AO COPY – for publication in Mélanie Vandenhelsken, Meenaxi BarkatakiRuscheweyh, Bengt G. Karlsson (eds.), Geographies of Difference: Explorations in Northeast Indian Studies (Taylor & Francis, 07.08.2017) (Copyright belongs to Taylor & Francis). Bianca Son a Brief Overview of Her Scholarly Life Bianca Son Suantack (Mai Mang Khan Cing) received her BA in Psychology from the University of Maryland, undertook a course in Mass Communications at the University of Arizona, and received her MA in Contemporary Asian Studies at the University of Amsterdam. She later undertook doctoral work at the School of Oriental and African Studies, the University of London, where she studied and worked closely with a number of members of the SOAS faculty, including myself and Dr. Mandy Sadan amongst others. Bianca’s research took her not just to the British Library, but also to Thailand, Japan, Mizoram, and Yangon. Bianca was made Doctor of Philosophy in 2013 after successfully defending her doctoral thesis, “The Making of the Zo: The Chin of Burma and the Lushai and Kuki of India through Colonial and Local Narratives, 1826-1917 and 1947-1988.″ At the time that Bianca passed away, she had just completed her first term of teaching, as a Senior Teaching Fellow with the Department of History at SOAS. She had undertaken this as replacement teaching for the course entitled “The Creation of Modern Burma” which examined the intellectual, cultural, social, economic, and political formation of colonial Burma under British rule, a course that allowed Bianca to bring together her vast personal and scholarly experience with the country, adding to the normal lowland focus much new attention to the historical role of the highlands. Bianca’s research agenda focused on bringing to the Chin/Zo a deeper awareness and understanding of their own history and to explain why the border between India and Burma divided this population group into different ethnic identities where were consciously presented as primordially exclusive of one another. This was both a personal and a family interest. Bianca’s personal life was one of migration to many different locations. At various points in her life she lived in Burma, East Germany, the United States, the United Kingdom, and South Korea, giving her fluency not simply in Chin, but also in English and German. She wrote about these personal experiences with migration and about her deep personal relationship with her father, the late Dr. Vumson Suantak, and her younger sister in 2007, and how these personal experiences brought her into contact with the Chin/Zo diaspora and the challenges of their transnational existence.1 Bianca was also the latest in a family line of scholars. She saw in her dissertation the continuity of a path chartered by her father, who had authored Zo History (1986), and who had viewed the latter as the continuity of his own father’s (Dr. Son’s grandfather’s) work on the Chin/Zo people. Bianca explained in interviews with the press that she also inherited from her father an interest in the plight of the Chin/Zo and their contemporary situation in Burma (Myanmar) and his belief that only education would empower the Chin/Zo and lead to self-development of what he saw as the Zo region. When he passed away, Bianca followed in his political footsteps and became a Chin/Zo activist and became a member of the managing board of the Chin Forum. In the midst of these activities, she encountered the obstacles of the 1 Bianca Son, “Papi,” in Thanakha Team (ed.), Burma—Women’s Voices for Hope (Bangkok: Alternative ASEAN Network on Burma, 2007): pp. 37-42. bifurcation of the Zo/Chin identity by outsiders into mutually exclusive ethnic categories. Trying to move beyond these constructions by outsiders led Bianca to embark on her doctoral work.2 During Bianca’s doctoral work she organised in collaboration with her peers, such as Dr. Lifeng Han and Dr. Matthew Phillips, a number of workshops, panels, and seminars. Amongst those she prized most was the conference “Communicating Civilizations and Global Order,” held at SOAS in September 2011, which featured Professor Harry Harootunian, a major intellectual influence on her work, and Professor Prasenjit Duara. This workshop, a joint effort of the History Department of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, the Centre for Comparative Studies of World Civilisations of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), the Institute of Cultural Studies of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences (SASS), and the School of Foreign Languages and Cultures of Nanjing Normal University, became a major event in the scholarly world and brought Bianca to international prominence beyond Burma/Myanmar Studies. It also revealed Bianca’s immense ability to draw scholars from different fields together and foster trans-disciplinary communication on topics that were as important to the public sector as they were to scholars. Considering today’s focus in the UK on scholarly impact, Bianca revealed herself to be ahead of the field. Generally, Bianca’s work was influenced by a number of scholars, amongst them Dr. Mandy Sadan, Professor James Scott, Professor Willem van Schendel, Professor F. K. Lehman, and others, but she adds to them an original contribution. Bianca’s work remains one of the most important contributions to the study of the Chin/Zo in decades, following a classic study in the early 1960s by the late F.K. Lehman and her own father’s work in the mid-1980s. By contrast to these works and other work on the history of the Chin/Zo, her dissertation draws out the colonial period as a fundamental phase in the emergence of modern Chin/Zo identities and identifications. It also demonstrated that we can view formally pre-colonial sources, including those of the Tang Dynasty and Catholic missionaries of the eighteenth century, through the same framework of understanding. Together, all external accounts reflected the perspectives of the states they represented (considering the Vatican-centred Catholic Church as a quasi-state), leading ultimately to the division of the highlands into those that fell within British India proper and those that were seen administratively as part of British Burma and went with Burma upon separation from India in 1937. States shaped perspectives that shaped ethnic identifications and were responsible for disempowering the contemporary Chin/Zo through bifurcations that remained fixed in place after Burma went on the path of independence from 1948. In other words, the contemporary was shaped by the colonial. Future generations of scholars will produce work that will necessarily find new, more nuanced understandings of Chin/Zo history, but only because of the steps Bianca made in pushing the field further. Bianca passed away on 13 June 2014. But neither she nor her work will be forgotten. Bianca’s achievements were related at SOAS during a special session within the graduation ceremony in the Summer of 2014. Subsequently, Bianca’s research was also honoured by her fellow doctoral students (Dr. Thomas Richard Bruce, Dr. Li Yi, and Maung Bo Bo) with a panel, “Burma and Thailand in the 20th Century,” held in September 2014 at the ASEASUK 2 “We are Divided by Outsiders: an Interview with Bianca Son.” Chinand Guardian, 11 Aril 2011. http://www.chinlandguardian.com/index.php/news/item/ 555-we-are-divided-by-outsiders-interview-with-bianca-son Conference in Brighton, UK. The editors of the present volume also asked for this brief sketch of her scholarship to commemorate her role in shaping the workshop on which it is based. Her scholarship will certainly remain an important contribution to the historiography on the Chin/Zo. Michael W. Charney SOAS, the University of London