Wednesday, February 5th, 2025
9:30 AM – 3:00 PM ET
Linder Family Commons
Elliott School of International Affairs
1957 E Street NW Washington, D.C. 20052
In May of 1965, the “Wang Gungwu Report” caused massive protests in then-Malaysian state of Singapore by recommending that Nanyang University change its language of instruction from Chinese to English. Despite significant student demonstrations, the committee accepted the recommendations. By August 9 of that year, Singapore declared itself as an independent “multicultural” state separate from Malaysia, with English enshrined as a symbol of its pluralistic model.
Wang Gungwu, in later articles, argued that diasporic Chinese in Southeast Asia should no longer accept the label Huaqiao ‘sojourner’ since it suggested a temporary status and harbored political connotations of patriotic loyalty towards China (Wang 1994). Nor should use of English be considered an alignment with the USA, as Bilahari Kausikan reminds us. In an environment defined partly by two superpowers, and partly by their own competing local interests, diasporic Chinese in Southeast Asia find themselves deploying the symbols of language, cultural identity, and political interests to walk – and “talk” – a tightrope.
We have chosen to focus on the “Malay archipelago” broadly defined – i.e. Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, southern Philippines and southern Thailand – as a uniquely perilous context that includes not only risky territorial claims, but one that is variously framed in “civilizational” terms that make reference to long histories of Chinese, European and Middle Eastern participation in the region. This conference seeks papers that document and analyze the diverse but often precarious practices of everyday management of linguistic and cultural identities of diasporic Chinese in the Southeast Asian region.
Topics:
Chang-Yau Hoon: “Chinese Christians in Indonesia: The Interplay of Ethnicity, Religion, and Class”
Hannah Ho Ming Yit: “The Inscrutable Voices: Subjective Writing in Transnational Anglophone Chinese Bruneian Poetry”
Charlotte Setijadi: “Dreams of Singapore: Narratives and Symbolisms of Order in Chinese Indonesian Residential Enclaves”
Chong Wu Ling: “Constrained Agency: Malaysia’s Ethnic Chinese-Based Political Parties’ Attitudes Towards Independent Chinese Secondary Schools (ICSSs) and Unified Examination Certificate (UEC)”
Ravando Lie: “Bringing Chinese Indonesian Narratives into Indonesia’s Medical History: The Role of Chinese Indonesian Doctors in Advancing Public Health System in Colonial Indonesia”
Featured Speaker
Dédé Oetomo is an activist, independent scholar, and educator in research, education and advocacy in the fields of language and society, the Chinese diaspora, diversity in gender-sexuality, and HIV & AIDS, mainly as Founder and Trustee at GAYa NUSANTARA Foundation (www.gayanusantara.or.id), which also hosts the Coalition for Sexual & Bodily Rights in Muslim Societies (CSBR; www.csbronline.org). He also serves on the Board of Indonesia AIDS Coalition. Academically, he is an adjunct senior lecturer at Universitas Airlangga, Universitas Surabaya, Widya Mandala Catholic University in Surabaya and Universitas Ciputra Surabaya, Indonesia.
Speakers
Chang-Yau Hoon is Professor at the Institute of Asian Studies, and former Director of the Centre for Advanced Research, Universiti Brunei Darussalam. He is also Adjunct Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia, Honorary Director of Institute of Brunei Studies at Guangxi Minzu University, and Advisor of Centre for Southeast Asian Studies at South China Normal University. He was Visiting Senior Fellow at ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in 2023-2024. Additionally, he serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the Asia in Transition book series at Springer. Professor Hoon specializes in Chinese diaspora, identity politics, multiculturalism, and religious and cultural diversity in contemporary Southeast Asia. His latest books include Christianity and the Chinese in Indonesia: Ethnicity, Education and Enterprise (sole-authored, Liverpool University Press, 2023); Southeast Asia in China: Historical Entanglements and Contemporary Engagements (co-authored, Lexington Press, 2023); and Stability, Growth and Sustainability: Catalysts for Socio-economic Development in Brunei Darussalam (co-edited, ISEAS Publishing, 2023).
Hannah Ming Yit Ho is Assistant Professor of Literatures in English at the University of Brunei Darussalam. She is also a research associate at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. Her PhD in Asian diasporic literatures was completed at the University of York, United Kingdom. She was previously a research fellow at King’s College London and University of California, Berkeley. Her current research interests include Chinese identity in contemporary literatures of Southeast Asia. Her publications in journals include Asiatic, Kritika Kultura, Southeast Asian Review of English, Science Fiction Studies (forthcoming) and The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture. She serves as a section editor (Southeast Asia) for The Year’s Work in English Studies (Oxford University Press). She coedited Engaging Modern Brunei: Research on Language, Literature and Cultures (Springer 2021). Her forthcoming book is entitled Transnational Southeast Asia: Communities, Contestations and Cultures (2025).
Charlotte Setijadi is a Lecturer in Asian Studies at the University of Melbourne’s Asia Institute. She researches Chinese identity politics in Indonesia and Indonesian diaspora politics. Charlotte has published widely in academic journals such as the Journal of Contemporary China, Asian Survey, and Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies. Her first book Memories of Unbelonging: Ethnic Chinese Identity Politics in Post-Suharto Indonesia was published by University of Hawai’i Press in 2023. She is currently working on a new book project on the migration trajectories of highly-skilled Indonesian professional migrants.
Wu-Ling Chong (钟武凌) is a senior lecturer at the Department of Southeast Asian Studies, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University Malaya, Malaysia. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the National University of Singapore (NUS). Her areas of expertise include ethnic Chinese studies and Southeast Asian politics. She is the author of Chinese Indonesians in post-Suharto Indonesia: Democratisation and ethnic minorities (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2018). The book explores the role of ethnic Chinese Indonesians in shaping the democratization process as well as their position in post-Suharto Indonesia across business, politics and civil society. She is also the co-author of Kaedah penyelidikan dan panduan penulisan [Research methods and guidance for writing, in Malay] (Kuala Lumpur: Universiti Malaya Press, 2016) (with Sivachandralingam Sundara Raja and Noraini Mohamed Hassan).
Ravando Lie is a John Legge Research Fellow in the Department of History at Monash University. He obtained his PhD from the University of Melbourne in 2023, with a thesis examining the history of Sin Po (1910–1949), the most influential and widely circulated Sino-Malay newspaper in colonial Indonesia. His research focuses on Chinese-Indonesian history, the intersection of medicine and ethnicity, and transnational health networks in Southeast Asia. He has authored five books, including his latest, Merawat Kehidupan: 100 Tahun Rumah Sakit Husada (Jang Seng Ie), which documents a century of medical care at one of Indonesia’s oldest hospitals. He is currently developing a book project based on his doctoral research.
Discussant
Margaret Scott is a journalist focusing on Southeast Asia and teaches at NYU’s Program in International Relations. She is also one of the founders of the New York Southeast Asia Network. Currently she is working on the role of Islam in Indonesian politics since 1998, and her research interests include democratic consolidation and decline, Islam, and religious actors in Southeast Asia. She writes primarily for The New York Review of Books. Scott also worked for The Far Eastern Economic Review, a magazine based in Hong Kong. She has also written for The New York Times Magazine and the Times Literary Supplement.
Moderators
Joel Kuipers is Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs at the George Washington University in Washington DC. Since 1978, he has conducted linguistic and ethnographic research in Southeast Asia, especially Indonesia, focusing on the relation of specialized language registers to systems of authority. He has published widely in academic journals such as American Ethnologist, American Anthropologist, Anthropological Quarterly, Anthropological Linguistics, Indonesia, Sapiens, Cultural Anthropology, Language in Society, and Anthropology Today. His first (U Penn 1990) and second (Cambridge 1998) books concerned ritual speech on the eastern Indonesian island of Sumba; a third about the work of anthropologist Harold C Conklin (Yale 2007), and edited volumes on discourses of science in US middle schools (2008), and cell phone use (2018). He is currently at work on a new book project that draws on his Southeast Asian work concerning the relation between speech registers and sociocultural scale.
Janet Steele is professor of Media and Public Affairs and International Affairs at the George Washington University. She received her Ph.D. in History from the Johns Hopkins University, and focuses on how culture is communicated through the mass media. A frequent visitor to Southeast Asia, she lectures on topics ranging from the role of the press in a democratic society to specialized workshops on narrative journalism. Her book, “Wars Within: The Story of Tempo, an Independent Magazine in Soeharto’s Indonesia,” focuses on Tempo magazine and its relationship to the politics and culture of New Order Indonesia. “Mediating Islam: Cosmopolitan Journalisms in Muslim Southeast Asia,” explores the relationship between journalism and Islam in Indonesia and Malaysia. Her most recent book, published in 2023 by NUS Press, is called “Malaysiakini and the power of independent media in Malaysia.”
