Kama Maclean
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 202667 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Kama Maclean |
| NOMBRES | Kama |
| APELLIDO | Maclean |
| FIRMA | MACLEAN K |
| AFILIACIONES | Clark University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8562-5696 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 43 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 82 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 43 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1999 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 5 |
War ecologies and their seductions
How can we engage ethnographically with the often overlooked toxic and explosive effects of war and their harmful, frequently multi-generational, legacies? The oversight is notable because war waste insidiously contaminates and transforms entire environments, making them lethal for humans and non-humans alike at different scales and over different time frames. While anthropologists have critically examined the social, political, material, and emo…
Digital human rights storytelling and its palimpsests
This article explores new conversations about the possibilities and limits of human rights documentation as a mode of truth-seeking. Drawing on the author’s more than two decades of experience working with human rights NGOs on issues related to state-sponsored violence and humanitarian assistance across Southeast Asia, especially Myanmar, this article explores multiple ways in which human rights “facts” are produced rather than found
Failure (re-)framed
The Vietnamese Communist Party adopted a rigid Maoist-model to foment class struggle to eradicate all traces of ‘feudalism’ and ‘capitalism’ across the northern countryside during the 1950s. The mass campaign began in late 1952 then ended abruptly in late 1956 due to the violent chaos it unleashed. A growing body of critical scholarship exists on this campaign; however, the importance of the final step in the campaign's model remains largely over…
Revolutionaries, coercive institutions and the crisis of collaboration in interwar India
Earlier generations of historians interpreted revolutionary politics of the interwar period within a paradigm of failure, on the basis that it did not bring about an immediate shift in the colonial dominance in South Asia. Following the ‘revolutionary turn’ in South Asian history, scholars have suggested that revolutionary politics needs to be read for the ways in which it shifted mainstream nationalist strategies and influenced other outcomes, b…
Interactive Digital Platforms, Human Rights Fact Production, and the International Criminal Court
The International Criminal Court (ICC) initiated criminal proceedings against Ahmad Al Faqi Mahdi in 2016 for the war crime of directing the destruction of religious monuments in Timbuktu, Mali, in the context of a non-international conflict. The monuments included nine mausoleums of Sufi saints that Islamist groups regarded as idolatrous, one mosque, and approximately four thousand ancient manuscripts. The case, which successfully ended in a gui…
Human Rights 'Fact' Production and Why It Matters
Ken MacLean's Crimes in Archival Form (University of California Press, 2022) explores the many ways in which human rights 'facts' are produced rather than found. Using Myanmar as a case study, the book examines the fact-finding practices of a human rights group, two cross-border humanitarian agencies, an international law clinic, and a global campaign led by a nongovernmental organization. Foregrounding fact-finding in critical yet constructive w…
Debate on The army and the Indonesian genocide
Returning Insurgency to the Archive
The recent surge of scholarly writing on seditious material in British India tends to focus on the reception and analysis of the content of proscribed publications. We still have scant knowledge of how revolutionary literature was produced and disseminated, partly because of the necessary secrecy in which this took place. Intelligence reports and revolutionary memoirs alike tend to describe the distribution of revolutionary literature in vague te…
A review of Border Capitalism, Disrupted
"A review of Border Capitalism, Disrupted: Precarity and Struggle in a Southeast Asian Industrial Zone. By Stephen Campbell." Economic Geography, 95(2), pp. 206–207
New histories of political violence and revolutionary terrorism in modern South Asia
This book round table discusses two recent monographs on political violence and revolutionary terrorism in late colonial India, Kama Maclean’s A Revolutionary History of Interwar India: Violence, Image, Voice and Text (2015) and Durba Ghosh’s Gentlemanly Terrorists: Political Violence and the Colonial State in India, 1919–1947 (2017). Maclean’s A Revolutionary History of Interwar India uncovers how revolutionaries in Punjab and northern India res…
Comrade Ryan, International Trade Unionism and White Australia
This paper considers the parallels and disconnections between leftist thought in Australia and India at a key moment in the interwar era, as the Comintern transitioned from its Second to its Third Period, eschewing the united front with nationalist and parliamentary parties. It does this by tracing the movements of the Australian communist Jack Ryan, who visited India in 1928 representing the Pan-Pacific Trade Union (PPTU), a Comintern organisati…
The Rohingya Crisis and the Practices of Erasure
The essay utilized two concepts, lawfare and spacio-cide, to place different facets of “belonging” into conversation with one another. The concepts highlight how the progressive erasure of citizenship shapes the progressive erasure of home and vice-versa, with the result being the largest cross-border humanitarian crisis in Asia today. The first section of the essay situates the Rohingya crisis within the broader politico-military context. It ill…
Gentlemanly Terrorists
After 9/11, studies in the history of Indian anticolonialism began to examine the occurrence of political violence—construed by the British as terrorism—that accompanied nonviolent campaigns. Gentlemanly Terrorists is the first major contribution in this recent wave of scholarship to focus on Bengal, described by the British as a “hotbed of terrorism” in India. Ghosh explores the rise of violent political protest in Bengal following World War I a…
A Colonial in the Colonies
This article explores the particular subjectivity of a ‘colonial’ in the higher echelons of imperial governance in late colonial India. Focussing on the Australian statesman R. G. Casey, who served as Governor of Bengal from 1944-1946, it demonstrates the unique perspective that Casey brought to his role. Appointed to a troubled province - stricken by a famine now widely recognised as colonially-induced, on the frontline of the Japanese advance t…
The Fundamental Rights Resolution
Kama Maclean's article responds to the analytical threads offered by Partha Chatterjee's “Nationalism, Internationalism, and Cosmopolitanism: Some Observations from Modern Indian History” by focusing closely on the dynamics leading to the passing of the Fundamental Rights resolution by the Indian National Congress at Karachi in 1931. A key moment in anticolonial thought, the resolution was many things: an uneasy fusion of ideologies to assuage a …
The Art of Panicking Quietly
Unbuilt Anxieties
The conflicts shaping territorial claims and counter-claims to overlapping areas of the South China Sea threatens to significantly damage Sino-Vietnamese relations, destabilize regional security arrangements, and alter the geopolitical status quo. The governments of both countries routinely invoke historical documents, commission scientific studies, and cite legal principles to justify their competing claims in the maritime region and the resourc…
Saffron shadows and salvaged scripts
Revolution and Revelation, or, When is History Too Soon
If historiography is ordered by a series of thematic and methodological turns, then it is not hard to demonstrate that there has in recent years been a turn towards revolutionary histories of South Asia. Scholars have begun to transcend the limitations of Gandhian frameworks in search of more dynamic understandings of Indian pasts that factor in the role of violence, subterfuge and conspiracy in South Asian anti-colonial struggles. But what happe…
History Reformatted
We primarily see the archive as storehouse of memory and fact, as the place from whence history issues forth. However, the archive is much more than this; it is . . . a place of trauma and pain. It is a place of sorrow and loss for many, where unpacified ghosts with unfinished business await, yielding stories and letters different from expectation, a site where loss is localized and realized. (Murphy 2011, 481)Many Vietnamese present ritual offer…
Humanitarian mine action in Myanmar and the reterritorialization of risk
This article examines current debates for and against Humanitarian Mine Action (HMA) in Myanmar. The analysis, based on interviews with key local, national, and international actors involved in HMA, reveals why so many of them regard the mapping and removal of "nuisance" landmines as posing a security threat to the peace process. (Landmines deny people access to territory; when conflict ends, these landmines no longer serve a strategic purpose an…
Allison J. Truitt. Dreaming of Money in Ho Chi Minh City. Seattle
Dreaming of Money in Ho Chi Minh CityThe scholarly study of banknotes (notaphily) is not a new phenomenon. But it did not take systematic modern form until the 1920s. (Ironically, it emerged under the Weimar Republic just as Germany was entering a three-year period of hyperinflation.) Since then, the number of numismatic associations has grown considerably, as have specialized publications. Banknote News is one relevant example. Banknote News iss…
Between Love and Freedom
Examinations, access, and inequity within the empire
c) 2015 The Institute of Postcolonial Studies. Recent scholarship on transnational immigration restriction have tended to frame British policies in opposition to those of white settler colonies, emphasising the frustration of British officialdom at the explicitly racist exclusions in South Africa, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. While acknowledging these, this paper interrogates the British position, by locating synergies between the deploymen…
Counter‐Accounting with Invisible Data
This article examines the counter‐accounting methods one NGO, EarthRights International (ERI), uses to make Myanmar's notoriously opaque energy sector more transparent. ERI's methodological approach relies heavily on the identification of “invisible data,” which do not appear in the statistics that governments and foreign energy companies release concerning their joint ventures. However, the data leave patterned traces in other statistical financ…
The Rohingya Crisis and the Practices of Erasure
The essay utilized two concepts, lawfare and spacio-cide, to place different facets of “belonging” into conversation with one another. The concepts highlight how the progressive erasure of citizenship shapes the progressive erasure of home and vice-versa, with the result being the largest cross-border humanitarian crisis in Asia today. The first section of the essay situates the Rohingya crisis within the broader politico-military context. It ill…
The Portrait's Journey
Bhagat Singh, the revolutionary nationalist executed by the British in 1931, continues to be an enormously popular figure in contemporary India, immediately recognizable in ubiquitous posters, stickers and placards by his distinctive hat. This article uncovers the story behind Bhagat Singh's original 'hat photograph' by tracing the portrait's journey from the time it was taken, in 1929, to the early 1930s. The portrait was devised as a tactic of …
Examinations, access, and inequity within the empire
c) 2015 The Institute of Postcolonial Studies. Recent scholarship on transnational immigration restriction have tended to frame British policies in opposition to those of white settler colonies, emphasising the frustration of British officialdom at the explicitly racist exclusions in South Africa, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. While acknowledging these, this paper interrogates the British position, by locating synergies between the deploymen…
The History of a Legend
Narratives about the revolutionary movement have largely been the preserve of the popular domain in India, as Christopher Pinney has recently pointed out. India's best-known revolutionary, Bhagat Singh-who was executed by the British in 1931 for his role in the Lahore Conspiracy Case-has been celebrated more in posters, colourful bazaar histories and comic books than in academic tomes. These popular formats have established a hegemonic narrative …
Enacting Anticorruption
This essay examines the ongoing “fight against corruption” in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. The PMU-18 scandal (ca. 2005–2007), the country's largest to date, is featured as a way to explore how different initiatives to audit the financial-moral practices of officials at all levels of government shape one another in contemporary Vietnam. This focus, which considers the material consequences of different discursive positions, reveals a curiou…
Making the Colonial State Work for You
It is widely believed that the Allahabad Kumbh Mela is an ancient religious festival or that it is "ageless", that its roots lie obscured in time immemorial. Editorials and articles in the press atmelatime (every twelve years) lyrically emphasize the continuity of the pilgrimage throughout India's past, find inspiration in its durability and changeless character, and marvel at the anachronism of an ancient festival thriving in the modern world ("…
In Search of Kilometer Zero
Bùi Minh Quốc left for the border in late 2001. His clandestine trip, which took nearly a month to complete on a 50cc Honda Cub motorcycle, retraced the perimeter of Việt Bắc, the name for the mountainous region that stretches across ten provinces in northeastern Vietnam. Quốc, a poet of considerable repute, documented the highpoints of the ride in verse. But the region's rugged beauty, which holds a prominent place in official histories of the a…
Imagining the Indian nationalist movement
Recent interventions suggest that the history of India's nationalist movement might be profitably reconstructed with reference to visual culture as a way of counteracting both dominant Congress teleologies and the colonial prejudices embedded in governmental records. This article furthers this hypothesis by undertaking a close examination of Desh Chintan, a rich nationalist image from the 1930s. Grounding Desh Chintan against a matrix of archival…
Reading Revolutionaries
This essay maps out the discursive and political trajectories of the 'revolutionary' in Indian historical and literary worlds. Focusing on the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army and related interwar Indian anticolonial agitators, this essay reflects on the lineages, breadth, and productivity of the term. By tracing the figure of the revolutionary, we show that its genealogy reflects a wide range of political allegiances, ethical concerns, and ae…
Manifest Socialism
A close examination of archival documents and other materials from the state-controlled press reveals there to have been at least five competing modes for organizing labor on public works projects in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam during the mid to late 1950s. Each of these modes is examined to illustrate how ideological concerns and bureaucratic struggles shaped not only the postwar reconstruction of infrastructure but also efforts to "build…
The Fundamental Rights Resolution
Kama Maclean's article responds to the analytical threads offered by Partha Chatterjee's “Nationalism, Internationalism, and Cosmopolitanism: Some Observations from Modern Indian History” by focusing closely on the dynamics leading to the passing of the Fundamental Rights resolution by the Indian National Congress at Karachi in 1931. A key moment in anticolonial thought, the resolution was many things: an uneasy fusion of ideologies to assuage a …
Counter‐Accounting with Invisible Data
This article examines the counter‐accounting methods one NGO, EarthRights International (ERI), uses to make Myanmar's notoriously opaque energy sector more transparent. ERI's methodological approach relies heavily on the identification of “invisible data,” which do not appear in the statistics that governments and foreign energy companies release concerning their joint ventures. However, the data leave patterned traces in other statistical financ…
What Durga Bhabhi did next
The revolutionary movement in the United Provinces and Punjab, which peaked in activity in the years 1928–1932, is often thought in inherently gendered terms, and as being underpinned by a masculine agenda of retributive anti-colonial violence. This study attempts to peel back the layers of masculinity attributed to the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA), through a study of the life of Durga Devi Vohra (1907–1999), more popularly k…
Returning Insurgency to the Archive
The recent surge of scholarly writing on seditious material in British India tends to focus on the reception and analysis of the content of proscribed publications. We still have scant knowledge of how revolutionary literature was produced and disseminated, partly because of the necessary secrecy in which this took place. Intelligence reports and revolutionary memoirs alike tend to describe the distribution of revolutionary literature in vague te…
New histories of political violence and revolutionary terrorism in modern South Asia
This book round table discusses two recent monographs on political violence and revolutionary terrorism in late colonial India, Kama Maclean’s A Revolutionary History of Interwar India: Violence, Image, Voice and Text (2015) and Durba Ghosh’s Gentlemanly Terrorists: Political Violence and the Colonial State in India, 1919–1947 (2017). Maclean’s A Revolutionary History of Interwar India uncovers how revolutionaries in Punjab and northern India res…
Unbuilt Anxieties
The conflicts shaping territorial claims and counter-claims to overlapping areas of the South China Sea threatens to significantly damage Sino-Vietnamese relations, destabilize regional security arrangements, and alter the geopolitical status quo. The governments of both countries routinely invoke historical documents, commission scientific studies, and cite legal principles to justify their competing claims in the maritime region and the resourc…
Revolution and Revelation, or, When is History Too Soon
If historiography is ordered by a series of thematic and methodological turns, then it is not hard to demonstrate that there has in recent years been a turn towards revolutionary histories of South Asia. Scholars have begun to transcend the limitations of Gandhian frameworks in search of more dynamic understandings of Indian pasts that factor in the role of violence, subterfuge and conspiracy in South Asian anti-colonial struggles. But what happe…
Lawfare and Impunity in Burma since the 2000 Ban on Forced Labour
The article examines the efforts of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) over the past decade to convince government officials to take meaningful steps towards the eradication of forced labour in Burma. Despite the government's intransigence on this issue, ILO-led interventions have produced some tangible results: a ban on the practice in 2000 and the creation of a complaint mechanism in 2007 that enables its Liaison Officer to determine w…
Conflicting spaces
Embracing the untouchables
Embracing the untouchables
Conflicting spaces
Making the Colonial State Work for You
It is widely believed that the Allahabad Kumbh Mela is an ancient religious festival or that it is "ageless", that its roots lie obscured in time immemorial. Editorials and articles in the press atmelatime (every twelve years) lyrically emphasize the continuity of the pilgrimage throughout India's past, find inspiration in its durability and changeless character, and marvel at the anachronism of an ancient festival thriving in the modern world ("…
Manifest Socialism
A close examination of archival documents and other materials from the state-controlled press reveals there to have been at least five competing modes for organizing labor on public works projects in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam during the mid to late 1950s. Each of these modes is examined to illustrate how ideological concerns and bureaucratic struggles shaped not only the postwar reconstruction of infrastructure but also efforts to "build…
Pilgrimage and power
"Today the Kumbh Mela in Allahabad, India, is a major Hindu religious pilgrimage and the largest religious gathering in the world. In 2001, according to the government of Uttar Pradesh, 30 million pilgrims were drawn to the confluence of the rivers Ganga and Yamuna on the most auspicious day for bathing. In an impressive feat of organization and administration, the first mela of the new millennium was managed to the overwhelming satisfaction of m…
In Search of Kilometer Zero
Bùi Minh Quốc left for the border in late 2001. His clandestine trip, which took nearly a month to complete on a 50cc Honda Cub motorcycle, retraced the perimeter of Việt Bắc, the name for the mountainous region that stretches across ten provinces in northeastern Vietnam. Quốc, a poet of considerable repute, documented the highpoints of the ride in verse. But the region's rugged beauty, which holds a prominent place in official histories of the a…
The Collected Works of the Communist Party
Research Article| June 01 2010 The Collected Works of the Communist Party: The Possibilities and Limits of Official Representations of Actually Existing Government Ken MacLean Ken MacLean Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of Vietnamese Studies (2010) 5 (2): 195–207. https://doi.org/10.1525/vs.2010.5.2.195 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review S…
Studying Hinduism
The Portrait's Journey
Bhagat Singh, the revolutionary nationalist executed by the British in 1931, continues to be an enormously popular figure in contemporary India, immediately recognizable in ubiquitous posters, stickers and placards by his distinctive hat. This article uncovers the story behind Bhagat Singh's original 'hat photograph' by tracing the portrait's journey from the time it was taken, in 1929, to the early 1930s. The portrait was devised as a tactic of …
State, Society and the Market in Contemporary Vietnam
Pham Thi Vach, who later became a Communist Party member and secretary for the People’s Committee in Kim Ty District (Hung Yen Province), first demonstrated her leadership potential in the late 1950s, while still a teenager. Concerned by heavy rains, she mobilized her peers to save the fall harvest one year by carrying out urgently needed repairs to dikes that protect Hung Cuong Commune from catastrophic flood. Leading by example, Vach personally…
A “Biography Not” of General Trần Độ
This article explores the controversial life, writings, and death of Lieutenant General Trần Độ, a decorated war hero who became Vietnam’s leading political dissident during the final decade of his life. The general made use of his biography to author “open letters” that circulated via elite social networks and later the internet. In them, he called on the Vietnamese Communist Party to democratize itself in order to foster just and equitable deve…
Enacting Anticorruption
This essay examines the ongoing “fight against corruption” in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. The PMU-18 scandal (ca. 2005–2007), the country's largest to date, is featured as a way to explore how different initiatives to audit the financial-moral practices of officials at all levels of government shape one another in contemporary Vietnam. This focus, which considers the material consequences of different discursive positions, reveals a curiou…
Lawfare and Impunity in Burma since the 2000 Ban on Forced Labour
The article examines the efforts of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) over the past decade to convince government officials to take meaningful steps towards the eradication of forced labour in Burma. Despite the government's intransigence on this issue, ILO-led interventions have produced some tangible results: a ban on the practice in 2000 and the creation of a complaint mechanism in 2007 that enables its Liaison Officer to determine w…
Letter from Kama Maclean
The History of a Legend
Narratives about the revolutionary movement have largely been the preserve of the popular domain in India, as Christopher Pinney has recently pointed out. India's best-known revolutionary, Bhagat Singh-who was executed by the British in 1931 for his role in the Lahore Conspiracy Case-has been celebrated more in posters, colourful bazaar histories and comic books than in academic tomes. These popular formats have established a hegemonic narrative …
What Durga Bhabhi did next
The revolutionary movement in the United Provinces and Punjab, which peaked in activity in the years 1928–1932, is often thought in inherently gendered terms, and as being underpinned by a masculine agenda of retributive anti-colonial violence. This study attempts to peel back the layers of masculinity attributed to the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA), through a study of the life of Durga Devi Vohra (1907–1999), more popularly k…
Reading Revolutionaries
This essay maps out the discursive and political trajectories of the 'revolutionary' in Indian historical and literary worlds. Focusing on the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army and related interwar Indian anticolonial agitators, this essay reflects on the lineages, breadth, and productivity of the term. By tracing the figure of the revolutionary, we show that its genealogy reflects a wide range of political allegiances, ethical concerns, and ae…
Counter‐Accounting with Invisible Data
This article examines the counter‐accounting methods one NGO, EarthRights International (ERI), uses to make Myanmar's notoriously opaque energy sector more transparent. ERI's methodological approach relies heavily on the identification of “invisible data,” which do not appear in the statistics that governments and foreign energy companies release concerning their joint ventures. However, the data leave patterned traces in other statistical financ…
Imagining the Indian nationalist movement
Recent interventions suggest that the history of India's nationalist movement might be profitably reconstructed with reference to visual culture as a way of counteracting both dominant Congress teleologies and the colonial prejudices embedded in governmental records. This article furthers this hypothesis by undertaking a close examination of Desh Chintan, a rich nationalist image from the 1930s. Grounding Desh Chintan against a matrix of archival…
Allison J. Truitt. Dreaming of Money in Ho Chi Minh City. Seattle
Dreaming of Money in Ho Chi Minh CityThe scholarly study of banknotes (notaphily) is not a new phenomenon. But it did not take systematic modern form until the 1920s. (Ironically, it emerged under the Weimar Republic just as Germany was entering a three-year period of hyperinflation.) Since then, the number of numismatic associations has grown considerably, as have specialized publications. Banknote News is one relevant example. Banknote News iss…
Between Love and Freedom
Examinations, access, and inequity within the empire
c) 2015 The Institute of Postcolonial Studies. Recent scholarship on transnational immigration restriction have tended to frame British policies in opposition to those of white settler colonies, emphasising the frustration of British officialdom at the explicitly racist exclusions in South Africa, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. While acknowledging these, this paper interrogates the British position, by locating synergies between the deploymen…
The Art of Panicking Quietly
Unbuilt Anxieties
The conflicts shaping territorial claims and counter-claims to overlapping areas of the South China Sea threatens to significantly damage Sino-Vietnamese relations, destabilize regional security arrangements, and alter the geopolitical status quo. The governments of both countries routinely invoke historical documents, commission scientific studies, and cite legal principles to justify their competing claims in the maritime region and the resourc…
Saffron shadows and salvaged scripts
Political science (36 obras) · Law (31 obras) · Sociology (31 obras) · Politics (23 obras) · Law (21 obras) · History (20 obras) · Philosophy (14 obras) · Colonialism (13 obras) · History (13 obras) · Economics (11 obras)