The Channel: A Podcast from the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS)

On this episode, Laura Erber hosts a conversation with two distinguished historians from the Federal University of Bahia, Brazil: João José Reis and Fábio Baqueiro Figueiredo. These scholars represent two generations of researchers committed to reinterpreting and deepening our understanding of the complex relationships between Brazil and Africa.João José Reis is one of Brazil’s foremost historians and a globally recognized authority on 19th-century slavery. Born in Salvador, his extensive research has focused on urban slavery, resistance movements, and the lives of former slaves in Brazil. Reis earned his History degree from the Catholic University of Salvador and completed his Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota, where his groundbreaking thesis explored the Malê Revolt of 1835. A full professor at the Federal University of Bahia since 1979, he has also held visiting positions at Princeton and Harvard. Reis’ work has profoundly influenced the study of slavery and Afro-Brazilian history, making him a seminal figure in the field.Professor Fábio Baqueiro Figueiredo is a leading scholar in African History, also at the Federal University of Bahia. His research is deeply rooted in the cultural and political dynamics of contemporary Africa, with a particular focus on Angola. Figueiredo has delved into the intricate relationships between culture and politics and the formation and transformation of social and political identities in the latter half of the 20th century. Figueiredo has also made significant contributions to the academic community as editors of the journal Afro-Ásia from 2018 to 2023. Notably, João José Reis earlier helped relaunch that journal in 1996 after some years of irregular publication during the military dictatorship.Additionally, their work is closely tied to the Centro de Estudos Afro-Orientais (Centre for Afro-Oriental Studies), a pioneering research center at the Federal University of Bahia. Established in 1959, the Center is dedicated to the study of African, Asian, and Afro-Brazilian cultures, fostering a deeper understanding of the historical and contemporary ties between Brazil and the broader Afro-Oriental world.

This episode features a conversation about the debates and land disputes surrounding the development of airports in Asia and Africa. As airport construction projects proliferate across the Global South – often seen as a fast-track to development and modernization – new tensions frequently emerge, particularly when it comes to the huge tracts of land required for these new infrastructures. My guests today have a new edited volume on this topic, Contested Airport Land: Social-Spatial Transformation and Environmental Injustice in Asia and Africa, just published by Routledge. That book was co-edited by Irit Ittner, Sneha Sharma, Isaac Khambule, and Hanna Geschewski. Unfortunately, Isaac – a professor of political economy at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa – had an urgent matter arise just before recording, so he was unable to join the conversation. But the other three co-editors were able to proceed with a wonderful conversation. Irit Ittner works as a senior researcher in the Programme Environmental Governance at the German Institute of Development and Sustainability in Bonn. Her research interests include unplanned urbanization, land tenure, social navigation, and processes of transformation in coastal West African and European cities. Sneha Sharma works as a Project Officer at Fairtrade International in Bonn after having conducted research at the University of Bonn (2015–2022). She is also the author of Waste(d) Collectors: Politics of Urban Exclusion in India (2022). Hanna Geschewski is a doctoral researcher in Human Geography at the Chr. Michelsen Institute and the University of Bergen in Norway. Her current research explores the socio-environmental dimensions of prolonged displacement, with a particular focus on agriculture, cultivation, and rural livelihoods of Tibetan refugees in South India. In addition to the co-editors, the episode also features Rose Bridger, who wrote the foreword to the volume. Rose is co-founder of the Map of Airport-related Injustice and Resistance and the Global Anti-Aerotropolis Movement. She is also the author of the book Plane Truth (Pluto Press, 2013). As listeners may know, for the past year, we at IIAS were planning a symposium entitled Aspirational Infrastructure Research: Mobilities, Airports, Place (AIR-MAP), which took place in Seoul on October 24-25. That event explored the aspirations and imaginaries surrounding airport mega-developments across the Global South, which have been relatively less examined compared to similar infrastructures in the Global North. On this episode of The Channel, the four guests touch on many of these themes as they discuss their new book as well as the motivations, ambitions, challenges, and outcomes that massive airport development entails.

In this episode, Soheb Niazi interviews Laurence Gautier about the history of two Muslim educational institutions – Aligarh Muslim University and Jamia Millia Islamia – and what these reveal about the politics of Muslim identity and the position of Muslims in post-Partition India. That topic is the subject of Gautier’s new book, Between Nation and ‘Community': Muslim Universities and Indian Politics after Partition, published earlier this year by Cambridge University Press. Soheb Niazi was formerly a Research Fellow here at IIAS, and he is currently a Gerda Henkel Postdoctoral Fellow at the Freie Universität, Berlin. Laurence Gautier is a researcher at the Centre de Sciences Humaines, New Delhi. She completed her PhD in History at the University of Cambridge and taught for four years at O.P. Jindal Global University, near Delhi. She writes on Muslim politics, secularism, nation-building, and university politics in post-independence India.

Thomas Berghuis is a curator and historian of Asian art based in The Netherlands. Berghuis recently curated the exhibition Home and the World in Museum Van Loon, an historical building in the canal district of Amsterdam. In this exhibition, fourteen contemporary artists from all over the world used different spaces of the Van Loon canal house to explore the intricate connections between colonialism and nationalism, past and present. In this episode, Berghuis elaborates on the themes of the exhibition, on its peculiar location, and on the importance of alternative perspectives on how to feel at home in a world beyond the “colonial state” and the “nation-state.” In addition to thanking Thomas Berghuis for this interview, we are grateful to Johan Kuiper and Victor van Drielen at the Museum Van Loon for providing images and soundbites from the exhibition.

This episode brings together two historians who have recently published biographies of 20th-century Indian radicals. The first guest, Ole Birk Laursen is an historian whose work focuses on anarchism and anti-colonialism from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century, with a focus on South Asian activists in exile. His first book, Anarchy or Chaos: M. P. T. Acharya and the Indian Struggle for Freedom, was published last year by Hurst & Co. He is currently a Researcher in the Department of History at Lund University, Sweden, where he is working on the history of anarchism and syndicalism in Scandinavia. The second guest, Nico Slate, is a professor in the Department of History at Carnegie Mellon University. His research examines struggles against racism and imperialism in the United States and India. His latest book is The Art of Freedom: Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay and the Making of Modern India, published this year by University of Pittsburgh Press. In each of their new books, Ole and Nico take on big questions of freedom, ideological commitment, anti-colonial activism, and transnational radicalism through deeply-researched portraits of a particular figure. Although covering very different people, both works offer fascinating points of overlap and resonance as well as interesting points of contrast.

This episode is guest hosted by Liberty Chee, who is currently a visiting researcher here at the International Institute for Asian Studies. While in Leiden, Liberty is working on a book manuscript that examines recruitment and employment agencies in Southeast Asia, their relations to other state and non-state actors, and how these structure the experiences of domestic migrant workers themselves. For this episode of The Channel, Liberty organized a conversation about the ILO Convention on Domestic Work (C189), which is a global norm-setting instrument that formalizes domestic work and serves as an important advocacy tool. To date, only one country in Asia – The Philippines – has ratified the Convention, even though more than half of the world’s domestic workers live and reside in the wider region. Asia is also host to a significant number of migrant domestic workers, both moving within and across regions. In this episode, Liberty interviews two advocates and organizers: Elsa Ramos-Carbone and Jec Sernande. Elsa Ramos-Carbone is a founding member of Samahan ng Mga Manggagawang Pilipino sa Belgium (Association of Philippine Migrant Workers in Belgium). Previously, she was Director of Equality and Youth at the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICTFU), and Senior Specialist for Workers' Activities at the International Labour Organization (ILO), Asia-Pacific Regional Office in Bangkok. Jec Sernande is a migrant domestic worker of 17 years.  She is Secretary of the Hong Kong Federation of Asian Domestic Worker Union and Executive Committee Member of the International Domestic Workers Federation. In describing their experiences organizing as workers in and across different contexts, their discussion illuminates key moments, alliances, and discourses which made C189 and its ratification possible.