In conjunction with "National Film Day 2017” (Hari Film Nasional), IFF & ISA NYU presents:

• Short Films: Return to Jakarta (Balik Jakarta) & On the Origin of Fear

• Feature Film : The Crescent Moon (Mencari Hilal)

Inviting you to seek, recognize, explore and expand your knowledge about Indonesia, Hari Film Nasional 2017 is the annual observance for Indonesian cinema that celebrated throughout March. This program is in collaboration with Indonesian Ministry of Education, Bekraf and BPI and supported by Consulate of Republic Indonesia.

During the Khmer Rouge’s brutal reign in Cambodia during the mid-to-late 1970s, a former math teacher named Duch served as the commandant of the S-21 security center, where as many as 20,000 victims were interrogated, tortured, and executed. In 2009 Duch stood trial for these crimes against humanity. While the prosecution painted Duch as evil, his defense lawyers claimed he simply followed orders. This was just one of a number of parallels between the Duch trial at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal and the Eichmann trial. This presentation focuses on arguments in my recent book, Man or Monster? The Trial of a Khmer Rouge Torturer (Duke, 2016). Specifically, I will reconsider Arendt’s notion of the banality of evil in terms of “the banality of everyday thought” and “effacing conviction.” 

Despite a long and complex history, the idea of jihad has recently been co-opted into seemingly endless debates on Islam, as the politicized symbol either of violent “holy war” or of peaceful “striving” for religious self-betterment. This presentation will provide needed context for such popular uses and abuses, examining the multiple meanings of jihad across time. In particular, the talk will provide an overview of the origins and development of the term during the eras of the Prophet Muhammad and early Islamic statecraft; of subsequent re-definitions during the age of European empire; and of the fraught relationship between jihad and “terrorism” in the late 20th century. While most of the talk will focus on the Middle East, brief case studies from South and Southeast Asia will help highlight the diversity of jihad in theory and practice.

Image: Wouter Engler/Wikimedia Commons

The prevalent use of the internet and social media by extremist groups has enabled women to be more active not only as propagators and financiers, but also as combatants and even suicide bombers. The initiative has come both from terrorist leaders who saw the tactical benefits of using female operatives and from the women themselves. In her talk, Nava Nuraniyah, an analyst at the Jakarta-based Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict (IPAC), will explore the evolution of the role of women extremists since the 1990s and the crucial role of the internet in that evolution.

Chia’s talk will reconsider Kuah-Pearce’s concept of  “reformist Buddhism” through the case of Yen Pei. He argues for the need to historicize “reformist Buddhism” in the Singapore context and to consider the Buddhist networks linking multiple nodes that circulated people, ideas, practices, and money between China, Taiwan, Southeast Asia, and beyond. In addition, he will demonstrate that a study of the transnational biography of Yen Pei is a fine example of how an individual life, examined in grainy detail, can offer insights into Buddhism and modernity in Asia. At a broader level, the case of Yen Pei reveals how Singapore’s Buddhist history was intertwined with the larger history of the modernization and globalization of Chinese-language Buddhism in the twentieth century.

Limited Choices and Infinite Possibilities: How to Extricate East Asia and Southeast Asia from the Global Cultural Predicament: This lecture will reconsider the socio-historical processes of East Asia and Southeast Asia, their interconnectedness with the rest of the world.

Dr. Meng Hang is an associate professor of anthropology and an interdisciplinary writer in China. His research interests focus on social and cultural change in China, East Asia, Southeast Asia, Inner Asia and the West, history of anthropology, cultural studies, intercultural dialogue, ethnoarchaeology, culture difference and similarities. He has conducted long-term ethnographic fieldwork in China and Britain.

This symposium explores how religions influence public policy in Southeast Asia that affects women and religious minorities.  The symposium presents the findings of a 9 country research project funded by the Henry Luce Foundation and led by the Indonesian Consortium for Religious Studies (ICRS).  ICRS is a consortium of secular, Muslim and Christian Universities, based at Gadjah Mada University.  The research involved leading universities in Indonesia, Vietnam, Myanmar, Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia, Singapore and the USA.

Click to view the schedule for the day.

Prior to the opening of the exhibition Secrets of the Sea: A Tang Shipwreck and Early Trade in Asia at Asia Society, New York, The New York Center for Global Asia presents a symposium which focuses on the ninth-century context of the Belitung shipwreck in the Java Sea, Southeast Asia, and more broadly on Indian Ocean trade, on the ship’s 1998 excavation, and on controversies that prevented its contents from being displayed at the Freer | Sackler Galleries, the Smithsonian’s Museums of Asian Art, in 2011.

The program is free and open to the public. Reservations are not required, and priority seating will be given to those who arrive early.

From 2012 to 2014, Myanmar experienced recurrent, sporadic, collective acts of lethal violence, realized through repeated public expressions that Muslims constitute an existential threat to Buddhists. In this talk, I draw on scholarship from Indonesia and India to make a case for classing and analyzing the violence as “communal.” I conclude with some tentative remarks on the relationship between communal violence, anti-Muslim sentiment, and the most recent military operations in Myanmar’s west. 

Danielle Labbé's research is focused on the inter-relations between the production and appropriation of urban space in Vietnam. Her work uses a combination of historical, process-oriented, and social agency perspectives to explore the encounters between state intentions, governing practices, and everyday life during the urbanization process. Through this approach, Danielle’s research shows that, although taking place during a so-called “global era,” the ongoing urban transition in Vietnam remains deeply rooted in local circumstances. Placed in a comparative context, her research on this Southeast Asian country contributes to larger theoretical debates about state-society relations, urban governance, and regulatory informality in the fields of urban planning, human geography, and urban anthropology.

This presentation analyzes the role Southeast Asian ports, especially Angier (Anjer, West Java) and Manila, played in supporting the coolie trafficking network for the 125,000 abducted Chinese taken to Cuba. Records of several mutinies aboard American coolie transport ships reveal that these ports provided not only essential supply lines for overloaded coolie ships, but also administrative and legal infrastructure that supported the trafficking – and that they occasionally regulated extreme abuses of Chinese by the traffickers. Special attention is paid to mutinies aboard the Waverly off Manila in 1855, which resulted in arrest and imprisonment of surviving crew members, the Kate Hooper off Angier in 1857, and a crew mutiny on the Boston-based Staghound off Angier in 1860. The early role of British merchant James Tait, whose commercial activities in Manila and with the firm Jardine Mathieson in southern China, is also examined.