The Oriental Society of Australia presents

The 2019 A. R. Davis Memorial Lecture

From Orientalism to Inter-Asia Referencing: Reflections on Asian Studies in Australia
Adrian Vickers (Professor of Southeast Asia, University of Sydney)

The Oriental Society cordially invites members, friends and guests of the Society to the 2019 A. R. Davis Memorial Lecture, co-hosted with the School of Languages and Cultures at the University of Sydney. This is the most important event in our calendar. We have the pleasure of a presentation this year by Professor Adrian Vickers for this most auspicious occasion.

Abstract

The University of Sydney did little to mark its centenary of Asian Studies in 2018 except for holding a colloquium that simultaneously marked forty years since the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism. The coincidence of these anniversaries in Australia’s oldest Asian Studies institution says much about the uneasy history of the study of Asia in Australia, and its entwinement with Orientalist ways of framing Asia. That founding father James Murdoch was a brothel-frequenting author of racist magazine articles about Chinese, further confirms the ambivalence of this legacy. This lecture will examine the wider issues governing Asian Studies in Australia, moving from colonial Orientalism to the Cold War underpinnings of the field. Drawing on ‘Asia as Method’ and the writings of Chua Beng Huat, I ask what might constitute an Asian-oriented understanding of Asia.

Speaker

Adrian Vickers holds a personal chair at the University of Sydney, and researches and publishes on the cultural history of Southeast Asia. He has held a series of Australian Research Council grants, the most recent looking at Indonesian art, the Cold War, and labour and industry in Southeast Asia. As part of a linkage grant on the history of Balinese painting, he has created The Virtual Museum of Balinese Painting, continuing previous pioneering work in eResearch and teaching. His books include the highly popular Bali; A paradise created (new edition 2012), A history of modern Indonesia (new edition 2013), Balinese art; Paintings and drawings of Bali, 1800-2010 (2012), and co-authored with Julia Martínez The pearl frontier; Labor mobility across the Australian- Indonesian maritime zone, 1870-1970 (2015), which won two book awards. Professor Vickers is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

Post-Annual General Meeting Dinner

Venue: Spicy Sichuan Restaurant
Address: 1–9 Glebe Point Road Sydney, NSW
Tel: 9660-8200
Enquiries and RSVP:
Please contact Seiko Yasumoto by 14^th October 2019
Email: seiko.yasumoto@sydney.edu.au
Telephone: 9351 4716
Fax: 9351 2319