Meet Janice Jeong!

Dr. Janice Jeong is Assistant Professor of History with a Professorship in the Comparative Study of Muslim Societies and Cultures at Simon Fraser University.

1. What project(s) are you currently working on in 2025?

This year, I am primarily working on my book manuscript, tentatively entitled Homes of Heaven: The Making of Chinese Muslim Diasporas between Shanghai and Mecca. In this book, I propose to view Islam and Muslims in China from the vantage point of Mecca, a universal home and the destination of the annual pilgrimage that is theoretically open to Muslims worldwide. Mecca in the Chinese language was historically referred to as Tianfang, or Heavenly Square. The term connotes a cosmological orientation to the west toward an unidentified, utopic place. The majority of Homes of Heaven is devoted to charting the dynamic changes of the twentieth century, as Mecca in the Arabian Peninsula transformed into a much more accessible city than compared to before at the turn of the century, and as the city became incorporated politically into the nation-state of Saudi Arabia. I chart out how Chinese Muslims turned the routes to and from Mecca into manifold pathways wherein the pilgrimage, diplomacy, and exile were intermeshed with one another, reconciling the discrepancies between their idealizations of and disappointments on Mecca along the way. Through such journeys, the western coasts of the Arabian Peninsula (the Hejaz) would become a home to a multi-generational community of Chinese Muslims. In this way, the book proposes to interpret Chinese Muslims as overlapping religious diasporas beyond the limitations of the “minority ethnicity” category as they are classified in the People’s Republic of China, and also to look at the Arabian Peninsula in a new light as a site and hub of inter-Asian networks and diasporic migrations.

My other project examines the transnational networks of Korean Muslim community in Seoul post the Korean War (1950-1953), and the ways in which the religious leaders utilized the language of Islamic unity, anti-communism, and the utility of religion for diplomacy in the process of consolidating their physical and spiritual space, drawing partly from the discourses that circulated in East Asia during World War II. This research also reveals how the community interacted with figures and institutions in Pakistan, Malaysia, and Saudi Arabia in sending students, receiving guests, and collecting donations. This project relates to my interests on labor migrations from South Korea to Saudi Arabia that reached its peak between the mid-1970s and mid-1980s, which further elevated the position of the emergent Muslim community in Seoul. All in all, my projects aim to expose the overlooked mobility channels between parts of Asia that are often understood in separation from one another largely due to divisions in area studies, through a historical and anthropological lens.

2. If you wanted to introduce students and junior scholars to transnational history, what central and/or critical/emerging concept(s) would you like to highlight?

Over the past two decades or so, there have been great advancements in transnational history, particularly the ones that focus on the interconnected histories within Asia, broadly construed. The aims of transnational approaches to Asian history, or “inter-Asian” connections, are not simply to uncover border-crossing flows, movements, and circulations, but to challenge the knowledge structures that have divided Asia into disparate regions in binding relation to western Europe. In this regard, historical and anthropological scholarship on the Indian Ocean has been at the forefront of redrawing preconceived geographies and chronologies beyond the modern and pre-modern divide. Particularly, Engseng Ho’s Graves of Tarim (2004) is a trailblazing work, as it traces the mobility of diasporic Hadrami sayyids between southern Yemen and Southeast Asia across the Indian Ocean, and genealogical conceptions of history. Relatedly, I would recommend works such as Nile Green’s short article “Rethinking the ‘Middle East’ after the Oceanic Turn” (2014) in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Eric Tagliacozzo’s The Longest Journey: Southeast Asians and the Pilgrimage to Mecca (2013), Nurfadzilah Yahya’s Fluid Jurisdictions: Colonial Law and Arabs in Southeast Asia, and Ismail Alatas’ What is Religious Authority? Cultivating Islamic Communities in Indonesia, in helping us reconceptualize the Middle East as a part and parcel of the Indian Ocean, or Asian, world. They also prompt us to look at Muslim communities and networks as necessarily transnational and interconnected, in contested yet interstitial relations with western empires, in past and present. For the necessity of “inter-Asia” as a concept and a host of related concepts, as well as scholarship that has been produced in this vein, Engseng Ho’s 2017 article “Inter-Asian concepts for mobile societies” in The Journal of Asian Studies presents an excellent overview.

I have also found the concept of the diaspora engaging and useful as a way to “do” transnational history. Of course, there are multiple ways of doing transnational history in a thick and rich way: by focusing on imperial histories (the relationships between the metropole and the colonies, for instance), circulation of a commodity, or border-crossing individuals at the interstices of empires and cultural zones in a historically interconnected space, such as the Mediterranean Sea. At present, as a concept and a subject of research, I find diaspora attractive because the lives and repertoires of diasporic communities present alternative articulations of time and space, and an understanding of identity as something formed in the process of travel, exile, and continuous acts of re-writing histories of the self, rather than something bound to the supposedly homogenous, modern nation-state. In this regard, I have found Sunil Amrith’s 2009 article “Tamil Diasporas across the Bay of Bengal” in American Historical Review and Rochelle Davis’ Palestinian village histories: Geographies of the Displaced (2010) particularly illuminating.

3. For someone looking to familiarize themselves with your scholarship, where would you direct them?

I would direct them to my article “Homeland, magnet, and refuge: Mecca in the travels and imaginaries of Chinese Muslims” (2023), published in Modern Asian Studies. The article introduces the significance of Mecca as a symbol and a real site for mediating the mobility, sojourns, and exiles of Chinese Muslims through the course of the twentieth century. I believe the CCMS will kindly post a recording of a related lecture (from December 2024).

My other article “South Korean Labor and Infrastructure in Saudi Arabia during the Cold War” (2023) was published in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. I introduce parts of this research in an online lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8pPbAul6Do

4. What courses do you usually teach that interact with the subject matter of your scholarship?

I teach HIST255: China since 1800 and HIST464: Problems in Modern Asian History (Homes and Diasporas in Modern Asia). In particular, HIST464 is an interdisciplinary course that introduces students to the different definitions of and debates around the concept of diaspora, and also to historical and anthropological scholarship that deals with mobile communities. The geographic scope is quite wide, covering cases from Jewish and Palestinian diasporas, Chinese labor migrations across the South China Seas and the Pacific Ocean, and Korean Chinese diasporas between China and the two Koreas. Students also complete an oral history assignment after conducting interviews with an emigrant or a child of an emigrant, contextualizing the interviewee’s experiences in historical contexts.

In Fall 2025, I will be offering this course (HIST464) as well as HIST151: The Modern Middle East. I very much look forward to meeting students in these courses!

5. What film or non-academic text would you like to recommend for people interested in the study of transnational history between East Asia and the Middle East? 

The documentary “From Xi’an to Mecca: The Road to Hajj” produced by Al Jazeera English (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0bvJkF0Ji8) has great footages of the aspiring pilgrims from northwestern China headed to Mecca. For a much earlier era, “The Silk Road” (1980-1981, NHK Documentary Series) is an amazing 12-series that follow a team of Japanese journalists in the immediate aftermath of the People’s Republic of China, as they examine stunning sites and artifacts that remain from a vibrant era of medieval “silk road” trade between China and Central and Western Asia, as well as the Indian subcontinent and Italy.