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Book Discussion: Fluid Jurisdictions – Colonial Law and Arabs in Southeast Asia, National University of Singapore, October 21, 2020, @10pm

October 21, 2020 @ 10:00 pm - 11:30 pm

ABSTRACT

Fluid Jurisdictions: Colonial Law and Arabs in Southeast Asia newly released by Cornell University Press is a wide-ranging, geographically ambitious book that tells the story of the Arab diaspora within the context of British and Dutch colonialism, unpacking the community’s ambiguous embrace of European colonial authority in Southeast Asia. Fluid Jurisdictions looks at colonial legal infrastructure – discussing how it impacted, and was impacted by, Islam and ethnicity. But more importantly, the book follows the actors who used this framework to advance their particular interests.

The book explains why Arab minorities in the region helped to fuel the entrenchment of European colonial legalities: their itinerant lives made institutional records necessary. Securely stored in centralized repositories, such records could be presented as evidence in legal disputes. In order to ensure accountability down the line, Arab merchants valued notarial attestation land deeds, inheritance papers, and marriage certificates by recognized state officials. Colonial subjects continually played one jurisdiction against another, sometimes preferring that colonial legal authorities administer Islamic law—even against fellow Muslims.

Fluid Jurisdictions draws on lively material from multiple international archives to demonstrate the interplay between colonial projections of order and their realities, Arab navigation of legally plural systems in Southeast Asia and beyond, and the fraught and deeply human struggles that played themselves out between family, religious, contract, and commercial legal orders.


ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Engseng Ho is the Muhammad Alagil Distinguished Visiting Professor of Arabia Asia Studies at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. At Duke University, he is Professor of Anthropology and Professor of History. He is a leading scholar of transnational anthropology, history and Muslim societies, Arab diasporas, and the Indian Ocean. His research expertise is in Arabia, coastal South Asia and maritime Southeast Asia, and he maintains active collaborations with scholars in these regions. He is co-editor of the Asian Connections book series at Cambridge University Press, and serves on the editorial boards of journals such as American Anthropologist, Comparative Studies in Society and History, History and Anthropology. He has previously worked as Professor of Anthropology, Harvard University; Senior Scholar, Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies; Country and Profile Writer, the Economist Group; International Economist, Government of Singapore Investment Corporation/Monetary Authority of Singapore; Director, Middle East Institute, National University of Singapore. He was educated at the Penang Free School, Stanford University, and the University of Chicago.

Mitra Sharafi is a legal historian of South Asia at the University of Wisconsin Law School (USA), with History affiliation. She is the author of Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia: Parsi Legal Culture, 1772-1947 (Cambridge University Press, 2014), which won the Law and Society Association’s Hurst Prize in 2015. She is currently working on a book project on falsity and forensic science in colonial India, with support from Princeton’s Davis Center (2018) and an American Council of Learned Societies Burkhardt fellowship ’18 (National Humanities Center, 2020-1). Sharafi’s recent publications include articles on forensic bloodstain analysis and abortion during the Raj, and she is working on another on the expulsion of South Asian and West African law students from the Inns of Court in London. She hosts the South Asian Legal History Resources website, which turns ten in 2020. She also tweets (@mjsharafi), and is a regular contributor to the Legal History Blog.

Nurfadzilah Yahaya, Assistant Professor in the History Department at National University of Singapore (NUS), is a legal historian of the Indian Ocean. Prior to NUS, she was Early Career Fellow in Islamic Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Her book Fluid Jurisdictions: Colonial Law and Arabs in Southeast Asia is published by Cornell University Press (2020). Her articles have appeared in Law and History Review, Journal of Women’s HistoryIndonesia and the Malay World and Muslim World.

Register here.

Details

Date:
October 21, 2020
Time:
10:00 pm - 11:30 pm
Event Category: