This project traces the emergence of a socialist intelligentsia of activists and technocrats in Southeast Asia the second half of the twentieth century. It breaks new ground in moving away from a state-led perspective on socialism to identify the transnational networks that emerged between two generations of socialist political leaders, feminists, activists, intellectuals, and technocrats in Southeast Asia who shared a commitment to democracy and socialism as a guiding ideology. The project takes a connective and comparative approach in examining the trajectories of individuals who participated in transnational socialist networks of the 1950s from countries including Burma, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore who forged networks of socialists across the Afro-Asian world.
Dr Su Lin Lewis is the principal investigator on the project. She specialises in global and transnational history in the twentieth century, with a thematic focus on urban history, civil society and activist networks, gender, decolonisation, development, and migration from the late colonial era to the Cold War. Her geographical focus is mainly Southeast Asia (especially Burma, Malaysia, and Indonesia), along with an ever-increasing interest in port-cities of the Indian Ocean and Pacific Rim.
She co-led a collaborative research project on Afro-Asian Networks in the Early Cold War. The project pioneered an innovative collaborative research methodology that encouraged scholarly collaboration from the point of archival inquiry to the writing-up process.
She is currently an AHRC Early Career Leadership Fellow working on a project on Socialist Internationalism in the Afro-Asian World. She is also a member of the editorial board of Past and Present and on the Board of Directors of the Global Urban History project.
Researchers:
Dr Su Lin Lewis, Associate Professor in Modern Global History, Department of History
This project is associated with the MMB Challenge on Bordering, control, struggle