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National Reconstruction of Colonial Territory in Southeast Asia, with Christian C. Lentz, University of North Carolina at Chapel HillPlease use the link to register.
In this talk Christian Lentz examines diplomatic relations between Indonesia and the two Vietnams from 1955-65, when political elites toggled between commitments to free themselves from colonial rule on the one hand and imperatives to fill out territories defined by colonial rule on the other. It uses these examples to conceptualize the complex relationship between colonial and post-colonial rule and sovereignty. All three countries sent delegates to the 1955 Asia-Africa Conference in Bandung and embraced its principles of self-determination, anticolonialism, and equality among nations. Yet subsequent diplomatic, political, and military maneuvers demonstrate that Vietnamese and Indonesian elites used the same Bandung principles to legitimize the conquest of territory created by former colonial overlords. Called “national reunification”, their projects endeavored to create national territories that, in fact, had never existed before. Taken together, the irredentist pursuit of territory in Southeast Asia suggests how Bandung principles exceeded anti-colonial solidarity and became, instead, tools of postcolonial recolonization
Christian C. Lentz is Associate Professor of Geography and Environment and Adjunct Associate Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is author of Contested Territory: Điện Biên Phủ and the Making of Northwest Vietnam (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), winner of the 2021 Harry J. Benda Prize for outstanding first book in Southeast Asian studies. His articles have appeared in The Journal of Peasant Studies, Political Geography, Modern Asian Studies, American Historical Review, and other journals. He has held fellowships with Fulbright in Vietnam, the Asia Research Insitute at the National University of Singapore, and the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. His current research examines territory, nationalism, and decolonization in Indonesia and the two Vietnams.
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Stockholm University, Frescativägen 26, 10691 Stockholm, Sweden, Frescativägen 26, SE-114 18 Stockholm, Sverige, Stockholm, Sweden
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