East Asian Studies Speaker Series: Madeline Hsu

Description

Madeline Hsu, a professor of professor of history and director of the Center for Global Migration Studies at the University of Maryland, will give a talk titled "Immobilization and Decolonization in Singapore, 1945-1953" as part of the East Asian Studies Speaker Series. This event is co-sponsored by the Department of History and the International Studies Program.

Perhaps the greatest challenge in preparing Singapore for independence was defining and assigning citizenship to its highly heterogeneous populations, a challenge magnified by the entrepot's majority of ethnic Chinese residents and its uncertain political relationship to Malaya. Affixing citizenship rights would determine balances of power in these future, presumably democratic, multiracial states and required the immobilization of their newly enfranchised residents while also enabling the legal exclusion of persons newly identified as aliens. Hsu will discuss how regulation of citizenship and immigration were necessary projects for decolonization and nation-state formation during the mid-20th century.