Events

Jointly organized by Mainland Southeast Asia Study Group, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, and Nalanda-Sriwijaya Centre, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore.

PROGRAMME

16:00     PRESENTATION BY SPEAKER
Dr Chang Yufen | Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore

16:40     COMMENTS BY DISCUSSANT
Prof Ho Engseng | Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, and Duke University, USA

17:00     QUESTION & ANSWER SESSION
Chairperson | Assoc Prof Maitrii Aung Thwin, Department of History, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

Since the publication of the seminal book The Invention of Traditions by famous British historians Eric Hobsbawn and Terrance Ranger in 1983, scholars in various fields in the social sciences and humanities have generally accepted that traditions and literary genres such as folklores and fairy tales, which are promoted by the state as created by illiterate country folk, are in fact fabricated by elites for the dual purpose of emphasizing the antiquity of nation and mobilizing the people to support their own agenda for state control. In this talk, I attempt to engage with this scholarship by using an anonymous pre-colonial Vietnamese verse story entitled The Tale of a Prince (皇儲傳) to argue that not only the elites, but also common people are capable of and are actively involved in the processes of inventing traditions in order to express their ethnic pride. The Tale of a Prince is a fictional verse narrative written in popular six-eight meters in Nôm, a script that used Chinese characters to represent Vietnamese sounds and that began to appear in Vietnam no later than the thirteenth century. Possibly composed in the mid-nineteenth century, this rather popular story tells the love story between a Chinese prince and a Vietnamese princess during the Warring States period (475−221 BC). Appropriating the theme of scholar-beauty genre fiction that originated in China and became popular in China, Korea, Vietnam, and Meiji Japan, the story subverts the Sino-Vietnamese power relationship by showing that the prince is so in love with the princess that he is willing to go so far as to disguise as a maidservant to work in Vietnam’s royal palace and even bow down to the princess to win her affection. Since no textual evidence pertaining to the authorship of this story has been uncovered, in order to determine the extent of elites’ involvement in the composition of this story, I will first compare different editions of this story to see whether or not the literary quality of the story became increasingly polished over time. I will then compare this story with other fictional Nôm verse narratives and pre-colonial Vietnamese literature written in Chinese characters to determine the similarities and differences between the story under study and other anonymous works on the one hand and known works written by prominent Vietnamese scholars on the other. I will also contextualize this work in broader East Asian scholar-beauty genre fictions and other Sino-Southeast Asian imperial romances to further explore its uniqueness. Last but not least, this story invites us to ponder on the dichotomy between “people” and “elites”. Vietnam as a Southeast Asian member of East Asian cultural-political sphere presents an excellent opportunity for scholars to interrogate the applicability of the dichotomy between “people” and “elites” in pre-modern Southeast Asian context.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER & DISCUSSANT

Chang Yufen is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Nalanda-Sriwijaya Centre, at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. She received her PhD in sociology from the University of Michigan in 2013. Her research interests lie in historical sociology, nationalism, social movements, as well as Sino-Southeast Asian cultural interactions. Since coming to Singapore in summer 2013, she has been collecting the legends of Sino-Southeast Asian imperial romances. This talk presents the first case study of these imperial romances.

Ho Engseng is the Alagil Distinguished Visiting Professor of Arabia Asia Studies at ARI NUS, and Professor of Anthropology and Professor of History at Duke University in the U.S. He was previously Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University and Senior Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. Prof Ho received his PhD and MA in Anthropology from University of Chicago, and BA from Stanford University. He is a specialist on Arab/Muslim diasporas across the Indian Ocean, and their relations with western empires, past and present. He has been involved in the Inter-Asia collaborations among the Social Science Research Council, NUS, Hong Kong University, Gottingen University and others since 2008, including the SSRC Inter-Asia postdoctoral fellowships programme. He is co-editor of the Cambridge Asian Connections book series, consulting editor at Comparative Studies in Society and History, and on the editorial board of Modern Asian Studies and other journals. His writings include The Graves of Tarim, Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean, and Empire through Diasporic Eyes: A View from the Other Boat.

REGISTRATION

Admission is free. We would greatly appreciate if you RSVP to Ms Tay Minghua via email: minghua.tay@nus.edu.sg.