Asian Intimacies and Estrangements across Colonial Southeast Asia, a transregional discussion with Chie Ikeya and Guo-Quan Seng

Chie Ikeya and Guo-Quan Seng will discuss their research in transnational histories of Asian mobility and intimacy in the era of European colonial empires and their recent books, InterAsian Intimacies across Race, Religion, and Colonialism (Cornell University Press, 2024) and Strangers in the Family: Gender, Patriliny, and the Chinese in Colonial Indonesia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2023). Challenging the Eurocentrism of postcolonial studies that remains preoccupied with Eurasian encounters and the European management of race, sex, and desire, Ikeya and Seng uncover an obscured history of intimacy and estrangement between indigenous people and Asian migrant-to-settlers. They will discuss how profoundly these “South-South,” interAsian interactions shaped modern understandings of identity and belonging that continue to vex Southeast Asian nations today.

Chie Ikeya is Associate Professor of History, Director of the Institute for Research on Women, and Co-Director of the Global Asias Initiative at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She is the author of two monographs, InterAsian Intimacies across Race, Religion, and Colonialism (Cornell University Press, 2024) and Refiguring Women, Colonialism, and Modernity in Burma (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2011). Her research has been funded by several institutions including the Japan Foundation, Mellon Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Toyota Foundation.

Seng Guo-Quan is Assistant Professor (History) at the National University of Singapore. He is a historian of Chinese societies in Southeast Asia, with a special interest in race, gender and sexuality, and the history of capitalism. His next book project is tentatively titled, “A Diaspora of Shopkeepers: Empire, Race and Chinese Commercial Expansion in Southeast Asia, 1870-1970s.”