Description

Ambassador McDowell will describe the run-up to Myanmar’s historic November 2015 election, and the take a look at the transition, Aung San Suu Kyi’s first months in power, and the challenges that lie ahead.

Mark McDowell served from 2013 to 2016 as Canada’s first resident Ambassador to the Republic of the Union of Myanmar. He joined the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade in 1994 and has served abroad in New York, Taipei, Bangkok, and Beijing. At headquarters his most recent position was Director of Public Diplomacy and Domestic Outreach, and he has worked extensively on international Aboriginal/Indigenous issues.

He received his BA in History and Philosophy from the University of Toronto, and has Masters degrees from the University of Toronto and Harvard University. From 2008-09 he was an Asia Research Fellow at the Ash Institute for Governance and Innovation at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Description

It has never been easy to write the history of Vietnam. This small country’s role in one of the most violent wars of decolonization of the 20th century and in one of the Cold War’s longest conflicts has meant that its past has been endlessly abused for all sorts of purposes, both inside and outside the country. It is perhaps only now, in the early 21st century, that the events which created the modern state can be seen from a more dispassionate, historical perspective. To illustrate this point, Christopher Goscha examines two themes that have been left out of standard accounts of Vietnam – the question of Vietnamese colonialism and collaboration. He will also suggest why it might be useful to revisit the question of periodizing Vietnam’s ‘modern history’ in terms of this country’s colonial encounter with the French in 1858 in order to push it further back in time or leave it open.

Christopher Goscha is associate professor of international relations at the department of history at the Université du Québec à Montréal. His works focuses on colonial Indochina, the wars over Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, and the Cold War in Asia. He recently published Vietnam, A New History (Basic Books, 2016) and is currently working on a social history of colonial Saigon and Hanoi in a time of war (1945-54).

Description

The Center for Southeast Asian Studies invites you to the first screening of a brand-new movie series. We will screen the second documentary by critically-acclaimed filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer (The Act of Killing) about the 1965 Indonesian genocide. In this sequel, Oppenheimer “focuses on a family of survivors who discovers how their son was murdered, as well as the identities of the killers. The youngest son, an optometrist named Adi, decides to break the suffocating spell of submission and terror by doing something unimaginable in a society where the murderers remain in power: he confronts the men who killed his brother and, while testing their eyesight, asks them to accept responsibility for their actions. This unprecedented film initiates and bears witness to the collapse of fifty years of silence http://thelookofsilence.com/).” Tania Li, Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Southeast Studies, will comment on the movie and contextualize it in relation to politics and development in Indonesia.