Civilizing the South: Colonialism & Cultural Change in Ancient East/Southeast Asia

This talk examines and gauges the extent to which imperial efforts were successful at “civilizing” the ancient southern frontier of the Han empire. It considers a few, key encounters of Han/Sinitic peoples with the local Vietic peoples in the ancient Nam Viet region – an area extending from modern-day Guangzhou to the Red River Delta in Vietnam. These encounters provide glimpses of the attempts made by the Han to pacify and assimilate the southernmost reaches of the empire. They give us insights into the nature of early East Asian colonization and help answer the question of whether and to what the extent military, administrative institutions from the North brought about cultural change in the South.

Speakers:

Erica Brindley is Professor of Asian Studies and History at Penn State University, currently visiting in the UH Department of History for sabbatical. Her research focuses on the cultural and intellectual history of premodern East Asia, (~500 BC to 500 CE), especially in a region she calls SEAMZ (the Southeast Asian Maritime Zone). Her first three monographs concern ancient Chinese thought and intellectual history, and explore the many ways thinkers envisioned the self and other in society and the world: Individualism in Early China: Human Agency and the Self in Thought and Politics (University of Hawaii Press, 2010); Music, Cosmology, and the Politics of Harmony in Early China (State University of New York Press, 2012); and Ancient China and the Yue: Perceptions and Identities on the Southern Frontier, c.400 BCE – 50 CE (Cambridge University Press, 2015). A current project, building on her work on the Yue/Viet, involves rethinking the networks that connected much of South China to areas in Southeast Asia, especially Vietnam. To that end, she has been fostering interdisciplinary discussions that will contribute to the history of this zone, as well as a better understanding of how South China was eventually, over the millennia, more fully incorporated into the Chinese realm.

Wensheng Wang is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. His research focuses on political culture, particularly in late Imperial China.