature, Bard HSEC Queens

  • Paris by Nightand the Making of Vietnamese-American Music

Conor Michael James Lauesen, School of the Art Institute of Chicago

  • Post-1975 Visual Socialist Politics: The Pictures of Bùi Xuân Phái and Vũ Dân Tân

Ann Ngoc Tran, PhD Candidate, American Studies & Ethnicity, University of Southern California

  • Imagined Diaspora: Anticipating Departure in Postwar Vietnam

5:00: Closing remarks

 

If you require an accommodation for effective communication (ASL interpreting/CART captioning, alternative media formats, etc.) or information about campus mobility access features in order to fully participate in this event, please contact Alexandra Dalferro at adalferro@berkeley.edu with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7-10 days before the event.

https://events.berkeley.edu/cseas/event/243993-conference-vietnam-centric-approaches-to-vietnams
Conference Keynote: The Strange Case of the History of the Vietnam War, April 19https://events.berkeley.edu/cseas/event/243999-conference-keynote-the-strange-case-of-the-history

About the Talk: Half a century after North Vietnamese tanks rolled through the iron gates of the Presidential Palace in Saigon signaling an end to the Vietnam War, South Vietnamese still struggle to claim a place in the historical narrative. This talk examines the strange case of the historiography of this war, where a major belligerent has been consistently left out, depicted only as the background cast. The persistent effort of a small group of historians over the last two decades has redirected attention to South Vietnamese, casting them as relevant actors. Why has it taken decades to recognize South Vietnam as a party of the war? And what does it mean to include them? My work on South Vietnamese civil society demonstrates that when non-communist South Vietnamese are taken into account, the history of the war becomes not only more comprehensive and representative, but also more complicated. Complex and contested, the history of the war defies the heroic narrative, making it difficult to evoke Vietnam as an analogy, a stand-in, or symbol.

About the Speaker: Van Nguyen-Marshall is an Associate Professor at Trent University in Ontario, Canada. Her research area is modern Vietnam with a focus on both the French colonial and postcolonial periods. Her publications include In Search of Moral Authority: The Discourse on Poverty, Poor Relief and Charity in French Colonial Vietnam (Peter Lang, 2008) and Between War and the State: Vietnamese Voluntary Association in South Vietnam (1954-1975) (Cornell Southeast Asian Program Publication, 2023). Since 2022, she along with Martha Lincoln and Peter Zinoman have been co-editors-in-chief of the Journal of Vietnamese Studies.

If you require an accommodation for effective communication (ASL interpreting/CART captioning, alternative media formats, etc.) or information about campus mobility access features in order to fully participate in this event, please contact Alexandra Dalferro at adalferro@berkeley.edu with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7-10 days before the event.

https://events.berkeley.edu/cseas/event/243999-conference-keynote-the-strange-case-of-the-history
Book Launch: Document Shredding Museum, April 23https://events.berkeley.edu/cseas/event/244002-book-launch-document-shredding-museum

About the Talk: This book launch features renowned poet, artist, and writer Afrizal Malna, whose poetry collection, Document Shredding Museum, was recently translated by UCB Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies (DSSEAS) graduate student Daniel Owen. It will be released by World Poetry Books in May as the first of Malna’s works to be published in the United States. Document Shredding Museum was first available in Indonesian in 2013, and the poems explore Indonesian and global histories by reflecting on the mythic in the everyday and the everyday in the mythic. Proposing a poetics of uncertainty and wonder, the collection aims to make porous the ossified social imagination encoded in dominant regimes of language usage. Join Malna, Owen, and DSSEAS Associate Professor Sylvia Tiwon for a discussion about the collection after listening to a reading from the new translation. 

If you require an accommodation for effective communication (ASL interpreting/CART captioning, alternative media formats, etc.) or information about campus mobility access features in order to fully participate in this event, please contact Alexandra Dalferro at adalferro@berkeley.edu with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7-10 days before the event.

https://events.berkeley.edu/cseas/event/244002-book-launch-document-shredding-museum
How Do We Look? Resisting Visual Biopolitics, April 25https://events.berkeley.edu/cseas/event/243984-how-do-we-look-resisting-visual-biopolitics

About the Talk: Through the story of Annah la Javanaise, a trafficked 13-year-old girl who was found wandering the streets of Paris in 1893 and who became the maid and model of painter Paul Gauguin, Fatimah Tobing Rony introduces theories of visual biopolitics to examine those who are allowed to live and those who are allowed to die, in representations of Indonesian women. In her talk she will be reading from her book and screening her short, animated film, Annah la Javanaise.

About the Speaker: Fatimah Tobing Rony makes films and writes books about people whose stories have not yet been told.

In her first book The Third Eye, Fatimah Tobing Rony wrote about how colonialism created a divide between the Historical and the Ethnographic, the Civilized and the Savage, and how these divides were inscribed in film, photography, and other visual technologies. These categories served biopolitics by producing a logic whereby the life of one group was nourished at the expense of another. Twenty years on, this divide is just as persistent and pernicious in our era of neoliberalism and globalization. In her new book HOW DO WE LOOK? she traces the legacy of one particular aspect of visual biopolitics–the representation of the Indonesian woman–into the twenty-first century of globalization.

As a filmmaker, Fatimah also co-directed the feature film CHANTS OF LOTUS [PEREMPUAN PUNYA CERITA] (2008), which was distributed and exhibited in major theaters in Indonesia, and in film festivals around the world. Her short animation film ANNAH LA JAVANAISE, distributed by Women Make Movies, was an Official Selection of the 2020 Annecy International Festival for Animated Film, in Annecy, France, and has won fifteen international film festival awards. Fatimah Tobing Rony is Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine.

If you require an accommodation for effective communication (ASL interpreting/CART captioning, alternative media formats, etc.) or information about campus mobility access features in order to fully participate in this event, please contact Alexandra Dalferro at adalferro@berkeley.edu with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7-10 days before the event.

https://events.berkeley.edu/cseas/event/243984-how-do-we-look-resisting-visual-biopolitics