David Borgonjon (Columbia University)
Departing from Thomas Lamarre’s account of platformativity as “the infra-individual intra-actions between platform and human, and individual and collective, a kind of performativity via platforms, “this paper seeks to inquire into the overwriting of the kongsi as a media infrastructure. In the 1770s, Dutch colonists in West Borneo encountered Hakka gold miners who had organized for generations in what have come to be referred to as “the kongsi republics.” A series of translinguistic and transhistorical mediations has inscribed these hybrid polities structured on electoral representation with profit-sharing and diplomatic functions. Today, the same term is re-romanized as gongsi (公司), referring banally to the modern private enterprise: the “company.” By retracing the archipelagic routes of the kongsi across three centuries and three languages, this paper details the stakes and contingencies of the naturalization of a hybrid polity as a purely economic organization. In the process, I propose a relay switch for these two forms of enterprise (kongsi as Hakka polity and gongsi as Mandarin enterprise) in the form of the Dutch “compagnie” (or gongbanya). We depart from sinologist and religious historian JJM de Groot’s account of the kongsi’s in his historical record Het Kongsiwezen van Borneo (1885), and trace the term’s surprising inversion as a descriptor of Sinified Dutch oppression in seminal Sundanese playwright Utuy Tatang Sontani’s resistance epic Tambera (1949). We conclude with popular fan-fiction author Lao Mao’s online magnum opus Fengqi Lanfang (Winds over Lanfang) (2010) to note how the kongsi structures inter-Asian imaginaries of mediated sovereignty and claims digital oceans.
David Xu Borgonjon is a writer and curator interested in economic practices as cultural objects. He has written for The New York Times, Rhizome, and the Journal for Chinese Contemporary Art, among others. He curated “Really, Socialism?!” (Momenta Art, 2015), “The Visible Hand” (CUE Art Foundation, 2017), and “In Search of Miss Ruthless” (Para Site, 2017) with Hera Chan. He co-founded Admin, a platform for arts administrators working on new cultural institutions (www.admin.network), and SCREEN (www.onscreentoday.com), a bilingual platform for media art criticism. He is a Critic at Rhode Island School of Design, where he teaches curating. In his Ph.D. at Columbia University, he is writing a media history of Chinese capital in Southeast Asia. www.davidborgonjon.com