CfP | "Southeast Asian Politics and History" (University of Oxford, UK, 9-10 March 2013)
Call for Papers for "Southeast Asian Politics and History" panel at the 2nd Southeast Asian Studies Symposium, organised by Project Southeast Asia, University of Oxford, UK, 9-10 March 2013.
CFP: Southeast Asian Politics and History,Southeast Asian Studies Symposium, Oxford 9-10 March 2013
Location: United Kingdom
Call for Papers Deadline: 2012-12-15
Date Submitted: 2012-10-11
Announcement ID: 197809
Call for Papers for "Southeast Asian Politics and History" panel at the 2nd Southeast Asian Studies Symposium, organised by Project Southeast Asia, University of Oxford, UK, 9-10 March 2013.
Governments everywhere seek to use history to justify their retention of power and the fulfilment of their policies. Southeast Asia exemplifies this. The dominant historiography of Southeast Asia is a product of establishment interests of the respective post-colonial states. Government seek to support their weak post-independence regimes by using history to give intellectual depth to the concept of their countries as nation-states, to redefine post-independence boundaries as natural and inevitable, and to suppress and destroy alternative voices and visions for their states.
This panel offers a counterpoint to that. It seeks papers which explore how Southeast Asian governments have manipulated or misused history. It also seeks to promote a progressive dialogue by soliciting historical studies which illuminate the fallacies and deceptions which underpin Southeast Asian history.
Examples of this might include papers which alter and expand perceptions of politically oppressed minority or dissident groups; papers which challenge the pretensions of governments to either neutrality or beneficence; papers which deconstruct the ideology which governments use to justify the maintenance of the status quo; the illustration of examples of the past which offer the possibility of a better way of life than that which dominates Southeast Asia today; and papers which show how social movements have gone wrong, how leaders betray their followers, how rebels become bureaucrats, and how ideals can become frozen and reified.
Please submit abstracts of no more than 200 words, together with name and contact information, to the convenor: PJ Thum Project Southeast Asia, University of Oxford pingtjin@projectsoutheastasia.com by 15 December 2012.
Please see http://projectsoutheastasia.com/academic-events/sea-symposium-2013/panels#pa nel4
for more information.