Migrants and minorities in 20th century Asia
Course code: HICL206P
Tutor: Sunil Amrith
This course considers the history of migrant communities in modern Southeast Asian history. The course begins by examining the growing tension between (mainly Indian and Chinese) migrants and indigenous populations from the 1920s, and the slow decline of earlier forms of pluralism and cultural hybridity. We will proceed to examine the experience of the Second World War, which sparked mass population movements in Southeast Asia and unleashed new ideologies setting majorities against minorities, indigenes against ‘outsiders'. The course will then proceed to consider the position of migrants and minorities within the region's new nation-states. We will seek to explain the frequent incidence of inter-ethnic violence (‘racial riots'), and explore the contrasting experiences of migrants and minorities in the region: from outright expulsion and civil war to uneasy assimilation. The course will introduce students to recent research in this growing field, and will draw on a selection of published primary sources (in English), as well as film and literary evidence.
1. Colonialism and Southeast Asia's “Plural Societies”
2 . Depression, Nationalism and Ethnic Tension
3. War, Occupation and Displacement
4. The End of Empire and the Question of Citizenship
5. Indians in Southeast Asia, 1945-1970
6. Southeast Asia's Chinese, 1945-1970
7. ‘Indigenous' Minorities in Southeast Asia
8. The Fate of Cosmopolitanism
9. Enduring Legacies, 1970s-1990s
INTRODUCTORY READING
Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World (1998)
Chrisopher Bayly & Tim Harper, Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia, 1940-45 (2004)
Amitav Ghosh, The Glass Palace (1999)
Adam McKeown, ‘Global Migration, 1846-1940', Journal of World History , 15, 2 (2004)
Vijay Prashad, Everybody was Kung-fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity (2002)
Wang Gungwu, China and the Chinese Overseas (2005)