Events

PROGRAMME

16:00     PRESENTATION BY SPEAKER
Dr Stefan Huebner | Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

16:30     COMMENTS BY DISCUSSANTS
Prof Naoko Shimazu | Department of History, Yale-NUS College, Singapore
Dr Ronojoy Sen | Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore

17:00     QUESTION & ANSWER SESSION
Chairperson | Prof Jonathan Rigg, Asia Research Institute, and Department of Geography, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

The history of regional sporting events in 20th century Asia yields insights into Western and Asian perspectives on what defines modern Asia, and can be read as a staging of power relations in Asia and between Asia and the West. The Far Eastern Championship Games began in 1913, and were succeeded after the Pacific War by the Asian Games. Missionary groups and colonial administrations viewed sporting success not only as a triumph of physical strength and endurance but also of moral education and social reform. Sporting competitions were to shape a “new Asian man” and later a “new Asian woman” by promoting internationalism, egalitarianism and economic progress, all serving to direct a “rising” Asia toward modernity. Over time, exactly what constituted a “rising” Asia underwent remarkable changes, ranging from the YMCA’s promotion of muscular Christianity, democratization, and the Social Gospel in the U.S.-colonized Philippines to Iranian visions of recreating the Great Persian Empire.

Based on an analysis of events spanning sixty years and connecting three continents, this presentation shows why and how pan-Asian sporting events reversed the “Western Civilizing Mission” and helped shape anti-colonial sentiments, Asian nationalisms, pan-Asian aspirations, and Cold War development policies in places as diverse as Japan, China, the Philippines, India, Indonesia, Thailand, and Iran.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER & DISCUSSANTS

Stefan Huebner (Hübner), PhD, is a historian of colonialism, modernization, and development policy. He is a research fellow at NUS’s Asia Research Institute. He was awarded scholarships and fellowships at Harvard University’s Center for European Studies, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (Washington, DC), the German Historical Institute Washington, and the German Institute for Japanese Studies Tokyo. He received his PhD from Jacobs University Bremen (Germany) in 2014. His first book—Pan-Asian Sports and the Emergence of Modern Asia, 1913-1974—was published by NUS Press in spring 2016 (http://nuspress.nus.edu.sg/products/pan-asian-sport-and-the-emergence-of-modern-asia-1913-1974). His PhD research covered the impact of regional Asian sporting events such as the Asian Games and the Far Eastern Championship Games on seven Asian countries. His related articles have been published by journals such as the Journal of World History, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, Itinerario, Diplomatic History, International History Review, Comparativ, Education about Asia, and the International Journal of the History of Sport. His second book project is a global history of oceanic colonization projects, which connects offshore oil drilling and mariculture (marine fish farming) to ideas of building floating city extensions and futuristic floating cities.

Naoko Shimazu joins Yale-NUS College after twenty years of teaching at the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology, Birkbeck College, University of London. She obtained her BA (Hons) in Political Studies at the University of Manitoba, followed by MPhil and DPhil degrees in International Relations at the University of Oxford. For three years, she worked as a merchant banker in the City of London. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, Professorial Research Associate at the Japan Research Centre at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at London, Research Affiliate at the Modern East Asia Research Centre (MEARC) at Leiden University, and Associate at the Pears Institute for the Study of Anti-semitism at Birkbeck University of London. She has held research fellowships at the Institute of Social Science at the University of Tokyo, Japan Foundation Fellow at Waseda University, Visiting Senior Research Fellow at ARI, NUS, and most recently as Fernand Braudel Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence. She has been the recipient of research grants from the Arts and Humanities Research Council of UK, British Academy, and Leverhulme Trust, among others.

Ronojoy Sen has worked for over a decade in leading Indian newspapers. He was last with The Times of India, New Delhi, where he was a Senior Assistant Editor on the editorial page. He holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Chicago and a BA in History from Presidency College, Calcutta. He has been a Visiting Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy, Washington, D.C. and the East-West Center Washington, and Fellow of the International Olympic Museum, Lausanne, Switzerland. Dr Sen is the author of “Nation at Play. A History of Sport in India” (Columbia University Press, 2015) and of “Articles of Faith: Religion, Secularism, and the Indian Supreme Court” (Oxford University Press, 2010; paperback 2012). He is the co-editor of “More than Maoism: Politics, policies and insurgencies in South Asia” and “Being Muslim in South Asia: Diversity and Daily Life”. He has contributed to edited volumes and has published in several leading journals, including the Journal of Asian Studies, Pacific Affairs, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Journal of Democracy and Sport and Society. He also writes regularly for newspapers.

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