
The Center for Southeast Asian and South Asian Studies proudly present
A Series of Lectures by Susan Bayly, Ph.D, University of Cambridge, Florence Liu Macaulay Distinguished Lecturer.

| “ACHIEVING COSMOPOLITAN MODERNITY FOR FAMILY, STATE AND NATION: NARRATIVES OF PERSONAL AND PATRIOTIC ATTAINMENT IN LATE-SOCIALIST VIET NAM” |
When: Tuesday, 20 March 2012; 3:00pm
Location: Korean Studies Auditorium, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
This lecture presents the key concerns of Bayly’s recent research in Viet Nam for a joint collaborative project on the Social Life of Achievement in contemporary Viet Nam and Indonesia, just launched in collaboration with her Cambridge University colleague Dr Nicholas Long. Viet Nam and Indonesia are two of Asia’s most distinctive ‘transition tiger’ economies. In both, a concern with how to foster, define and sustain achievement has become a focus for extensive reflection and debate, together with a host of often hotly contested public policy initiatives. These initiatives have aroused fierce controversy by seeking not only to inculcate globally recognizable levels of attainment, but also to foster excellence in fields framed as distinctively Indonesian or Vietnamese. What can count as achievement thus ranges extraordinarily widely from the ability to contribute to the so-called global knowledge economy in exceptionally disciplined and productive ways, to the capacity to outshine other competing nations in the cultivation of psychic gifts and spiritual knowledge, a sensitive but increasingly active realm of achievement-related initiatives in both countries, and an issue to which I give particular attention in this presentation as Florence Liu Macaulay Distinguished Lecturer.

“NEHRUVIAN INDIA AND THE LIFE OF THE SOCIALIST ECUMENE” |
When: Thursday, 22 March 2012; 3:00pm
Location: Korean Studies Auditorium, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
Reception to immediately follow talk
Building on my longstanding research interests in the making and unmaking of colonial modernity in India and Viet Nam, two very different Asian ‘postcolonies’ with contrasting experiences of empire and its legacies, this lecture’s focus is on Nehruvian postcoloniality and the notion of socialist ecumene. Through reflections on the world I knew in my India research days in the 1980s in southern Tamil Nadu state, I seek to address questions of agency and moral action in the context of developmentalist intelligentsia life, both at the personal level in settings of domestic conjugality, and in the public arena. My concern is thus with the diversity and dynamism of what has sometimes been a simplistically represented arena of late-socialist and postcolonial Asian life: that of the people Indianists call Nehruvians, and their fascinating counterparts in the Vietnamese context. I believe that the concept of socialist ecumene may help to meet our pressing need for an improvement on some of the less satisfactory applications of globalization theory to issues of both personal and public life in late-socialist and postcolonial contexts, thereby enriching our understanding of the ways in which notions of translocal cosmopolitanism have been forged, deployed and contested through the great projects of high-modern nation-building and enlightenment to which these two countries’ intelligentsia moderns sought to commit themselves, their families and their fellow citizens.

| “QUESTIONS OF MODERNITY IN SOUTH AND SOUTH EAST ASIA: THINKING ACROSS REGIONS, DISCIPLINES AND TEMPORALITIES” |
When: Friday, 23 March 2012; 1 – 2:30pm
Location: Moore 155A, Susan Bayly’s RWCLS Seminar, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
How might research focusing on questions of the forging and experience of modernity in Vietnam/South East Asia and India/South Asia productively allow for interactions across regional specialisms, and between historical and anthropological research perspectives? Drawing on her past work on caste and religion, and her more recent research on intelligentsias and colonial/postcolonial modernity, Dr. Bayly will reflect on her attempts to unite perspectives from the study of colonialism/postcolonialism and socialism/ postsocialism. In order to understand contemporary marketisation experiences, and the accompanying emphasis on achievement in new national and personal projects, she proposes a historically-minded anthropology, and an appreciation of plural temporalities.

DR. SUSAN BAYLY is Reader in Historical Anthropology in the Cambridge University Department of Social Anthropology. Her research focuses on colonialism and its cultural afterlife in Asia ‘s former French and British colonies. For several years she has been conducting ethnographic research in Vietnam as part of a larger comparative project on empire, nationalism and post-colonial transformations in a variety of periods and settings. She also has a long-standing research interest in India, where she has focused on caste, religious conversion and a variety of translocal social and cultural movements.
Event Sponsor:
Center for Southeast Asian Studies
Center for South Asian Studies
For more information, please contact The Center for Southeast Asian Studies at cseas@hawaii.edu.