History

Adelaide Festival of Ideas Panel: Good Things Sometimes Happen

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I took part in a fantastic panel discussion alongside Assistant Professor Noura Erakat and chaired by Peter Mares at the Adelaide Festival of Ideas this morning.

I offered my take on the recent success of Malaysia’s Pakatan Harapan, and its campaign that was able to overcome an electoral system rigged against an opposition win. We discussed whether or not it is truly possible for Malaysia to build a rejuvenated and peaceful multi-racial society and institutions, and what hope there is for political reconciliation for the Palestinians.

The event was presented by the Australian Friends of Palestine Association (AFOPA), the School of Social Sciences at The University of Adelaide and the 2018 Adelaide Festival of Ideas, and you can listen to a recording of it here.

Review in Journal of Islamic Studies

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The Journal of Islamic Studies has featured a review by Martin van Bruinessen of From Anatolia to Aceh. Ottomans, Turks and Southeast Asia, edited by A.C.S. Peacock and Annabel Teh Gallop.

My chapter is described as follows:

Amrita Malhi discusses an even more ephemeral Ottoman ‘presence’ in Malaya in the enigmatic appearance of an Ottoman or Republican Turkish flag (the ‘Bendera Stambul’) in the 1928 peasant uprising of Terengganu.

Review in the International Journal of Turkish Studies

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The International Journal of Turkish Studies

The American journal, International Journal of Turkish Studies has published a review by Elizabeth Lambourn of From Anatolia to Aceh. Ottomans, Turks and Southeast Asia, edited by A.C.S. Peacock and Annabel Teh Gallop, to which I contributed a chapter on the Ottoman connection in colonial Terengganu.

Lambourn picks up an important point – that the material culture of the Ottoman connection, including physical signs like the flag used in Terengganu – was essential to the circulation of notions of connectedness to a Caliphate and a Muslim World beyond the Malay Peninsula. This is in addition to the intangible signs of this connection, including rumours of Ottoman intervention, which also played an important role in Terengganu.

Lambourn has also noticed my “detailed, high-quality maps,” created by the CartoGIS unit in the College of Asia & the Pacific at the Australian National University. This is a critical resource, and institutional access to it was critical to these maps existing at all.

 

ASAA Conference 2016

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Image: Cover of the ASAA Conference Program for 2016.

I presented some work in progress at the 2016 conference of the Asian Studies Association of Australia at the ANU, in a panel called Mobility, Place and Displacement in Histories of the Left in Indonesia and Malaysia, chaired by Dr Vannessa Hearman of the University of Sydney.

I talked about the Tenth Regiment of the Malayan People’s Army and their project to create a new kind of Malay Muslim from their marginal location in hiding during and after the Malayan Emergency.

Review in Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde

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Cover of the Dutch journal Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde.

The Dutch journal Bijdragen tot de taal-, land- en volkenkunde / Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia has published a review by Carool Kersten of an edited volume in which I published a chapter, namely From Anatolia to Aceh. Ottomans, Turks and Southeast Asia, edited by A.C.S. Peacock and Annabel Teh Gallop.

Kersten’s specific comments on my work are:

The chapters by two other young promising historians, Amrita Malhi and Chiara Formichi, on British Malaya and the Netherlands East Indies respectively, bring into the twentieth century the study of Southeast Asian interest in the Ottoman Empire as well as that of the contemporary Turkish Republic. Read together, they record a shift from a fascination with Ottoman Caliphal pretences to the vivid interest exhibited by anti-colonial activists in the achievements of Kemal Atatürk.

Violence, Displacement & Muslim Movements in Southeast Asia

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Today I spent the day with colleagues in a fantastic workshop on Violence, Displacement & Muslim Movements in Southeast Asia, hosted by the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies and the Leiden University Centre for the Study of Islam and Society. The full program is available from the KITLV website.

Review in Indonesia

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The American journal Indonesia has published a review by Robert W. Hefner of an edited volume in which I published a chapter, namely From Anatolia to Aceh. Ottomans, Turks and Southeast Asia, edited by A.C.S. Peacock and Annabel Teh Gallop.

Hefner’s specific comments on my work are:

In chapter ten, Amrita Malhi examines the repeated invocations of the Ottoman Caliphate made by native rulers in the Malay peninsula between 1874 and 1928, as the British made their “forward movement” into the previously independent Malay states. In an original and important reading of these overlooked events, Malhi demonstrates that the practice of invoking the Caliphate was emblematic of a profound reworking of the global order, recognized by Malay Muslims, and expressed in their increasingly desperate appeals to the ideal of the Caliphate even as a global British imperialism was ushering in the Ottoman collapse.

Review in The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences

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The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences has published a review by Philipp Bruckmayr of the edited volume From Anatolia to Aceh. Ottomans, Turks and Southeast Asia, edited by A.C.S. Peacock and Annabel Teh Gallop, in which I have a chapter.

Bruckmayr’s comments on my chapter are:

Amrita Malhi, in contrast, discusses how British colonial authorities as well as later western and nationalist Malaysian historiography failed to grasp, and have therefore misconstrued, the implications of the deployment of Ottoman caliphal symbology in anti-colonial uprisings on the Malay Peninsula. For the author, the Ottoman Empire’s symbolic relevance in the struggle against the British in Malaya represented neither religious fanaticism nor pious proto-nationalism, but rather resulted from the fact that during the first decades of the twentieth century, “nationalism had not yet established itself as the primary mode in which Malay Muslims expressed their counter-colonial desires” (p. 224).

Seminar on the Caliphate in Southeast Asian History

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I gave a talk on territorial enclosures and the Caliphate on the Malay Peninsula for the History Seminar Series at Flinders University today. Why? Because they invited me!

My talk focused on the allure the Ottoman Caliphate held for anti-colonial rebels during the British period of forward movement—and the ways in which seemingly-localised uprisings were really aimed at the world system as a whole, as well as at local tactics for privatising land and forests.

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