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

This episode features a conversation with the team behind the exhibition Asian Bronze at the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam. The ambitious show celebrates 4000 years of bronze art and the central role of bronze in the traditions of Asia. Ranging from prehistoric objects to contemporary artworks, the exhibition includes pieces from India, China, Indonesia, Japan, Thailand, Vietnam, Pakistan, Nepal, and Korea. In this conversation, our four guests elaborate on the magnificence of this metal and its importance across widely different regions of the Asian continent. They discuss the complexities of planning and designing an exhibition of this scale and proportion, and they introduce some of their favorite objects and stories. William Southworth is Curator of Southeast Asian Art at the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, Ching-Ling Wang is Curator of East Asian Art at the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, Anna Slaczka is Curator of South Asian Art at the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, and Sara Creange is Conservator Metals at the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam.Asian Bronze is on view at the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam until 12 January 2025. It includes a book entitled Asian Bronze. 4000 Years of Beauty, as well as a symposium that will be held on 9 and 10 January 2025. Interested listeners can register for the symposium using the following link: https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/whats-on/lectures-symposiums/symposium-asian-bronze[The recording of bronze bells, a clip of which is played in this episode, was kindly provided by the Museum of East Asian Art, Koeln & Ludwig Foundation, Aachen.]

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.

Here at IIAS, the upcoming edition of our flagship publication The Newsletter (June 2024, #98) comes out next month, just in time for the ICAS 13 conference in Surabaya, Indonesia. This edition of The Newsletter is meant to engage in various ways with the conference theme, “Crossways of Knowledge.” The special Focus section of this issue presents a collection of articles by authors from the Indigenous Ta-u community of Lanyu Island off the coast of Taiwan. Echoing the theme of maritime connections so central to this iteration of ICAS 13, the authors of The Focus reflect on multiple dimensions of Ta-u life, including traditional practices like fishing and boat-building as well as contemporary challenges posed by tourism, migration, and ecological disruption.  As a teaser for the Indigenous collection in the upcoming issue, we asked two authors – both members of the Ta-u community – to come on the podcast and give our audience a sense of the Ta-u language through its stories and poetry. In this episode, Syaman Lamuran gives a brief introduction before Syaman Rapongan, an elder of the community, offers two recitations: first, some ceremonial words spoken during the Summoning Flying Fish ritual; and second, a poem reflecting the importance of boats and fish to the Ta-u culture. Finally, Syaman Lamuran returns to reflect and translate these recitations into English.  If you'd like to know more about traditional Ta-u culture and contemporary Ta-u lives, be sure to pick up Issue #98 of The Newsletter. In addition to Syaman Lamuran and Syaman Rapongan, we'd also like to thank Eric Clark, Annika Pissin, and Huei-Min Tsai, who co-edited the upcoming Focus section in collaboration with members of the Ta-u community.

This episode features a conversation about development, state-owned enterprises, and the political economy of resource extractivism, with a special focus on the case of Brazil. Jewellord “Jojo” Nem Singh is an Assistant Professor in International Development at the International Institute of Social Studies in The Hague, part of Erasmus University Rotterdam. In 2020, Jojo was awarded a grant from the European Research Council for the five-year project Green Industrial Policy in the Age of Rare Metals: A Trans-regional Comparison of Growth Strategies in Rare Earths Mining (GRIP-ARM), for which he is also affiliated with us here at IIAS. His new book is Business of the State: Why State Ownership Matters for Resource Governance, forthcoming later this year from Oxford University Press. The book includes analysis of multiple sites, including the case of the State-Owned Enterprise (SEO) Petrogras in Brazil. The guest interviewer, Pietro Erber, worked for Eletrobras for many years and was a consultant for the World Bank and for the World Energy Council. He was also the director of the Brazilian Energy Efficiency Institute and writes for newspapers on economics and energy policy. In their conversation, Jojo and Pietro dive deep into the context of Brazil and its relationship to extraction, State-Owned Enterprises (SEOs), as well as corruption and the Lava Jato scandal in Brazil. In covering these topics, they also explore what it all might reveal about growth strategies for states in Global South more broadly, particularly in an era of decarbonization and the race for cleaner technologies.