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Special Seminar by Dr. Yew-Foong HUI on June 27th

2016/06/27 @ 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM

You are cordially invited to a special seminar by Dr. Yew-Foong HUI. The details are as follows.

Date and Time: June 27 (Mon.) 17:00 – 18:30, 2016
Place: Seminar Room at the 4th Floor of Common Building (Room No. 409), Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University

Speaker: Dr. Yew-Foong HUI, Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology, Hong Kong Shue Yan University

Title: Between Nations: The Political Vicissitudes of the Aceh Chinese

Abstract:
As the Cold War was heating up on the international scene, an anti-communist witch hunt was taking place in Indonesia in the aftermath of the abortive coup of September 30, 1965, allegedly orchestrated by the Indonesian Communist Party. Chinese all over Indonesia were accused of being communists or communist sympathizers, and many bore the brunt of both symbolic and real violence under the Suharto regime. In Aceh, 10,000 Aceh Chinese were displaced from their homes and cooped up in refugee camps in Medan and its outskirts. Subsequently, more than 4,000 left via repatriation ships for China, while others had to remain behind and rebuild their homes on the grounds of the refugee camps. This paper will trace the migratory trajectories of the Aceh Chinese, and reflect on their political plight of being caught between two nations at the height of the Cold War.

This paper will examine the vicissitudes of the Aceh Chinese from three different angles. First, it will look at how states define and contest issues of nationality and citizenship, and how displacements of people are one of the ways in which uncertainties related to such issues are resolved. Second, it will consider the ethnic Chinese community, in terms of how it acted and organized itself in the midst of this crisis, and how it related to the Indonesian and Chinese governments, caught as it were between different ideologies and nations. Third, it will dwell on the Chinese subject, with multiple identifications as Aceh Chinese and overseas Chinese, among others, fragmented because the modern nation-state cannot tolerate such uncertainties among its subjects. In examining an event and a time when the processes of the nation-state were not yet fully rationalized, this paper will demonstrate how the Chinese as a minority in Indonesia was constructed out of the embers of the Cold War.

Bionote:
Yew-Foong HUI is an anthropologist and Research Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology, Hong Kong Shue Yan University. He is also affiliated with the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute as a Senior Fellow. His research interests include the Chinese overseas in Southeast Asia, religion and politics in Southeast Asia, decentralization in post-Suharto Indonesia, and heritage politics. He had been a Visiting Fellow at Cornell University, the University of Hong Kong and Xiamen University. Besides Singapore, he has conducted multi-sited field research in Indonesia (West Kalimantan and Medan), East Malaysia, South China and Hong Kong. He is the author of Strangers at Home: History and Subjectivity among the Chinese Communities of West Kalimantan, Indonesia, co-author of Different Under God: A Survey of Church-Going Protestants in Singapore and editor of Encountering Islam: The Politics of Religious Identities in Southeast Asia.

Acknowledgement: This seminar is part of the research activities of JSPS Grant in Aid B Grant Number:16H03312

 

Moderator: Yumi Kitamura, Associate Professor, Research and Development Laboratory, Kyoto University Library

Details

Date:
2016/06/27
Time:
5:00 PM - 6:30 PM
Event Category:

Organizer

Yumi Kitamura