Department of History

Diasporic Regionalism and the Consolations of History
11th Spring History Symposium 2019

Dr. Rachel Leow
Cambridge University

This keynote explores alternatives to formalized, institutional and political conception of regions, by way of microhistory. Like Hong Kong itself, the historical phenomenon of Southeast Asian Chinese migration is balanced at the productive edges of two constructed regions — that of ‘East’ and ‘Southeast’ Asia. This keynote presses alternatives to institutional conceptions of regions that privilege national, economic and geopolitical scaffolding at the expense of almost complete abstraction from the lived experiences of regionality. Through an inversion of scale and the layering of microhistories, it explores instead the possibilities of ‘diasporic regionalism’, challenging us to ask what happens to regions when we think of diasporas―their routes and practices of movement, their intimate imaginaries, fears and expectations, and most of all their limits―rather than nations, states or economies, as their principal authors. In doing so, it hopes to recover consolations from history for our age of rising, hardening borders.

Rachel Leow is a University Lecturer in Modern East Asian History at the Faculty of History at Cambridge University, and a fellow of Murray Edwards College. Born and educated in Malaysia, she subsequently completed a BA in History at Warwick University, and an MPhil and PhD in History at St Catharine’s College, University of Cambridge. She was also a recipient of a postdoctoral Prize Fellowship in Economics, Politics and History at Harvard University. Her first book, Taming Babel: Language in the Making of Malaysia, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2016, and received the Association for Asian Studies’ Harry J. Benda Prize in Southeast Asian Studies in 2018. Research published and forthcoming includes studies of Chinese female bondservitude in interwar Malaya and Hong Kong, Southeast Asian participation in Chinese peace movements in the early Cold War, and transnational May Fourth-era networks in Chinese newspapers in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore. Her present work continues to explore aspects of Chinese migration to Southeast Asia.

Date/Time: 03 May 2019, 14:00
Venue: Room 4.36 Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, The University of Hong Kong
Language: English

For further information, please visit: http://shs.history.hku.hk/