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Julia Stephens, "Worldly Afterlives: Tracing Family Trails Between India and Empire" (Princeton UP, 2025)
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Julia Stevens
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Nicholas Gordon
Hello, I'm Nicholas Gordon, host of the Asian Review of Books podcast, done in partnership with the New Books Network. In this podcast, we interview fiction and nonfiction authors working in around and about the Asia Pacific region. The British Empire covered much of the world during the 19th century, and each time someone moved through it, they left a paper trail in their wake. Julius Stephens, the author of Worldly Tracing Family Trails Between India and Empire, uses that archive of documents to try to piece together the stories of Indian migrants that traveled the empire throughout their lives and in some cases, after their lives were over. Julia joins us today to talk about her book and her attempt to find a different approach to studying these histories. Figures like Kuala Lumpur Bagnate Kambhusami Pillai, Zanzibar, Bombay matriarch Jambai, and the elusive sailor John Muhammad. Julia is an associate professor of history at Rutgers University. She is also the author of Governing Law, Empire and Secularism in South Asia. So, Julia, thank you so much for coming on the show today. You know, perhaps it's kind of I want to start by talking about the approach your book tries to take. I mean, what did you want to try to do with worldly afterlives and how maybe does it differ from other books trying to examine these sorts of family histories?
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Julia Stevens
Great. Well, I mean, first, thank you so much for having me on the podcast. I'm really excited to have this conversation about the book. So, you know, I'll kind of give both a scholarly answer to your question and a kind of, I think, more personal answer to the question, which kind of mirrors, you know, the spirit of the book more broadly. So I'd say kind of as a scholar, some of the things I was thinking about is I've been very influenced by histories of gender and sexuality and family in Empire. So just to kind of give like a, you know, representative work. Durba Ghosh's Sex and the Family in Colonial India was like a really foundational book for my thinking that I read now, I don't know, a couple decades ago. But then I also love when scholars write about their own family histories. So, you know, to give just a kind of another representative work. You know, I really like Hazel Carvey's Imperial Intimacies, A Tale of Two Islands. But when I was thinking about the book I wanted and could write, you know, I was definitely aware of the fact that I am not, in a simplistic way of from a South Asian background. So it didn't seem like I was going to write a book about my own family. And so I'm kind of thinking through, you know, what can I contribute to this conversation? And, you know, what I really hit on was to kind of do a combination of using my skills as a historian to kind of trace family histories through colonial archives, but then to also really try to think about how families go about reconstructing their past. And so some of that is what we would traditionally think of as genealogy. So looking at family trees, looking at websites like Ancestry.com, but you know, particularly for families who trace their roots through the Indian Ocean, some of those kind of traditional modes of genealogy, you know, particularly kind of these, you know, mass scale commercial websites like Ancestry may not be that useful. So I also try to think about things like how families pass objects like jewelry or photos from generation to generation and kind of different types of media that families with these kinds of itineraries have found kind of more useful. So in that way, I ended up kind of writing about Instagram because I found people doing really interesting things with family history on, on Instagram. So but I would say kind of from a personal perspective, as I worked on the project and particularly as I kind of talked about with families who were doing this work themselves, they kept bringing me back to the question of, well, what's your family history? And like, how is your family history motivating this project? And I think they forced me to kind of dig into the like, you know, deeper recesses of my motivations. And I think, you know, what I ultimately came to kind of understand through those conversations is so I'm married into a South Asian family, my in laws are originally from Kerala. And so I do think part of the kind of perspective in the book is of a daughter in law of someone who is kind of inside and outside of these histories. And then I think also sort of my own family background, I come from a mixed religious marriage of my parents, which when they got married, that was a really big deal. And then my own marriage is mixed. And so I think there was an element of kind of selection bias in that the people who ended up wanting to share their stories with me and who really captured my attention, I do think ultimately there were some resonances between kind of the ways in which we inhabit diaspora in different ways, which are not necessarily the kind of traditional kind of ethnic and religious boxes that often define how people talk about diaspora and more these kind of extra experiences of different types of mobility, of diasporas kind of flowing into each other. And so, you know, I think there is both a kind of scholarly and a kind of personal dynamic going on in the book, although it actually took me a much longer time to kind of realize like how the personal was kind of in informing the book.
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Nicholas Gordon
So, I mean, the book is called kind of Afterlives, which means it's focused on kind of what people? I guess how people talk about your subjects kind of after they. They pass away. You know, what future? Well, what, what, what, what success? What, what succeeding generations? I'm going to get mixed up with, like, past and future tense here, but what succeeding generation going to talk about these people? So, you know, as you were kind of exploring these family histories, I mean, what did the descendants of these, in these families themselves kind of think back to what these people were and how they saw, you know, that kind of conversation with previous generations.
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Julia Stevens
Yeah. So, I mean, I actually. I love that you kind of have that, like, moment of confusion with time because maybe we can kind of get into this at some point in the interview. The book has a kind of a somewhat atypical, like, approach to time. And it is a book that's both in the past and the present in many parts of the story. And I think that's also a kind of roundabout way of getting to the question of sort of, you know, how to people today to relate to these kind of, you know, their family stories of imperial migration. And, you know, I think that we kind of understand a lot about the violence of empire. And, you know, certainly in the scholarship, we also know a lot about the ways in which empire really kind of reshaped how people understood family, the types of intimacies that were seen as, you know, normative or that were viewed as sort of elicit. But what I'm really kind of interested in kind of trying to unpack through working with families in the present is how have those kind of imperial legacies kind of reverberated across generations. And I certainly think that's partially a story of the inheritance of trauma and displacement, but I also found that it was a story of resilience and a kind of creative reworking of inheritance of empire. And. And in a way, this is certainly a history of how kind of violent empire can be. But I think also people who inhabited these spaces and who passed this legacies onto their children often kind of did really sort of creative things with those imperial legacies. So I kind of give an example in my book in that I encountered a story about a woman, an Indian woman in South Africa, who is a kind of matriarch in the community. And she wore a pendant of Queen Victoria, you know, around her neck. And that was something people really remembered about her. Was she like a total, like, you know, just loved empire and that's why she wore that pendant? I don't. I don't think so, because she also had a background of resisting apartheid, you Know, very much someone who sort of understood the racism of empire and its sort of, you know, reincarnations through kind of the apartheid regime. What I really saw that as a. As a way of kind of taking the Persona of Queen Victoria and kind of taking it upon herself and projecting her own kind of power, you know, maybe even kind of like regal presence through kind of, you know, almost like embodying and domesticating the figure of Queen Victoria in the mode of wearing it as a pendant. So I think I'm really interested in those really complex ways that, you know, people who lived in the shadow of empire sort of exercise their own agency in reworking empire and then how that kind of impacted their children and grandchildren and great grandchildren.
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Nicholas Gordon
Well, let's actually talk about empire. You know, let's explore kind of the period of time that your book covers. I mean, what's the state of the British Empire during this time? How are the various parts of this empire kind of stood, stitched together? How are people kind of moving through the British Empire? If we can talk more about kind of the setting for kind of the lack of a better term.
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Julia Stevens
Yeah, I think stories should always begin with setting the scene. And ultimately I'm a scholar, but what gets me up in the morning, it's really kind of the work of storytelling. So I think that's a great thing to kind of lay out here. So I'd say, you know, the core history of. Of my book sort of unfolds from about the middle of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th century. And this is really the period in which British imperial power is at its height. And India is part of a kind of sprawling global empire. So it's a time in which about 30 million Indians across that period leave India to go all across the globe as indentured laborers, which is maybe at this point a more well known story, but also as soldiers, as police, as merchants. I also found these kind of crazy, more eclectic stories of circus performers in almost every role imaginable. And then, you know, the book continues through to the middle of the 20th century. Because I'm also interested in the period in which that empire starts to unwind through processes of anti colonialism, nationalism, war, and then independence, and then kind of the creation of post colonial states. And those histories were sometimes complex for Indians who were living outside of India and whose mobility had in some ways been kind of, if not mobilized by empire. They traveled imperial circuits. So the post colonial period is also really interesting, I think, from their perspective. And in terms of like, you know, thinking about what was the British Empire that Indians would have encountered in that roughly hundred year period. I mean, I think you might have used like the word that it was a kind of like stitched together empire. And I like that, like, phrasing because, you know, at first, to me it's like, oh, it's a kind of quilt. But it's probably better to think of it as like a Frankenstein. A quilt is a way too kind of gentle domestic image. But, you know, it is very variegated. And so there's parts of the British Empire, like large parts of India, that are directly ruled by the British during this period. Period. But then my book also parts of my book enfold in spaces like Zanzibar, which has a kind of form of indirect rule in that Zanzibar still had a sultanate. In fact, in the case of Zanzibar, obviously it's on the coast of Africa, but the rulers during this period, at least nominally, are a sultanate of Omani origin. But the British are increasingly interfering and controlling with controlling sort of the politics of Zanzibar, even as they leave those sultans in place. And then one of the moves I ended up making in the book is that I also looked at places that were once part of the British Empire but were no longer part of the British Empire during my period. So especially the US And I ended up doing this because I think they really functioned as part of a kind of system of white settler colonialism. And so particularly when we're thinking about Asian migration and policies of Asian exclusion that become, you know, an important part of the landscape in the late 19th and early 20th century, there's really, really similar patterns in the U.S. canada, South Africa, Australia. And so I thought it actually really made sense to include the US in the book to kind of get that picture of, on the one hand, we're talking about the British Empire, but we're also talking about a kind of network of white settler colonialism. But I sort of said this a little bit earlier in the conversation, but the book doesn't really take a kind of traditional approach to historical time. So I told you kind of, oh, it covers roughly these hundred years, but a lot of, you know, Instagram was not around in the middle 20th century. And, you know, I think the reason I have that kind of, you know, unorthodox approach to time is that for families, the kind of boundaries between the past and the present are more blurry. And so like, you know, a story about an illicit relationship that happened a hundred years ago. For historians, that's the past. But for the family, that relationship may still very much kind of call into question who they are, you know, how they identify. And so, you know, the organization of the book is actually not chronological in a kind of traditional historian sense. It kind of unfolds as what I call a kind of arc of an afterlife. So it starts with a chapter on a funeral and the disposal of the. Of a body immediately after death. Then I have another chapter that looks at the division of material assets, which is also a process that happens, you know, well, at least starts to happen quickly after a person dies. In some cases it stretches on for decades. But then the kind of latter chapters of the book kind of skip ahead in time and I kind of look at processes that more unfold kind of in later generations. So processes of how families like told, forgot, retold stories about their families, how they made photo albums, and then also kind of how these histories have been sort of remembered and memorialized in kind of public history and heritage projects. And that's how, you know, I get from like, you know, the 19th century all the way up to Instagram in one kind of, you know, sprawling book.
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Nicholas Gordon
Why don't we kind of talk about some of the actual people you, you cover in worldly afterlives and you know, maybe we'll start with the first person who you cover in your book, you know, this kind of educated Malaysian civil servant, you know, or, or bureaucrat Thambu Sami Pillai, in kind of all the discussions around, well, certainly, you know, what they did when he passed away and kind of what he represents about kind of the British Empire at that time.
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Julia Stevens
Yeah, so, I mean, he is a really fascinating character. And you know, he, in contemporary Malaysia is kind of understood, understood as, you know, a sort of pioneer of the Indian as well as the kind of Kamal Hindu community. Both for his role, first working within the kind of imperial bureaucracy in Kuala Lumpur, but then also he uses all those connections he makes in that role and then he basically becomes a business tycoon who's involved in construction, who's involved in labor recruitment in building plantations that really are. Are very crucial for the kind of 20th century history of Malaya. But I actually never set out to write a chapter on him. I was trying to write a chapter on ghost stories in Singapore, which is maybe a book I will write at some point. But I was kind of digging through old newspapers from Singapore and I came across coverage of his death in 1902. As I said, he's really a very, very well known figure in Kuala Lumpur. But he's actually born in Singapore, and he passes away in Singapore as well. And there was this kind of just crazy description that when he passes away in Singapore, his body is embalmed, and then it's loaded onto an imperial yacht that travels from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur. And then when it reaches kl, there's this kind of enormous procession with Indians and Europeans and Malays and Chinese people, and then they bury his body. And that kind of struck me as surprising because, you know, as a, you know, a leader of the Hindu community, I would have perhaps expected him to be cremated. So just kind of based on those stories, I was like, okay, I'm going to go to KL and kind of try to see if I can find his grave. And maybe that will give me some insight, you know, into what is going on here, as well as working in the archives and in kl. And I won't give away the whole story of, like, what happens with my search for his grave. You could read the book to find that out. But that process of looking for the grave also ended up leading me to hear a lot more about women in his family. And so I think, well, and that those stories of women in his family, as well as the reasons that he was buried rather than cremated, kind of did two important pieces of work for my thinking on the book. I mean, one was really thinking about when we shift the telling of diasporic histories from kind of histories of a patriarch to histories of wider circles of kin and particularly kinship networks that include women. And these. I define kinship very broadly. You know, it doesn't have to be heteronormative or legal relations, but the kind of circle of people who kind of are within that orbit of. Of kin. That when we really kind of think about that, that wider perspective and the role of women in those kinship networks, that that also kind of shifts the way we think about diaspora. And when I started to really think about Tamu Swami's, the women in his life, that kind of picture of him as this leader of, like, the Indian Tamil, Hindu diaspora in Malaya kind of started to unravel. And that was kind of really helpful for me in thinking about, okay, you know, maybe I need a different way of thinking about diaspora. And that, you know, I'm going to think about diaspora in terms of inheritances, of migration and mobility, not necessarily as a kind of, you know, ethnic or religious identity, which is the way I think it's more commonly kind of used, particularly by scholars.
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Nicholas Gordon
You know, you mentioned kind of why I tell the stories around you Know, around kin, around kind of the. Sometimes the women, around these people's lives. And this kind of leads me to. I think. I think the. The story you tell about. About John Bai. And, you know, I guess my question is kind of how. How difficult is it to kind of of piece these stories together? I mean, what are the sources you're uncovering? You know, how are you then kind of analyzing those sources to kind of tell this broader or even this like. Or even a different story about these people? I mean, like, what's the actual process of, you know, putting something like. Like. Like one of these particular stories together?
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Julia Stevens
Yeah. So John Bai is the perfect person to ask this question about. She was the matriarch in an Indian Ocean family firm that kind of split their time between Zanzibar and Bombay, but had kind of a network of commercial relations that extended across the globe. And I personally first encountered Jianbai in the records of a legal case in which she was battling her stepsons for control over her husband's estate. And so her husband is a figure, Tarya Topan, who is kind of similar to Tamuswamy in that he's a kind of patriarch of the Indian diaspora in East Africa. But I actually ended up being much more interested in Dambai as a character, and I was kind of tracing her through these legal records. And then I was really lucky in that her grandson is still alive, Farouk Topan. And I reached out to him, and he shared with me an unpublished biography that his father had written about his father. So Tarya Topan, who was the husband of John Bai. But once I kind of worked through that manuscript, it became really clear to me that it was possible to kind of read the biography of Tarya Topan against the grain, to sort of reframe it as a history also of John Bay. And so, kind of through those legal sources and then through that family biography, I learned a lot about John Bai. But I still was kind of seeing her as this kind of singular. She's such a crazy character. I mean, in those documents, she's described as very argumentative, as kind of like a pain in the butt, to put it, like, you know, inelegantly. The men in her life, other than Tara Topan, who adored her, but her stepsons and other men found her very aggravating, as was often the case with, you know, women who fought aggressively for. For their. Their. Their rights. But I was kind of unsatisfied with that picture of John by just within that kind of orbit of men and the often, like, somewhat, you Know, in fact, quite sexist ways in which she comes across in that kind of source material. And then just in a kind of crazy late night Googling session, I came across a reference to a bracelet and a photograph of John Bay that John Bay had given to the wife of an American sea captain who had traveled to Zanzibar. There were a lot of trading relationships between sort of New England and East Africa. This is one of the ships that was sort of part of that trading network. And the wife of the captain of the ship, you know, went along on this journey. And we don't know the nature of her relationship to John Bay, but we do know that she brought home this bracelet and photograph of John Bai, which then her daughter will end up giving to the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem. So it was really like the last place I would have expected to find materials for this project, which I was thinking about as kind of Bombay and Zanzibar. But it really kind of unlocked the possibility through that photograph and then some other photographs and then the bracelet of really kind of placing Jon Bai within a network of women that extended across the globe. And the sort of thing I really took away from that first kind of experience was sort of how important looking beyond textual sources can be for finding histories of women. And that there were kind of texts available for Johan Bai's history. But actually, ultimately, I think some of the most interesting sources were, you know, the bracelet and the photograph. And that really became kind of, you know, a template for thinking about how kind of visual and material sources, as well as visual and material analysis, can really do a lot of work to accomplish what I kind of call in the book feminist family histories, and to kind of unsettle the kind of patriarchal patterns that often, you know, have both dominated kind of histories of the economy in the Indian Ocean, but also often dominate the way that families kind of tell their diasporic stories, you know, with, you know, to children and grandchildren.
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Nicholas Gordon
And there's one more kind of person I'd love to talk about, you know, particularly kind of John. John Muhammad, you know, who's a. He's a seaman. He kind of goes between the US And Britain. His. His records seem to change depending on where he is, which again, I guess, once again gets into the difficulties of. Of kind of looking at all of these documents and kind of what you like, what you're working with. But could you tell us a bit more about him?
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Julia Stevens
Yes. So he is this remarkable shapeshifter who at once kind of drove me crazy for many years, but who, again, Trying to kind of find him or them, which I'll kind of explain in a moment, was sort of both the pleasure and the torturous work of the historian. So he, John Muhammad, kind of appears in records as an Indian sailor who worked in the British Merchant Navy, you know, from the, like, teens, several decades onwards. And he, you know, was from India, but he spent time in Britain and he spent time in Antwerp. And then, you know, I was tracing his story and I encountered another story which may or may not have been about the same person. There's a figure called John Ali Muhammad who is moving around the US as a religious lecturer, as a marketing agent, as a traveling salesman. And at one point, when John J A N Mohammed is trying to kind of get into Britain, he's interrogated, and they find a newspaper article about John Joh and Ali Mohammed, who's involved in citizenship litigation in the US on John's body. And they ask him, so why are you carrying this story? And he says, oh, well, that's about me. And so the chapter kind of sets up as a kind of my effort to try to think through, well, are John and John the same person? And so to try to think through that question, I looked at a lot of archives across the US and the UK I particularly was intrigued to find a very heavy photographic trail for this figure or figures, which is part of this regime of sort of surveillance and exclusion of Asian migrants that I kind of mentioned before, particularly during the interwar period, Places like the US And Britain are really pushing Asians out and they develop these sort of regimes of surveillance to do that, which use photography as one of their tools of bureaucracy. So there's all of these photographs of this man or men in the archives, but there's also photographs in newspapers, in promotional materials for religious lectures, and partially because this is the only major chapter of the book where I could not, in fact, connect with descendants. And so kind of in the absence of being able to have those conversations with families that had been so important to the other chapters of the book, I ended up making photo albums. And I literally kind of did this, you know, on my desk with glue and cutting to take all of these photographs in many cases which came out of these kind of racialized, oppressive systems of surveillance and exclusion, and try to think, you know, can I collage these into something else and to see kind of a different picture of this person or persons? And in the process of doing that, I ultimately decided, look, the logic of the regimes that took these photographs were to kind of identify these people And I, as a historian, need to ask a different question. And so actually, I end up saying I don't think it's actually important whether John and John were the same man. That through this process of albuming, I became more interested in thinking about sort of how they might have identified with each other and who else might they have identified with. So, you know, that chapter includes a lot of photographs, not just of John and Jen or John Jen, but also of kind of other men who were in their orbit, of people who might have had familial connections to them. And I really kind of think about that chapter as a kind of representation of what kind of a technique of engaging the past that I saw families do, which is albuming, how it can actually be kind of translated into historical method, which might be useful not just for people who are doing kind of like family history, narrowly defined, but really helped me to kind of think about, you know, how do I work with images? How do I kind of think through the materiality of images, through this process of, you know, for me, actually cutting and pasting, but also thinking about kind of archives of spaces which are filled with cutting and pasting and threads. The chapter also talks a lot about, like, threads in. In the archive, both literal threads as well as metaphorical threads. So that's kind of some of the work. You know, with each of these chapters, it was like, I found, like, a really interesting story. And at first, I really was kind of grabbed by the story. And then through kind of my training as a historian, I try to kind of think a bit more deeply with kind of what we can learn from that story that might be kind of, you know, tell us, you know, additional things about kind of the practice of history and how we kind of think about the past and the present.
- [34:44]
Nicholas Gordon
I kind of want to ask two questions about legacy with kind of two different framing. So I'll start with the first one and let. And maybe we'll take kind of the macro framing for this. I mean, now that you've done this project, I mean, what do you see as kind of the. Like, how does that. How does this project kind of change how we should talk about, you know, these. These imperial and colonial networks? You know, as people kind of moved around these different spaces, I mean, what do you think a project like this, you know, tells us about how we should understand kind of the British Empire?
- [35:17]
Julia Stevens
Yeah. So I think, you know, for me, ultimately, I think especially over the last kind of, like, year and a half, like, living in the US that the history of migration and Empire that I kind of tell across the long 19th century and then its legacies, it is so terrifyingly relevant for the present. And the ways in which, sort of in the spread of various authoritarian regimes across the globe, the question of migration and the kind of targeting of migrants is this pattern we really see kind of repeating. And I think kind of as a historian who worked really closely with kind of the documentary regimes of migration and empire, one of the things that really struck me is that particularly in the U.S. these conversations about migration often pivot around this idea that there's a right and a wrong way to be a migrant. And that often being, like, documented or undocumented is one of the ways that some people want to determine, like, who is a right, who's migrating in the right way and who's migrating in the wrong way. And I think, you know, the history of empire can really show us how problematic that way of thinking is, because this kind of regime of documentation is very much the product of the British Empire, which constructed this kind of gargantuan documentary regime to control the people that were moving around its empire. And that's part of the reason I could honestly write this book, because there was so much detail about people's lives that was kind of collected through this. This process. But what I really kind of learned by working with families along outside that, working with those documents, was that even as that documentation can at times feel so massive and so detailed that it's full of gaps and it's full of fictions. And there are so many tensions between the history that I found in colonial archives and the history that was, like, passed down within families about these stories of migration. And it's not necessarily that the families were right and the archives were wrong or vice versa, but it was sort of the kind of tension between them. And I think for me, that really kind of, you know, drove home the ways in which, you know, we really, you know, that at once we're all heavily documented, and that documentation is always kind of incomplete and false. And I think, you know, this also really resonates with me personally, because on my mother's side, my grandparents migrated from Poland and the Ukraine as Jewish refugees in the early 20th century. And in my family, this story was always told that we didn't know how old my grandmother was because her paperwork had different birth dates for her. And the explanation that was given was that likely what happened is in order to get a cheaper passage for her, her parents might have kind of reduced her age by a couple of years to get her to qualify for, like, a children's rate on the ship. And, you know, in the past couple of years, as we've seen these kind of new campaigns, I look at campaigns of denaturalization in the 1920s, but we're seeing, you know, new campaigns, efforts to kind of take away people's citizenship on the grounds that they have kind of fully, falsely, you know, falsified their. Their paperwork in the process of applying for citizenship. And it made me realize, like, well, yeah, my grandmother, My great grandparents falsified my grandmother's paperwork in the process of immigration. And does that mean that I don't no longer have a right to U.S. citizenship? You know, and I think my book provides a definitive answer to that question, which is that if you dig deep enough, we're all migrants and we're all also kind of undoc, both heavily documented and ultimately undocumented, because our stories are kind of always exceed the kind of bureaucratic record and the bureaucratic logic.
- [39:47]
Nicholas Gordon
And you've sort of already talked about this just now in that answer. But again, to kind of talk about the, you know, how this project has kind of changed, we should approach things. I mean, how has this project changed how you approach this question of, like. Like, whether it's your own family or other people's families? There's, like, how to kind of invest, like, to kind of look backwards at the stories family tell themselves. I mean, look, my family, we have lots of. We have lots of stories. We have lots of myths. I know about my own family of dubious veracity, although I did actually manage to find documentary proof of one such myth in the Library of Congress about a year ago. So that was fun, but kind of. But in this project, I mean, how do you now think about, you know, investigating and thinking about these family stories, these. These family myths, even?
- [40:37]
Julia Stevens
You know, I guess one of the conclusions I came to is just how important it is to have these conversations in ways that traverse the academy and kind of other publics. And, you know, scholars often honestly, like, look down on roots groups, research researchers, and they think about, like, websites like ancestry.com as kind of like, you know, just for, like, crazy hobbyists. And, like, I learned so much from working with people who were trying to make sense of their own family's past. And I hope that also the people that I had these conversations with, you know, found something about the kind of professional historical methods that I brought to the table. Also sort of helpful. I mean, even, you know, just saying, look, just because you found it in a document doesn't mean it's true, because I know as a historian that like the kind of paper records and the state records are often themselves also incomplete. So, you know, for me, the kind of take home message is we really need to have these conversations in all sorts of, you know, different spaces and that they're not just relevant to understanding the past, but that they are so kind of relevant to making sense of, you know, you know, the types of things that we're living through in the all too scary present.
- [41:59]
Nicholas Gordon
So I think with that, that's a great place to end our conversation with Julia Stevens, author of Worldly Tracing Family Trails Between India and Empire. Julia, I actually have two final questions for you, which are where can people find your work? Not just this book, but all of your work, and what's next for you? What do you think the next project might be?
- [42:20]
Julia Stevens
Great questions. You know, I always recommend that people, whenever possible, buy books from independent bookstores or directly from presses. So I'd encourage people who want a physical copy of the book to think about those possibilities. But there's also lots of my work that circulates in journals. Look out for I'm working on a piece on how to teach my book in the classroom. So if any teachers, especially K through 12, but also college and university teachers, are thinking about how they want to do different things with family history in the classroom, I hope in the next six months or so to have a piece out on that. So in the short term that's something that I'm working on. And my book is told as a bunch of micro histories. And there are so many stories that I couldn't answer include. I'm really interested in these histories of denaturalization and the loss of citizenship during the interwar period. So that might be my next kind of book project. But for now I'm trying to think about helping people to find useful ways to use this book in their own efforts to reconstruct their family's past, but also as a teaching resource. Because my students really helped me to write this book and they read portions of it before it was published and they did their own family history, which I learned a lot from. So I also want this really to be a kind of teaching resource as well.
- [43:56]
Nicholas Gordon
So you can follow me Nicholas Gordon on Twitter Ick R I Gordon. That's N I C K R I G O R D O N. You can go to agereviewbooks.com to find other reviews, essays, interviews and excerpts. Follow them on Twitter ookReviewsAsia. That's reviews, plural and you can find many more author news at the New books network and newbooksnetwork.com we're on all your favorite podcast apps, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, rate us, recommend us, share us with your friends to support us interviewing those writing in around and about Asia. Next week, join us for an interview with Fyodor Trtytsky, author of Pyongyang, on the 16 crises that shaped North Korea. But before then, Julia, thank you so much for coming on the show today.
- [44:36]
Julia Stevens
Thank you, Nicholas.