Speaker: Dr Tsai Yen-ling (Postdoctoral Fellow, Southeast Asian Studies Programme National University of Singapore)
Date: Wednesday, 11 February 2009
Time: 3:30pm – 5:00pm
Venue: AS3, Level 6, SEAS Seminar Room (06-20)
Synopsis
This seminar will explore the ways in which cross-racial interactions produce racial boundaries between Indonesian citizens of Chinese decent and their non-Chinese counterparts. I argue, contrary to the conventional wisdom, that intimacies — defined here as instances of physical proximity and social affiliation — produce a fusion of identities, but that the lived experiences of the Chinese Indonesians suggest complicated dynamics of group- and subject-making in which intimacies create differentiated identities rather than dissolving them. Terming these dynamics of group- and subject-making as “intimate exclusion,” my dissertation takes them as central to contemporary Indonesian politics of ethno-racial formation and seeks to explore them ethnographically by focusing on the social world of the Chinese Indonesians in Medan.
About the speaker
Dr. Tsai is a post-doctoral fellow in the Southeast Asian Studies Programme at NUS. She conducted her dissertation fieldwork research in Medan, Indonesia. She’s currently researching on the Southeast Asian context of Taiwanese Independence Movement during the 1950s and the 1960s.
