Book Talk: “Emplacing East Timor: Regime Change and Knowledge Production, 1860–2010”
Wednesday, April 16 2025, 9:00 – 10:30 pm (Eastern Standard Time) / 3:00 pm – 4:30 pm (Hawaiian Standard Time)
Thursday, April 17, 2025, 10:00 – 11:30 am (Timor Leste Time)
Link for Zoom Registration: https://go.hawaii.edu/x5b
About the Book Talk:
This virtual book talk features a recent publication (May 2024) by Dr. Kisho Tsuchiya, in which he examines the relationship between regime change and knowledge production in East Timor, offering an alternative framework for understanding its history from the 1850s to the 2010s. He argues that prevailing perceptions of East Timor have been shaped by large-scale wars, postwar consolidation, and the influence of foreign observers. Dr. Tsuchiya highlights how the transitions that define our understanding of East Timor have been intricately tied to cycles of violence and regime transformations.
About the Book:
Emplacing East Timor explores the relationship between the cycle of regime change and that of knowledge production, offering an alternative framework to periodize the history from the 1850s to 2010s. Kisho Tsuchiya shows that the prevailing perceptions of East Timor have been shaped by large-scale wars, postwar consolidation, and the dominance of foreign observers. The transitions that construct what we know about East Timor have followed the rhythm of devastating violence and regime transformations. Playing a role as well are personal, institutional, and geopolitical interests and the creativity of Timorese and foreign observers. Acknowledging this cycle, Tsuchiya interweaves narrative of crucial events and political movements with an analysis of Timor’s connections to global circulations and historical transitions. He traces key persons and communities that shaped the contour of East Timor—from Portuguese colonial officers to anthropologists, Japanese occupiers to Australian activists, and Timorese poets to revolutionaries. Their experiences and imaginations of (East) Timor have been expressed through scholarly works, secret documents, policy statements, ceremonies, revolutionary songs, and museums.
Published by the University of of Hawai’i Press, May 2024 / ISBN-13: 9780824894986 / Hardback: $68.00
Purchase Online: https://uhpress.hawaii.edu/title/emplacing-east-timor-regime-change-and-knowledge-production-1860-2010/
Promotion code 30% discount: AAS2025. (It’s good through July 31.)
About the Author:
Kisho Tsuchiya is a historian and Southeast Asian area studies scholar specializing in colonialism, the Cold War, race and ethnicity, social warfare, place and space, borderlands, identity politics, community formation, religious transformation, human-rights, and multiculturalism. His formal training was in history, Southeast Asian Studies, and international relations. Within the field of history, he focused on Asian history and topics such as historiography, social history, longue durée and the Cold War.
His fieldwork for the PhD dissertation focused on Timor-Leste and Indonesia since 2013. But, he also conducted archival research in Singapore, Portugal and Japan. More recently, he has been conducting fieldwork in Northern Mindanao in the Philippines, in addition to Timor-Island. Currently, he collects oral history interviews with various groups of people in order to reconstruct local experiences of the Cold War period from the perspectives of “ordinary people.
