Situated within Southeast Asian cinema and media studies, this presentation will consider the relationships among theory, method, and practice as modes of critical engagement that live in close proximity across the region, particularly in the Southeast Asian independent and experimental filmmaking scenes that have emerged over the past two decades. Academic discourse and pedagogical practice often conceive these fields as separate, if interconnected: “practice” is the role of the filmmaker, who creates an object; “theory” is the role of the scholar, who analyzes the object; “method” is the doing that gets us from the former to the latter. Within this model, these nodes are counterpoints, sometimes existing in tension with one another—theory vs. method, theory vs. practice, “maker” vs. “scholar.” I would like to consider how these binaries might function productively as mutually-defining, overlapping aspects of a multifaceted critical approach. In so doing, I hope to engage the question of “how the idea of ‘Southeast Asian theory’ might respond to issues of generalisability and universalism.”
As a form of discursive practice, theory creates its object; as Trinh Minh-ha has argued, theory “does not translate a reality outside itself, but more precisely, allows the emergence of a new reality.”[1] Meanwhile, recent scholarship has sought to trouble the space between object and analysis through work that focuses on problems of method, often using the shorthand “___ as method” to question the divides between method and object that emerge in codified analytic practices.[2] What new realities might practice-informed theory, or theory-informed practice create? What methods would best enable these provocations? How do questions of regional specificity and intra-regional diversity come into play?
To engage with these questions, I will draw from a nascent, co-authored research project on film and media organizing in Southeast Asia that began through work with the Association for Southeast Asian Cinema Studies (ASEAC). The project seeks a grounded approach that builds its arguments collaboratively and iteratively, negotiating between theory (space and place, the Capitalocene), method (textual analysis, practitioner interviews), and practice (writing, organizing, audiovisual media production, programming) (initial interviews associated with the project are available at this website, a work in progress: https://www.aseac-interviews.org/). The presentation will focus on space and speculation as broad categories of analysis that enable the dynamic triangulation of theory, method, and practice in Southeast Asian media.
Day 1 (May 27, Thu HK/SG time)
Panel 2: Organized Culture
11:30am-1pm HK/SG / 4:30-6:30am BST / 5:30-7:30am CEST / 11:30pm-1am EDT / 8:30pm-10:30pm PDT
[1] Trinh Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989, 2.
[2] See the special issue of Prism, Method as Method, edited by Carlos Rojas, which takes as its srarting point scholar of Chinese literature Takeuchi Yoshimi’s lectures, “Asia as Method,” which went on to inspire influential work such as Kuan-Hsing Chen’s Asia as Method. Carlos Rojas, “Method as Method,” Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature 16, no. 2 (2019): 211-220, 212; Kuan-Hsing Chen, Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.