People in Motion: Notes on the Malay Annals of Sěmarang and Cěrbon

Southeast Asia Seminar Series, Spring 2021

Pre-recorded Lecture

Speaker: Boyi Chen, Associate Professor of History, Xiamen University

Moderator: Teren Sevea, Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies, Harvard Divinity School

Produced by the Harvard University Asia Center 

Live Q&A session on Monday, March 22, 2021, from 10:00 a.m. to 10:45 a.m. EST via Zoom. REGISTER HERE.

Abstract: Since the full publication of the Malay Annals of Sěmarang and Cěrbon at Monash in 1984, the task of digging out its authentic information will remain a major task for historians for generations. With progress in research on the Javanese society of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, seen through the lens of social order, religion, economy, political organization, and material culture, scholars can now map a very different picture of early modern Javanese, or even insular Southeast Asian history, compared to a few decades ago. This talk will focus on the mobilities of insular history in three areas: the expansion of the Islam in Java, and in the Malay Archipelago, the transformation of Chinese Muslims from the Hanafi School to the Shafiʽi School, and the receding and regeneration, the ebb and flow, of Islamic/Hindu political power in northern coastal Java.