The proposed paper nominates Maphilindo, a particular moment in the consolidation of the region we now understand as Southeast Asia, as a case study with which to frame the possibility of Afro-Southeast Asian affinities. Maphilindo, an amalgamation of Malaya, Philippines, and Indonesia, is an imagination of Southeast Asia regionalism based on a Pan-Malayan ethnos formalized in 1963 in the middle of the Cold War. As a historico-political imaginary, it harnessed the potential of a third world regional solidarity prospected by the Afro-Asia Conference in Bandung in 1955. In his speech before the University of Padjadjaran in Bandung in 1964, Filipino diplomat and Bandung delegate Carlos P. Romulo traces the continuity from Bandung to Maphilindo as the “recognition and assertion of the idea of ‘self-determinism’ of the countries of Asia against the big powers” that was “projected on a universal concept of a greater harmony among nations.” For Romulo, Maphilindo articulates the “actuality of a united world” shaped by “a new intellectual relation…needed” to reconfigure the “outmoded…observations of the past colonial strategies and motivations in the politics of Asia.” In looking at Maphilindo, the paper theorizes on the idea of the melayu, both as an idiom for an ethnic basis for regional and transregional solidarity, and as a cipher for “a wonderfully absorptive form of creole” that plays out a complex dynamic of agencies on the one hand and colonial and ideological entanglements on the other that foils the easy discriminations of colonial instrumentalization in the milieu of the Cold War. It also tries to think about melayu alongside what Latinx scholar Jose Esteban Munoz’s theorizes as the idea of “browness” and how these conceptualizations might facet ideations of Afro-Southeast Asia alignments, third world sovereignty, and regional affinities.
Carlos Quijon, Jr. (b. 1989) is a critic and curator based in Manila. He is a fellow of the research platform Modern Art Histories in and across Africa, South and Southeast Asia (MAHASSA), convened by the Getty Foundation’s Connecting Art Histories project. He writes exhibition reviews for Artforum and Frieze. His research is part of the book From a History of Exhibitions Towards a Future of Exhibition-Making (Sternberg Press, 2019). He has published in MoMA’s post (US), Queer Southeast Asia, ArtReview Asia (Singapore), Art Monthly (UK), Asia Art Archive’s Ideas (HK), and Trans Asia Photography Review (US), among others. He curated Courses of Action in Hong Kong in 2019, co-curated Minor Infelicities in Seoul in 2020, and In Our Best Interests: Afro-Southeast Asia Affinities during a Cold War in Singapore in 2021.
Day 2 (May 28, Fri HK/SG time / British Summer Time (BST) / Central European Summer Time (CEST))
Panel 4: Criticisms of Anatomy
3-5pm HK/SG / 8-10am BST / 10am-12pm CEST / 3-5am EDT / 12pm-2am PDT