Tuesday Noon – Tamara Ho

Since August 2017, the world’s attention has turned to Myanmar and the displacement of the Rohingya, a Muslim minority group who have lived in the western state of Rakhine near the Myanmar-Bangladesh border. Over 500,00 Rohingya have recently been driven out of Myanmar into Bangladesh and other parts of the region due to escalating violence, causing a refugee emergency. While international and western media have labeled this crisis as an example of ethnic cleansing and genocide, the government and many people of Myanmar view the situation differently. In this conversation, UCR Professor Tamara Ho will discuss the history of majority nationalism and ethnic conflict in Myanmar/Burma, Aung San Suu Kyi, Burmese perceptions of what’s happening in Rakhine state, and the role of Islamophobia in the current conflict.

Tamara C. Ho is an Associate Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at UC Riverside. Her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature is from UCLA, and she participates in multiple interdisciplinary units at UCR: Southeast Asian studies, the Comparative Literature department, the Speculative Fiction and Cultures of Science program, Medical and Health Humanities, and Queer and Transgender Studies in Religion. She has published work on Burmese gender politics and diaspora, and her book Romancing Human Rights: Gender, Intimacy, and Power between Burma and the West (2015, U of Hawai’i Press) analyzes on 20th century representations of Burmese women. She teaches about migration, human rights, and race/ethnicity, and her research has been published in the journals Signs, PMLA, Discourse, and Science Fiction Studies, and in various collections in Asian American studies.