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SUMMARY:Remembering and forgetting a prince in exile: Myngoon Min  in Myan
 mar and Vietnam - Dr Natasha Pairaudeau (University of Cambridge)
DTSTART:20180131T170000Z
DTEND:20180131T180000Z
UID:TALK97117@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Barbara Roe
DESCRIPTION:The Myngoon Prince was one of several exiled contenders for th
 e throne of Upper Burma\nin the late 19th century. He was also among a wid
 er contingent of royal exiles from\nindigenous polities whose power and pu
 rpose were removed\, and their lives uprooted\, by\nEuropean contests for 
 imperial power. His life in exile took him from British India to the\nFren
 ch comptoirs of India and on to Saigon. This trajectory\, already complex\
 , was\npeppered with escapes - both rumoured and real - into the upper rea
 ches of the Mekong\nto stir rebellion in the Shan States. Myngoon was poli
 tically irrelevant by the time of his\ndeath in Saigon in 1921. Britain an
 d France had come to agree on the spoils they sought\nin Southeast Asia\, 
 and no longer found him a useful pawn. Any hope of regaining\nMandalay was
  definitively extinguished in the years preceding his death\, as his sons 
 each\ndied of drink\, despair and suicide. His legacy was debt and a group
  of maladjusted wives\,\ndaughters and granddaughters who were finally all
 owed to return home to Burma\, a place\nmany of them had never known.\n\nT
 he tragic end\, however\, was not the final story. Myngoon continued to ha
 ve an active\n‘afterlife’ in 1930s Burma as a figure firing up anti-co
 lonial political imaginings. His position\nin public memory was reshaped a
 t Burma’s independence\, and is being recast again today\nin both contem
 porary Myanmar and in Vietnam. This talk recounts a search for the exiled\
 nPrince’s legacies in both places. It will reflect on public memory in t
 wo nation-conscious\nbut increasingly integrated states in Southeast Asia\
 , and suggest ways in which historians\nmight rethink the ‘historical tu
 rn’ as a phenomenon that is less scholarly and more\nembedded within its
  contemporary context.\n
LOCATION:Seminar Room SG1\, Alison Richard Building\, 7 West Road\, Cambri
 dge CB3 9DT
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