How the Vocabularies and Discourses of Empire persist
A Public Lecture by Dr Farish A. Noor  

The talk will summarise the arguments of my two recent works- The Discursive Construction of Southeast Asia in 19th Century Colonial Capitalist Discourse (Amsterdam University Press, 2016) and Before the Pivot: America's Encounters with Southeast Asia (Amsterdam University Press, 2018) - and also my upcoming book Fear of the Unknown: Data-collecting in 19th Century Colonial Southeast Asia. The focus will be on how a range of authors - mainly British and American - not only discursively constructed the idea of a Southeast Asia that was distinct and rendered 'exotic', but also how much of their epistemic claims to knowledge about Southeast Asia were based on strategies and modalities of data-collecting and object-framing that invariably cast Southeast Asia as a region that was rich, exotic, ripe for colonisation and needy of intervention. In so many ways these discursive strategies and narratives remain with us today, and can be seen in how justifications for political-military intervention (Iraq, Afghanistan, South China Sea, etc.) continue to operate along similar logical templates, and how even present-day discourses on security, data-management and social management can be traced back to the workings of power-knowledge of the 19th century. In that respect, we are still living in the long shadow of the 19th century. 

Details 
Date: 25 October 2018, Thursday 
Time: 14:00 to 16:00 
Venue: F1A23 
             University of Nottingham Malaysia 
             Jalan Broga 43500 Semenyih Selangor Darul Ehsan

About the speaker
Dr Farish A. Noor is Associate Professor at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies and the School of History, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences HASS, Nanyang Technological University NTU. His most recent book is 'Before the Pivot: America's Encounters with Southeast Asia 1800-1900' (Amsterdam University Press, 2018).