Date and Venue

May 14 (Wednesday) | 17:00-18:30 JST

In-person at Waseda University and Online via Zoom

REGISTRATION REQUIRED HERE

Room 309, Building 19, Waseda University

Event details:

Speaker:

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Rachel Leow (University of Cambridge)

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Rachel Leow is an Associate Professor of Modern East Asian History at the University of Cambridge. She is currently co-editing the Oxford Handbook of Asian Migration and Diaspora, c. 1300s-2000s with Emma Teng, and her second monograph, Southern Seas: Chinese encounters on diaspora's horizons, is forthcoming with the University of California Press and Penguin Allen Lane.

Abstract:

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This paper and accompanying film explores the history of mass deportations of ethnic Chinese to China during the Malayan Emergency (1948-1960), a period of civil war in which deportation served as one of several colonial measures for expunging “undesirable” elements of Chinese resident communities suspected of supporting an armed insurrection led by the Communist Party of Malaya (CPM). In contrast to most accounts, which have focused on the historical trajectories of the (primarily male) deportees to China, this paper additionally considers the administration and fates of the (both male and female) dependents of deportees, and the choices they made about whether to leave or stay behind. In doing so, it sheds light on the complexities of postwar reconstruction in Asia in the aftermath of WW2 and the Chinese Civil War, and the violent foreclosure of possibilities for diasporic mobility in the emergence of a world of normative nation-states.