Christian C. Lentz _"A Biography of Decolonization in Cold War Southeast Asia"

In-person event

This paper revisits mid-20th century Asia, Southeast Asia especially, when the promise of decolonization met the perils of the Cold War. Theoretically, it argues for an eventful geography of decolonization based on the actions, perspectives, and biographies of historical actors. Empirically, it discusses the life and work of Oey Hong Lee (1924-1992), a visionary intellectual, activist, and journalist from Indonesia. His Indonesian-language book “Asia Won in Dien Bien Phu” (1961) narrates the diplomatic and military struggles between France and Vietnam that ended the First Indochina War (1946-54). In dialog with anti-colonial theorists Aime Cesaire, Frantz Fanon, and others, Oey advanced a regional understanding that balanced contextual nuance with geopolitical imperative. In contrast to his better-known contemporaries, Oey focused on the regional tensions between decolonization and geopolitical struggle, analyzing less the universalizing binary between colonizer and colonized and more the specific histories of place, in this case Vietnam and Indonesia. Insodoing, he rejected the regional construct of Southeast Asia as a creature of American-led Cold War machinations in favor of an emancipatory idea of Asia positioned at the vanguard of a decolonizing world order. All the while, Oey navigated a political landscape in Indonesia that, between 1955-65, was roiling with Cold War intrigue, nativist Islam, and anti-Chinese sentiment that ultimately forced him into exile.   

Christian C. Lentz is Associate Professor of Geography and Environment and Adjunct Associate Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is author of Contested Territory: Điện Biên Phủ and the Making of Northwest Vietnam (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), winner of the 2021 Harry J. Benda Prize for outstanding first book in Southeast Asian studies. His articles have appeared in The Journal of Peasant Studies, Political Geography, Modern Asian Studies, American Historical Review, and other journals. He has held fellowships with Fulbright in Vietnam, the Asia Research Insitute at the National University of Singapore, and the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. His current research examines territory, nationalism, and decolonization in Indonesia and the two Vietnams during the early Cold War.