Colloquium with Eric Tagliacozzo, Department of History, Cornell University

Thursday, December 10, 2015
1:00 PM - 2:30 PM
6275 Bunche Hall
UCLA Campus
Los Angeles, CA 90095

This talk looks at the history of lighthouses and lighting in colonial-era Southeast Asia, along a broad sweep of land and sea that is now part of Indonesia, but also part of a number of neighboring nation-states (including Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei and the southern Philippines). Michel Foucault has outlined to us the power of the panopticon, especially in its guise in the development of prison regimes in Europe. Yet the panopticon notion might also be used in other cultures, and other climes. It seems a fruitful way of looking at the development and spread of these “tools of empire” in the tropics, where lighthouses were not only used to enhance navigation, but also to allow colonial states to see in the dark. Lighthouses became structures of surveillance and control, ones that were used to “herd” shipping into avenues acceptable to the state. This talk explores some of this history, as part of a wider examination of the place of science and the sea in colonial history. The lecture forms part of a new project on different ways of looking at the ocean in the history of Asia writ large.

Eric Tagliacozzo is Professor of History at Cornell University. He is the author of Secret Trades, Porous Borders: Smuggling and States along a Southeast Asian Frontier (Yale, 2005) which won the Harry Benda Prize from the Association of Asian Studies, and more recently of The Longest Journey: Southeast Asians and the Pilgrimage to Mecca (Oxford, 2013). He is also the editor or co-editor of eight other books, on trans-nationalism in Asia as seen through period (Harvard, 2015), and through place (Harvard, 2015); on Burmese lives under a coercive state (Oxford, 2014); on the state of the field of Indonesian Studies (Cornell/SEAP, 2014), and Indonesian sources more generally (Duke, 2009); on Chinese trade down to Southeast Asia (Duke, 2011), and Southeast Asian contacts west to the Middle East (Stanford, 2009), and finally on the relationship between History and Anthropology as disciplines (Stanford, 2009). He is the Director of the Comparative Muslim Societies Program at Cornell, and Cornell’s Modern Indonesia Project (CMIP), as well as editor of the journal INDONESIA.

Cost : Free and open to the public.

BarbaraGaerlan
310-206-9163
cseas@international.ucla.edu

www.international.ucla.edu/cseas/

Sponsor(s): Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Department of History