Edgy City: Urban/Rural Space and Ho Chi Minh City

Link to audio of program: .
Update 21 February 2014:  Erik Harms has won the Association for Asian Studies' 2014 Harry J. Benda Prize for Saigon's Edge



As Ho Chi Minh City races to be Vietnam's most modern metropolis, some outlying areas are left behind. Yet they become interesting because they exhibit many of the tensions that face the developing country after decades of war, as Vietnam copes with being nominally Socialist but practically capitalist, and races to modernize itself, at the risk of leaving behind peasants in the largely rural country.

Erik Harms, who teaches Anthropology at Yale, has offered a revealing look at the social lives that intersect each other in the wake of this modernization race. Focusing on Hóc Môn, on the edge of Saigon, he writes like a journalist [I mean his writing is readable], revealing social lives as otherwise marginalized residents of this region on the Trans-Asia Highway are able to tell their stories through his new book, Saigon's Edge: On the Margins of Ho Chi Minh City, now out from University of Minnesota Press.

Harms is interviewed by KUCI Subversity show host Daniel C. Tsang, in the first show of this 2011 summer online series, as Subversity takes a break from radio broadcasts for the summer. The interview is exclusively available online, and as podcasts, with a official posting date of Monday 20 June 2011 but the interview was taped earlier today, 17 June 2011 at KUCI's studios.

Interview with Harms by Yale University posted on YouTube:

Egypt's Revolution in Historical Context

Updated 15 February 2011: To listen to the podcast of this program, click on:
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See also Prof. Makdisi's piece in Huffington Post: "Egypt: Why Is The United States Afraid Of Arab Democracy?".


The successful revolt in Egypt has laid bare the limits of U.S. attempts to impose its will over the Middle East. For the next edition of Subversity, a KUCI public affairs program, we talk with Prof. Ussama Makdisi, a Rice University professor and the first holder of the Arab American Education Foundation Chair of Arab Studies there.

We also expect to provide listeners with a news update on the street protests in Yemen by UCI sociology graduate student Dana Moss of the Yemen Peace Project. She last appeared on Subversity last Monday.

Makdisi is the author of the new, critical analysis of U.S. interference in the region, Faith Misplaced: The Broken Promise of U.S.-Arab Relations: 1820-2001, New York: Public Affairs, 2010.

According to his Rice profile: "His previous books include Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East (Cornell University Press, 2008), which was the winner of the 2008 Albert Hourani Book Award from the Middle East Studies Association, the 2009 John Hope Franklin Prize of the American Studies Association, and a co-winner of the 2009 British-Kuwait Friendship Society Book Prize given by the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies. Makdisi is also the author of The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon (University of California Press, 2000) and co-editor of Memory and Violence in the Middle East and North Africa (Indiana University Press, 2006). He has published widely on Ottoman and Arab history as well as on U.S.-Arab relations and U.S. missionary work in the Middle East. Among his major articles are “Anti-Americanism in the Arab World: An Interpretation of Brief History” which appeared in the Journal of American History and “Ottoman Orientalism” and “Reclaiming the Land of the Bible: Missionaries, Secularism, and Evangelical Modernity” both of which appeared in the American Historical Review. Professor Makdisi has also published in the International Journal of Middle East Studies, Comparative Studies in Society and History, and in the Middle East Report.

"By exploring missed opportunities for cultural understanding, by retrieving unused historical evidence, and by juxtaposing for the first time Arab perspectives and archives with American ones, his work counters a notion of an inevitable clash of civilizations and thus reshapes our view of the history of America in the Arab world.

"As a professor at Rice, Makdisi is interested in encouraging a new transnational approach to the study of American foreign relations as well as a more contextual understanding of the modern Middle East. He is also interested in new scholarship on overseas missionary work."

Subversity airs from 5-6 p.m. today on KUCI, 88.9 FM in Orange County, California, and is simulcast via kuci.org. He is interviewed by show host Daniel C. Tsang. A podcast will be posted later.

Remembering Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and More

On this federal holiday commemorating the life and work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., we bring you portions of his speech at Riverside Church in 1967 a year before his assassination where he spoke out against the Vietnam War. He linked racism, poverty, and militarism.

The program comes from Making Contact, the National Radio Project: Beyond the Dream: MLK and the Anti-War Movement, which first aired in 2003.

We also air another Making Contact program, where Harvard law prof. Charles Ogletree talks about the arrest of Harvard prof. Henry Louis Gates that ended up eventually with the famous "beer summit" at the White House. Ogletree has written a new book, “The Presumption of Guilt: The Arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Race, Class and Crime in America.” The Making Contact program, The Presumption of Guilt: Charles Ogletree on the Arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr., was first recorded by the National Radio Project at the African American Art & Culture Complex of San Francisco, on October 21st, 2010.

Our thanks to National Radio Project for permission to air their programs.

The Subversity show airs from 5-6 p.m. today on KUCI, 88.9 FM in Orange County, California, and is simulcast via kuci.org.

Adam Bereki on His Lawsuit vs. Huntington Beach Police Department

Updated: To listen to the 14 June 2010 edition of the Subversity show, click here: .

Irvine -- On the next edition of KUCI's Subversity program, airing Monday 14 June 2010, we talk with Adam Bereki, author of Friendly Fire: The Illusion of Justice, his memoir about his fight against homophobic discrimination within the Huntington Beach Police Department.

We ask him why as a gay teenager in Orange County he wanted to be a cop in the first place and how he found peace after being consumed with his case, which ended up in an out-of-court 2.5 million-dollar settlement. In his book, he critiques the way police interact with residents and calls for law enforcement as well as a foreign policy, that is not based on violence.

A review of Bereki's book by Subversity's host in the Surf City Voice calls it a "stunning indictment of what the author perceived as the deep machismo, laced with homophobia, of the Surf City's police department."

The show airs from 5-6 p.m. on 14 June 2010 on KUCI, 88.9 FM in Orange County, and is simulcast via kuci.org.