Doing Theory in Southeast Asia

I propose to examine Bienvenido Lumbera’s Ang Pagas na Lupain (1971)—his translation into Filipino of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922)—from the vantage points of translation studies and postcolonial studies. Lumbera locates his translation—along with the efforts of other translators and poets during the mid-1960s to early 1970s—within a critical juncture in Philippine literary history: on the one hand, translations sought to bring to contemporaneity literary texts written in Filipino by imbuing them with the capacity to render urbanity, alienation, and other concerns of early to mid-20th century Euro-American modernism. On the other hand, the “impulse toward modernity” (Lumbera’s phrase) was challenged and superseded by an emerging national democratic movement whose aesthetics and politics turned away from Eliot’s polyvocalities, ambiguities, and ironies toward literary and political practices which were more in solidarity with writers and cultural workers in the global south. Taking my theoretical and methodological bearings from Lawrence Venuti’s hermeneutics of translation, in conjunction with approaches to postcoloniality and translation proposed by Robert J.C. Young, Susan Bassnett, and Harish Trivedi, I aim, firstly, to demonstrate the formal possibilities opened up by Ang Pagas na Lupain’s translational gestures. Secondly, I will situate Lumbera’s translation within the period immediately preceding Martial Law in the Philippines (1972): a moment in which, per Lumbera, the literary cosmopolitanism of the mid- to late 1960s was confronted by—in ways that were politically and aesthetically generative—the nationalism of the early 1970s. I aim to explore, using Ang Pagas na Lupain as my central text, the contact zone between postcolonial studies and translation studies, as situated in the context of a Philippines engaging, internally, with the imminent dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, and externally, with the prospects and problems of global modernity.

Vincenz Serrano finished his PhD at the University of Manchester (UK) and is currently an Associate Professor at the Department of English in Ateneo de Manila University. His article on the baroque historiography of the Nick Joaquin was published in UNITAS in 2018. His review of Jacob Edmond’s Make It the Same: Poetry in the Age of Global Media was published in Cha in 2020. His poetry books are The Collapse of What Separates Us (2010) and When a map is folded cities come closer, when clothes are unpacked cities fall apart (2016). He is the editor-in-chief of Kritika Kultura.

Day 1 (May 27, Thu HK/SG time)
Panel 1: Rethinking ‘Trans-’ and ‘Post-’
9:30-11:30am HK/SG / 2:30-4:30am BST / 3:30-5:30am CEST / 9:30-11:30pm EDT / 6:30-8:30pm PDT

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

My contribution to the workshop will explore the keyword “aphasia” in relation to the history of the Cold War in Cambodia. “Aphasia” is a medical term that refers to language impairment that derives from a neurological condition. I will focus on a tension between the Western medical understanding of “aphasia” and a proverb that Cambodians have to describe a condition of language that took shape during the Cambodian genocide called dam-doeum-kor, which translates to “planting the kapok tree.” In Khmer, the word kor means both kapok and mute. It is said that when the wind blows in Cambodia, the leaves of doeum-kor make no sound; therefore, the kapok tree is like a person who is mute. From 1975-1979, many Cambodians refrained from speaking, even to family members, out of the knowledge that their words could be overheard by the Khmer Rouge and used as evidence of treason. At once a protective mechanism against threat, a response to it, and a metaphor of latent regeneration, dam-doeum-kor is resistant to a straightforward cause-and-effect teleology. 

In my work, I mobilize dam-doeum-kor / aphasia as a critical analytic to refract and reframe the Cold War in Cambodia and its refugee afterlives. Bringing the fields of critical refugee studies and critical disability studies to bear on the study of the kapok tree, I seek to make three key interventions: to shift the Cambodian narrative beyond a homogenous account of horror and trauma; to explore the limits of biomedicine as a privileged paradigm for thinking about Cambodian refugee mental health; and to map out what I call a “Cambodian refugee aesthetics of regeneration.”

Day 3 – (May 29, Sat HK/SG time)

Panel 8:  Cold War Traumas

11am-12:30pm HK/SG / 4-5:30am BST / 5-6:30am CEST / 11pm-12:30am EDT / 8pm-9:30pm PDT

Drawing from my own ethnographic research on gender and the performing arts in Indonesia this paper proposes to rethink applications of international feminist theories in global contexts using the novel Tarian Bumi (“Earth Dance”) by Oka Rusmini.

The novel tells the stories of four generations of women who confront issues of caste, sexuality, and motherhood. First published as a newspaper serial in in 1995, the novel has been translated into five languages and recently rereleased in Indonesia. The author describes herself as a feminist while engaging with specifically Indonesian and Balinese issues related to women such as adat (custom laws).

The novel provides an excellent case study to examine larger issues about the use and development of critical theories specific to Southeast Asia and ASEAN that might be expanded and applied to other regional contexts.

I am especially interested in engaging with the questions of:

• How might cultural and ethnographic research, which emphasizes local particularity, offer sources for suitable theoretical frameworks?
• How do creative producers borrow and create theory?

I engage with current discourses about the global uses of feminism (Chandra Talpade Mohanty and others), Western feminist frameworks, and specifically Balinese/Indonesian feminist writings.

Day 1 (May 27, Thu HK/SG time)

Panel 1: Rethinking ‘Trans-’ and ‘Post-’

9:30-11:30am HK/SG / 2:30-4:30am BST / 3:30-5:30am CEST / 9:30-11:30pm EDT / 6:30-8:30pm PDT

The Philippines and Indonesia revised their constitutions in 1987 and 1999-2002 respectively. The revisions are purported to be the start of democratic consolidation after decades of authoritarian rule, as part of “a wave of democratization” happening globally especially in the Third World. It is important to note, however, that Marcos and Suharto also used “democracy with adjectives” to legitimize their regimes. Moreover, in the years leading to the constitutional revisions, after the countries’ struggle for independence, the term “democracy” has been used in different ways than its Western counterpart and has proven to be malleable as a means to gain international recognition, as a government propaganda, and as a national aspiration, among others. In the workshop, I want to think about how democracy has been transplanted from its liberal foundations in the West to archipelagic Southeast Asia and to examine how Filipinos and Indonesians understand power and their place in its legitimation. This understanding is influenced by the countries’ traditional notions of community, their colonial histories and struggle for sovereignty, and their political and legal cultures (in my study, as specifically shown in their constitutional histories). Therefore, I attempt to ground the recent “democratic” constitution-making of the two countries to their histories and cultures. The subject is also relevant to the other Southeast Asian countries where similar phenomena of syncretism can be observed, sometimes authorizing personalism and communitarianism along with democratic institutions. In a time when Western liberal democracy is questioned and populist tendencies are on the rise around the world, there is a need to reinvestigate the idea of democratic consolidation but this time from the lens of the sovereign people from which democracy gets its legitimacy.

Bionote:

Francis C. Sollano is a PhD student in La Trobe University and an instructor in Ateneo de Manila University. He is currently working on his dissertation project on the public sphere in the Philippine and Indonesian constitution-making.

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

Unlike Western conceptions of disability prior to modern time regarding it as a thing related to sorcery or witchcraft, punishment, and curses, (Colin 1997) Javanese tradition believes disability as power, magic, and blessing and that as an object, disability should be respected and appreciated. The Javanese Kingdoms regarded disabled people as a blessing – persons with supernatural power who have always been placed in important positions beside the Javanese Kings. Javanese classical writings also show that some heroes and Javanese knights were disabled. Petruk, Gareng, Semar, and Bagong in Javanese wayang, which Anderson (1965: 5) has described as a “compelling religious mythology” that unites the entire Javanese people geographically and spiritually were disabled. Deva who played a significant role in the Javanese version of the Mahabarata and Ramayana story was also disabled. Baru-Klinting was another hero who was also disabled – he had pale skin and a small body. However, he is portrayed as a wise person having power who was able to change his village into a swamp. Similarly, there had also been other classical writings which depict a person with a disability as a person with magic and supernatural power. This concept of disability still exists in the daily life of Javanese society.  People, especially living in a rural area, still live in this belief system. The perception of physical and mental disability as magical also spreads out ubiquitously in the urban area and to the people living around the Kraton Yogyakarta (royal palace). A lot of people, especially within the older generation, believe in the power of the disabled. The perception of disability for the Javanese people therefore becomes a type of symbol, maintained by the kingdom to strengthen and keep its power.  The balance system and harmony of the universe, in which disability becomes a significant element, is a symbolic power that fertilizes Javanese culture. This conception of disability can sometimes clash with the current concept of disability (human rights) introduced by activists of disability movements, but sometimes it also smooths them. This paper considers the religious underpinnings of disability in Java, and uses it as a means to think about theorising disability in Southeast Asia.

Day 3 – (May 29, Sat HK/SG time)

Panel 9: Disability, Discourses, Disruptions

1:30-3:30pm HK/SG / 6:30-8:30am BST / 7:30-9:30am CEST / 1:30-3:30am EDT / 10:30pm-12:30am PDT

In this paper, I take up two important keywords for theory in Southeast Asia – disability (subject of this panel), and technology. Technology has been an increasingly important area of social and cultural life around the world. This is especially the case in relation to disability, where over the past 20+ years socio-technical developments have taken on great visibility with the ‘digital technology’ turn. We see, for instance, many innovations in social life and technology development associated with disability and increasingly unfolding with innovation driven by people with disabilities – such as web accessibility, inclusive design in smartphones, efforts to reframe AI from disability justice perspectives, connected cars and other mobilities, and so on. There has also been an overdue theoretical cross-fertilization across science and technology studies (STS) and critical disability studies, as well as areas such as disability sociology, disability histories, and disability media studies. Such theoretical efforts, thus far, have been largely shaped by European, North America, UK, Australian, and other contexts, imaginaries, and specificities. So: what of disability and technology theory in Southeast Asian contexts? What are the relationships among disability, technology, digital cultures, and so on, in Southeast Asia? What is specific about the histories, politics, and innovations of disability and technology in Southeast Asian societies – and what are their implications for doing technology-as-part-of-disability in this region?

Gerard Goggin is Wee Kim Wee Professor of Communications at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He has a longstanding interest in disability, technology, human rights, social justice, and design. Among his 24 books are Apps (2021), Routledge Companion to Disability and Media (2020), Disability and the Media (2015; with Katie Ellis), and, with Christopher Newell, Disability in Australia (2005), and Digital Disability (2003).

Day 3 – (May 29, Sat HK/SG time)

Panel 9: Disability, Discourses, Disruptions

1:30-3:30pm HK/SG / 6:30-8:30am BST / 7:30-9:30am CEST / 1:30-3:30am EDT / 10:30pm-12:30am PDT

Worldwide, people with disabilities – especially in the Global South – are exposed to particularly high risks of poverty and exclusion (see Yeo 2001, 2005). Although the overwhelming majority of people with disabilities live in countries of the Global South, scientific or even interdisciplinary work on the problem is relatively rare in the Global North (cf. Nguyen 2018). Post-colonies such as Vietnam are intensively addressed by German and International NGOs within the context of development cooperation and inclusive development in which the so-called Social Model of Disability is very frequently highlighted and perpetuated. Postcolonial theories are contemporarily engaged in an intensive debate on how to rethink colonialism with its legacies and continuity. What does a postcolonial critique of the development discourse mean from the perspective of people with disabilities in the Global South? Which concepts of disability prevail in discourses of development policy? This paper aims to contribute to the critical analysis of the ways in which the category of disability is addressed in the discourse on development in the context of inclusive development. Thus, it aims to reveal the theoretical gaps in hegemonic knowledge on development and postulates of inclusion from an intersectional, power-critical perspective by showing the (re)production of colonial-racist and able-bodied patterns of representation inherent in the discourse on inclusive development in which the „white ‘non-disabled’ body“ (Garde 2015, p.98) remains the norm.

References

Garde, J. I. (2015): Cripping Development? Ambivalenzen “Inklusiver Entwicklung” aus crip-theoretischer Perspektive. ISBN 978-3-631-66090-4

Nguyen, X.T. (2018): Critical Disability Studies at the Edge of Global Development: Why Do We Need to Engage with Southern Theory? DOI: https://doi.org/10.15353/cjds.v7i1.400

Day 3 – (May 29, Sat HK/SG time)

Panel 9: Disability, Discourses, Disruptions

1:30-3:30pm HK/SG / 6:30-8:30am BST / 7:30-9:30am CEST / 1:30-3:30am EDT / 10:30pm-12:30am PDT

“We know that nagas [water dragons] exist, because people see them all the time” claims my friend Nok. It is a hard claim to reconcile with my own world, one in which the Mekong River does not contain vast fire-spitting serpents. Recent anthropological work advises us to deal with different ontological worlds, ones that are irresolvable and which should not be equated with the anthropologists’ own (Holbraad and Pedersen 2017). Here, the anthropologist is to analyze Nok’s world as a separate one, taken on its own terms. Other anthropologists, taking up the notion of incommensurable ontological worlds, have noted their political possibilities in challenging the taken-for-granted-ness of colonial or white supremacist worlds (De La Cadena 2015).

But this attention towards incommensurable worlds has the distressing effect of erasing Nok’s own status as an observer, theorist, and thinker, and reducing her to a Thai thinker. She does not give a caveat and say “Thai people see nagas all the time”.  Here, then, it is worth thinking through the kinds of evidence that Nok gives – in this case, dreams. In this paper, I address the quality of dreams as a way to address and deal with an uncertain, uncanny or “weird” (Fisher 2016) occurrence within the world, and how dreams come to express possibilities, suppositions, or uncertain claims without the requirement that they be resolved. Dreams, here, are evidence of a sort, ones that allow an open-ended ontological world, one that does not call for resolution nor enforces boundaries (e.g. a “Thai” world and a “Western” one). It is also a way to pay attention to and respect our interlocutors as theoreticians in their own right, rather than relegating them to their own, separate reality.

Day 2 (May 28, Fri HK/SG time / British Summer Time (BST) / Central European Summer Time (CEST))

Panel 6: Beliefs in Theory

9-10:30pm HK/SG / 2-3:30pm BST / 3-4:30pm CEST / 9-10:30am EDT / 6-7:30am PDT

“One might subsume the eliminated element in the term “aura” and go on to say: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.”

–            Walter Benjamin, The Art of Mechanical Reproduction

“Pangunahin ang kultura ng Pilipinas bilang puwersang tumitiyak sa dating ng isang akda.”

(Philippine culture is the first defining power that secures the aesthetic value of an art.)^[1]

        -Bienvenido Lumbera, “Dating”: Panimulang Muni sa Estika ng Panitikang Filipino

If dating is to literary texts, awra is to queer decolonial performances.  From the works of B. Lumbera (Philippine National Artist for Literture) and W. Benjamin (German philosopher and cultural critic),  I would like to discuss the queering of the term aura and how it operates in local performances and discourses, through beki^[2] language, as awra. In this workshop, I hope to share my study about how the sign “awra” is resuscitated from the imperial lexis and queered by the local imagination in the Philippine media. I will use two media texts to expound these claims, the first one is Awra Briguela’s song “Clap, Clap, Clap, Awra” and second is through the game segment of Showtime, a Philippine noontime entertainment show, “Beklaban” a portmanteau of Beki (gay) and laban (fight). With these examples, I will highlight the moments from these performances that deploy and perform the term “awra” that function as a slippery, dynamic, and exuberant queer performance. Further, through these discussions, I aim to theorize a queer decolonial performance after the local queer tongue of Philippine LGBT community highjacks this word from the Western epistemology and uses it in queer local performances. That aura becomes awra and it is not just appropriation nor reviving of the word and its sense rather it is a reincarnation born into new contexts and politics.

^[1] My translation

^[2] Gay lingo or swardspeak

John Paolo Sarce is a lecturer at Ateneo de Manila University and Polytechnic University of the Philippines. He teaches courses on Education and Literature. He is also a current graduate student in Ateneo de Manila University, his works are commonly focused on understanding postcolonialism, gender and queer theory, medical humanities, and critical pedagogy. 

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

In this exploratory paper, I ask what kinds of transmedial art and writing are necessary and urgent to archive, critique, and respond to the intertidal zone. By focusing on the mutable coastlines of Singapore and its archipelagic contexts of Malaysia and Indonesia, I consider the rich potential of these spaces as contact zones that have much to teach us about the relations between human and nonhuman forms in this time of climate catastrophe. The intertidal zones are the spaces between the high tide and the low tide, spaces where plants and animals must survive both above the surf and under the surf — places most likely to be altered by waterfront infrastructure and haunted by histories of displacement and dispossession. A focus on these spaces thus gives us a heightened awareness of the inequities and histories of colonial and capitalist violence done to communities of humans and nonhumans. From beaches to ports, harbours to wetlands, and dykes to swamps, intertidal zones are defined by flux, ecological complexity, human and nonhuman desire, infrastructure, visible and invisible environmental devastation, teeming life, and spectral traces. Singapore’s larger archipelagic context shares the common histories of imperialism, development, land reclamation, and dispossession.

By focusing on art, writing, and performance in around these zones by Robert Zhao Renhui, Juria Toramae, Charles Lim, Jeremy Tiang, Clara Chow, and ila, I seek to develop new ways of theorizing transmedial art and literary non-fiction as critical/creative lenses and methodologies to reckon with loss, displacement, “progress,” and extraction in the intertidal zone. How are notions of urban ecology and nature in flux due to these developments? How do site-specific poetry, fiction, art, and other forms of cultural expression offer us alternate, multidisciplinary ways of inhabiting and contesting these spaces? What forms of nonhuman life persist here despite human expansion? Fundamentally, my work will probe what rights and responsibilities we have to these ever-shifting, everchanging spaces. It will seek, through artistic and critical means, to pose questions about what has been lost and what might be to come in our living together in these haunted, resonant, polyphonic spaces.

Day 1 (May 27, Thu HK/SG time)
Panel 1: Rethinking ‘Trans-’ and ‘Post-’
9:30-11:30am HK/SG / 2:30-4:30am BST / 3:30-5:30am CEST / 9:30-11:30pm EDT / 6:30-8:30pm PDT

Islamic studies have taken the marginalized position regarding social science in Indonesian with Eurocentric and American traditions dominated by the public university. It is not only excluding from the social science discourse in Indonesia but also a part of silencing. Meanwhile, many Islamic scholars and Islamic thinkers contribute significantly to shaping the Indonesian public sphere, which is currently well-known as moderate Islam. Due to adopting social science theories into Muslim society, some of them then “provincialize” social science tradition by proposing the alternative social discourse. One of those scholars is Muslim Abdoerrahman, who offers Islam Transformatif as the liberation theology for Indonesian Muslim societies. This paper presents the three questions; what is the primary problem that encourages him to submit intensively? How does he theorize the concept of Islam Transformatif that contextualise with the Indonesian Muslim society? To what extent his theory is to be relevant to the current condition? This paper argues that the inequality economy that causes the Indonesian to become more poor people is in line with understanding the primary sources of Islamic interpretation to guide ummah as the piety person to practice the Islamic rites. In contrast, Islam could be an inspiration to establish social justice. Therefore, to re-interpret Islamic theory from both Al-Quran and Sunnah by employing the social approach is significant as the form of empowerment and support for poor people. Within the oligarchy power dominant to the Indonesian economy and Indonesian Muslim elites and their Islamic organizations that could not articulate critical voices on the inequality economy as the structure problem, his theory becomes an essential point for religious moral appealing. 

Wahyudi Akmaliah is Researcher at Research Center for Society and Culture, Indonesian Institute of Sciences (PMB-LIPI). His study focuses on the New Media, Pop Culture, and Sociology of Knowledge in Indonesia. Some of his works are published in Journal of Indonesian Social Sciences and Humanities, Indonesian Journal of Islam and Muslim Societies, Al-Jāmi‘ah, Studia Islamika, ISEAS (book chapters). Currently, he is PhD student of Malay Studies Department, National University of Singapore (NUS).

Day 2 (May 28, Fri HK/SG time / British Summer Time (BST) / Central European Summer Time (CEST))

Panel 6: Beliefs in Theory

9-10:30pm HK/SG / 2-3:30pm BST / 3-4:30pm CEST / 9-10:30am EDT / 6-7:30am PDT

Southeast Asia is a region of diverse indigenous groups (Asia Indigenous Peoples’ Pact, 2010). However, the Southeast Asian IP groups, are often left behind, chiefly in their vital role in the national consultation process (Amnesty International, 2020; Minority Rights Group International, 2020). Scholars, researchers, civil society advocates, and policymakers argue that their presence in our society is enriching for all, and that we must learn from and with IP groups in a spirit of mutual encounter and engagement, principally for theory construction. Despite this, IP communities remained marginalized, discriminated, and victimized. (IWGIA, 2020). Moreover, what is the value of (premodern/precolonial) indigenous spirituality and traditional knowledge – now usually referred to as indigenous knowledge, skills, practices and spiritualities (IKSPS) – in formulating Southeast Asian theories, particularly for purposes of critical knowledge production? To address this question, I will explore one of the underrated theologian-anthropologists Carlito “Karl” Gaspar who has lived and worked with indigenous communities or indigenous peoples (IPs) in Southern Mindanao in the last half-century (1972-2020). Gaspar’s works build on his long engagement with indigenous people’s struggles for recognition of their rights in solidarity with their struggle for self-determination (Gaspar, 2008; Gaspar, 2010; Gaspar, 2011). That said, this paper is divided into three parts. The first part will introduce the anthropological and theological works of Gaspar as a latent decolonial approach or a possible epistemic reconstitution of doing theory in Southeast Asia (Smith, 2012; De Sousa Santos, 2014; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018; Mignolo, 2018; Dey, 2019). Recognizing Gaspar’s anthropological works as a decolonial option, the second part will attempt to address the main question: what is the value of (premodern/precolonial) indigenous spirituality and traditional knowledge in formulating Southeast Asian theories, particularly for purposes of critical knowledge production? The third part will provide a short conclusion.

Keywords: Decoloniality, Epistemic Reconstitution, IndigenousSpirituality, Knowledge Production, Traditional Knowledge

Day 2 (May 28, Fri HK/SG time / British Summer Time (BST) / Central European Summer Time (CEST))

Panel 6: Beliefs in Theory

9-10:30pm HK/SG / 2-3:30pm BST / 3-4:30pm CEST / 9-10:30am EDT / 6-7:30am PDT

In our attempts to decolonize the Philippines at the heart of the Southeast Asian region, a move that continuously being haunted by the imperious influence of the Western world, I propose a keyword I call “vulgos,” drawn from the archive of a 19th-century polymath folklorist and labor union leader from the Philippines, but also an early thinker of Southeast Asia, Isabelo De Los Reyes. I propose “vulgos” as a keyword that empowers us to wield a decolonial approach to the study of the coloniality Philippines, and this entails an attempt to critique what stands as a nation, especially that “vuglos” gets to be translated by contemporary scholars as “people.” The “vulgos” enables us, despite how it might sound pejoratively, to vulgarize the  Western critical theory by ensuring an index, such as the “vuglos,” as a collective that  recognizes the lack of a recognizable coherent identity and social formation, and subsequently,  it propels us to develop a predicate from such subject, which acknowledges the lack, the  autochthone, and the subalternity as a necessary beginning in any study of the decolonial  process of the Philippines, as well as the broad Southeast Asia. With this frame, I recognize the indexical function as well of the “vulgos” for us to appreciate the attempt of De Los Reyes to archive the 19th century cosmology, which he felt was disappearing in the face of expanding colonial modernity, a historical moment necessary for us to expand the tendency of nationalism to eclipse the fugitive nature of the people as the colonial modernity ushers in the birth of a modern nation-state. As a result, by deconstructing what naturally gets to be elided in the  chronological narrative of the shift of the pre-colonial to the colonial Philippines, the vulgos  shows the cosmology that brings together congeries of ghosts, witches, shamans, faith-healers,  magic, occult, and at large, folklore as an interim where the “nation” morphed into an  epistemological weapon to flatten the breadth of transnational connection of the Philippines  with Southeast Asia, but also a pluriverse in which the cognitive imagination is beyond the anthropocentrism of the Western epistemology. However, without recognizing the presumption of a “vulgos,” it would be difficult to proceed since the colonial modernity of nation-state will perpetually persist with its monolithic idea of a people, but also the human, anthropocentrism ad infinitum. From this point, I also share the vulgar archive of De Los Reyes, which were published at the turn of the 20th century, spanning from anthropological monograph, folklore essays, working class periodical, and even literature, which has remained in the original Spanish, hiding in the lack of national interest to study our colonial language.

Day 1 (May 27, Thu HK/SG time)

Panel 3: Folk and Creole Epistemologies

3:30-5:30pm HK/SG time / 8:30-10:30am BST / 9:30-11:30am CEST / 3:30-5:30am EDT / 12:30-2:30am PDT

What makes activism in Southeast Asia ‘real,’ Indonesia labor movements specialist Michele Ford wonders (2013). With a slight twist, the question becomes: What makes it ‘matter’? What are its material manifestations, effects, and meanings across a range of levels, from embodied everyday life to global eco- and biosystems? These are the questions my presentation will address with a focus on environmental protest in Cambodia. Building on the interdisciplinary field of New Materialisms, it will discuss a set of operations by non-governmental organizations and critical contemporary artists with regard to issues of pollution, extractivism, and land grabbing. It will examine the following aspects: the ‘apparatuses’ that make these protest operations visible, intelligible, and ‘measurable’ across different geographical, cultural, and institutional spaces; the sensuous, messy, transitory, and relational aspects of activism and their capacity to unhinge essentialisms and determinisms. By emphasizing the porosity between bodies, objects, and contexts, an analysis of activism through the lens of materiality might enable a different tracing of the practices and productions of Cambodian activists and artists. In terms of theory, the presentation will explore, through this case study, how materialist conceptualizations of agency and causality might contribute a different understanding of the conditions of doing politics in Southeast Asia. Conversely, it will consider the potential of Southeast Asian perspectives to decenter and to decolonize ‘theories of matter’ which, since they are primarily anchored in Western modern intellectual traditions, have so far been little challenged by non-Western and indigenous ontologies.

Bio:

Stéphanie Benzaquen-Gautier is an art historian and ERC Research Fellow in the project ‘Cultures of Occupation in Twentieth Century Asia’ (COTCA), University of Nottingham, UK. She received her PhD at the Erasmus University Rotterdam and was associate researcher at the university’s Centre for Historical Culture for several years. She has worked as curator and organized exhibitions in Israel, France, Germany, Lithuania, Romania, Russia, Slovenia, and Thailand. She was a Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien and ICI Institute for Cultural Inquiry in Berlin (2018-19), the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (2012), the Stone Summer Theory Institute at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago (2010) and the Theory Department at Jan van Eyck Academie in the Netherlands (2005-2006). She is currently working on her first monograph (‘Beyond skulls: Western visual culture and the memory of the Cambodian genocide’) and a co-edited volume on the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Cambodia. She has contributed to essays collections, exhibition catalogs and journals such as Cinéma & Cie, Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust, Mémoires en Jeu, Journal of Perpetrator Studies, Kunstlicht, and Media, Culture & Society.  

Day 1 (May 27, Thu HK/SG time)

Panel 3: Folk and Creole Epistemologies 

3:30-5:30pm HK/SG time / 8:30-10:30am BST / 9:30-11:30am CEST / 3:30-5:30am EDT / 12:30-2:30am PDT

Practices of performance criticism in Southeast Asia both appropriate and diverge from lineages of Eurocentric arts criticism; these may style the critic as a “parasite” siphoning off the creative energy of a work, or as symbolic of accrued cultural capital endowed with the expertise to decode an artwork.  Drawing from Julietta Singh and Irfan Ahmad’s troubling of colonial masteries and resistances to western lineages of critique, I wonder: how might the critic unravel the tangle of parasitical masteries that separate her from the performance she goes to see – and move alongside a work, skin to skin? My repositioning of the critic’s navigational journey is informed by archipelagic performance theory (Paul Rae 2019), and this paper in particular draws from a nascent Practice-as-Research (PaR) project that involves a loose working group of critics and practitioners from across archipelagic Southeast Asia who are interested in mapping ecologies and vocabularies of critique in the region and collaboratively theorizing lineages of critique from where we are located. While in its early stages, this PaR project will involve a series of meetings, focus groups and workshops across a six-month period, with an emphasis on care studies, relationality and embeddedness in a regional context, and translocal exchanges.

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

“Plural Ecologies in Conflict: Perspectives from Southeast Asia“, a Germany-based network of anthropologists, is currently developing a new synthesis of political ecology and ontological approaches toward human-non-human relationships. We argue that the research traditions on Southeast Asia are particularly apt to support such a synthesis. Political ecology has studied local human-environment relationships from the point of view of their translocal, national and global entanglements in power relationships. The anthropology of ontologies, in contrast, has focused on local conceptions of human-non human relationships that offer radical alternatives to Western-modern or globalized concepts. Southeast Asian local cosmologies, however, always valorize translocal relationships. The translocal, the foreign and the faraway are constitutive elements of these cosmologies and ontologies. This provides them with a specific flexibility regarding the acknowledgment of non-humans, for instance, spirits of life forces, while at the same time linking cosmological and political hierarchies. Therefore, Southeast Asians often practice what we call ‘ontologies of possibilities’ in their engagement with the environment. We therefore develop a theoretical language based on the concept of plural ecologies – ecologies based on the contrastive recognition or exclusion of certain non-humans, be they person or things, animals, plants, spirits or humans. Human-environment relationships thus constantly produce ecologies whose dynamics develop along lines of pluralization and hegemonialization. Pluralization denotes their tendency to produce multiple sets of relationships between humans and non-humans, while hegemonialization denotes the always incomplete tendency of one ecology to dominate or marginalize others. Both terms represent two aspects of each ethnographic situation that are in a constant tension of production and destruction.

Guido Sprenger is Professor of Social Anthropology at the Institute of Anthropology, Heidelberg University since 2010. He has done research on ritual, cosmology and transculturality in the uplands of Laos since 2000. Among his publications is the monograph Die Männer, die den Geldbaum fällten (The Men who cut the Money Tree: Concepts of Exchange and Society among Rmeet of Takheung, Laos) (2006), Animism in Southeast Asia (co-edited with Kaj Århem, 2016) and Plural Ecologies in Southeast Asia (Sojourn, co-edited with Kristina Großmann, 2018). His research interests include ritual, exchange, human-environment relations, animism, cultural identity, kinship and social morphology.

Day 2 (May 28, Fri HK/SG time / British Summer Time (BST) / Central European Summer Time (CEST))

Panel 5: Politics and Poetics of Nature

7:30-9pm HK/SG / 12:30-2pm BST / 1:30-3pm CEST / 7:30-9am EDT / 4:30-6am PDT

There is a growing acknowledgement for the need to ‘provincialize’ knowledge claims based on European social and political categories in the context of non-European societies. However, despite the common ground that Critical Race Theory (CRT) shares with postcolonial thought (Winant 2004), the US-centric nature of its origin and focus has been understated. It is claimed that CRT presents ‘a rich framework to address the multitude of global racial manifestations’ (Weiner 2012), and attempts have been made to utilize CRT in a transnational setting (Wing, 2000). This paper uses the states of Malaysia and Singapore to illustrate the limitations of using CRT as a framework for understanding racial dynamics on a global scale. I argue that CRT has been formulated to explain racism in a black/white paradigm and is unable to account for the fluid racial hierarchies and intersecting oppressions which characterize Southeast Asia, as racializing projects and relations of racial oppression occur within and between various non-black peoples of colour. For instance, the usage of the term ‘Chinese privilege’ in Singapore consciously mimics the language of CRT, in which dominant white majority of the US is replaced by the ethnic Chinese of the island city-state. This does not account for the realities of Singapore’s racial politics, which has developed in a different historical, institutional, and cultural context from the US. Furthermore, CRT is difficult to utilize in Malaysia, where an elite Malay capitalist class exists alongside prejudice and racial stereotyping against Malay workers in the private sector (Lee & Khalid 2015). A theory of racism for Southeast Asia cannot entirely rely on the precepts of CRT; but must consider the history of British colonialism and the continued phenomenon of global white supremacy, while being rooted in local racial discourses and indigenous forms of racial thinking. 

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

This essay situates resource extraction politics in the twin formation of Malayan intellectual and literary thought as embodied by Nanyang Studies and Mahua literature. Rather than Chinese-Malayan, Sino-Malay, and sinophone Malaysian, I explore Mahua literature as Chinese-language literature from the Malay Peninsula, along the rich tin-belt stretching from Ranong and Phuket to Bangka and Belitung. I argue that its coinage was an anti-colonial response to Malaya’s export-oriented colonial economy at the height of the international tin trade during the 1920s and 1930s. Additionally, I trace the intellectual origins of Nanyang Studies, not to its actual founding in Singapore in 1940, but to its founder Hsu Yun-Tsiao’s experience of the central peninsula and ports, as recounted in his Patani diaries (1933). For centuries, southern Thailand and northern Malaya experienced Chinese migration due to the tin trade, and their development under Siamese and British spheres of influence and local Malay rule can be conceived as a geohistorical unit. It was only the Anglo-Siamese treaty of 1909 that formed the present-day border between Malaysia and Thailand, and how we now conceive the national boundaries between Mahua and Taihua literatures. But the long history of the tin trade’s Phuket-Penang sea route and Patani-Perak-Kedah overland routes not only influenced the internationalist, cosmopolitan, and anti-colonial thinking of Hsu’s work, but also facilitated his recruitment to teach the descendants of Chinese laborers and capitalists in the first place. Nanyang Studies’s historical consciousness of borderlands and coastlines contains non-national strategies for intellectual decolonization within Mahua literary development. 

Nicholas Y. H. Wong holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Chicago. As a postdoctoral fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Hong Kong, he will deepen his study of global networks of commodities and industries as they transact the writing of literary history. His current book project examines the impact of tin and rubber on the Malay Peninsula and the aesthetic forms of minority relations and differences they generate in Chinese-language writing. In short, he is writing a materialist and geoeconomic history of Mahua literature and intellectual culture. During his Lee Kong Chian Research Fellowship at the National Library Singapore in 2018, he did archival research into the Nanyang historian Hsu Yun-Tsiao’s unpublished diaries, written in classical Chinese in Patani, Siam during the 1930s. His articles have appeared in CLEAR (Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews) and Chapters on Asia.​

Day 2 (May 28, Fri HK/SG time / British Summer Time (BST) / Central European Summer Time (CEST))

Panel 5: Politics and Poetics of Nature

7:30-9pm HK/SG / 12:30-2pm BST / 1:30-3pm CEST / 7:30-9am EDT / 4:30-6am PDT

This paper will discuss the idea of postmodernity in the context of Malaysia visual arts. The late 20th-century movement has always been cautiously discussed as the theory itself is characterized by broad subjectivism or relativism; and suspicion of the role of ideology in asserting and maintaining political and economic power. Such concept was threaded carefully in Malaysia as it was feared that such an ideology would challenge the national cultural conceptualisation rooted in Malay and Islamic forms. The postmodern narrative were more possible in the late 1990s without provoking any fearful responses. This paper will, discuss further the appropriation of the idea of postmodern/postmodernity in the new context of Malaysian art history. Within the larger context of Malaysian studies, this paper will discuss the term situasi percamoden (postmodern situation) as an appropriation of postmodern theory, although it has nothing to do with the discontinuity in the earlier phases of the modern period in Western societies. It a term that I have used in describing the cultural condition, that have developed especially among the Malaysian middle class as the result of Malaysia’s sudden participation in the modern global economy. The art works by Malaysian artists since the 1990s can be argued a result of this situation.

Sarena Abdullah, Ph.D is an art historian at the School of the Arts, Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM). She was awarded the inaugural London, Asia Research Award, by Paul-Mellon Centre, London and Asian Art Archive, Hong Kong in 2017. She was also the recipient of the 2016, and 2017 & 2019 CAA-Getty Travel Grant as part of the CAA-Getty International and Reunion Program. She is the author of Malaysian Art since the 1990s: Postmodern Situation (2018) and co-editor of a publication of Southeast Asian Art entitled Ambitious Alignments: New Histories of Southeast Asian Art 1945-1990 (2018). She had written extensively on Malaysian art on various academic journals and platforms.

Day 1 (May 27, Thu HK/SG time)
Panel 1: Rethinking ‘Trans-’ and ‘Post-’
9:30-11:30am HK/SG / 2:30-4:30am BST / 3:30-5:30am CEST / 9:30-11:30pm EDT / 6:30-8:30pm PDT

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.

The term Anthropocene has been critiqued for failing to adequately acknowledge the disproportionate influence of fossil fuel capitalism and imperialism on the ongoing environmental crisis and how its effects are unevenly experienced across the Global South and North. Alternative conceptual frameworks—the Capitalocene, the Chthulucene and the Plantationocene—that seek to address these inequalities have been offered.^[1] This paper will focus on one of these terms: the Capitalocene and will consider its usefulness for developing a critical vocabulary to describe and theorise recent films and video works from Southeast Asia that address themes of infrastructural development and both colonial and contemporary processes of resource extractivism. In doing so, I follow T.J. Demos’s conceptualisation of “the extractivist logic of the Capitalocene.”^[2]

The paper will discuss this concept in relation to the work of three filmmakers and artists from Thailand, Vietnam, and Cambodia that similarly draw attention to the ways that present day environmental concerns are intertwined with historical legacies of colonial expansionism across the region: Sutthirat Supaparinya’s “electricity generation series” (2012—); Nguyen Phuong Linh’s Memories of a Blind Elephant (2014-16) and Danech San’s A Million Years (2018).

Referencing local cosmologies and belief systems, these works also reveal an openness to pre-colonial temporalities and even deep time. The paper will consider how through these connections, these works from Southeast Asia draw attention to the asymmetrical power relations that result from the loss of Indigenous land rights and cultures, and the exploitation of the natural environment for capitalist purposes across the region.

This research forms part of a co-authored book and website project with Dr Jasmine Nadua Trice on film and media organising in Southeast Asia, please see: https://www.aseac-interviews.org for more information.

Philippa Lovatt is a Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of St Andrews, UK. Her research focusses on artists’ moving image, eco-cinema, sound, and Southeast Asian independent cinema. She is currently writing a book on the politics of sound and listening in global artists’ film and is also working on an oral history project with Jasmine Nadua Trice, entitled: “Parallel Practices: Oral Histories of Southeast Asian Film and Video Cultures, 1997-2022.” She has recently edited two dossiers for Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (“Theorizing Region: Film and Video Cultures in Southeast Asian Cinema” co-edited with Jasmine Nadua Trice) and Screen (“Tracing the Anthropocene in Southeast Asian Cinemas” co-edited with Graiwoot Chulphongsathorn) which are both forthcoming in 2021. She has previously published her research in Screen; Sound, Music and the Moving Image; The New Soundtrack and Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia.

Day 2 (May 28, Fri HK/SG time / British Summer Time (BST) / Central European Summer Time (CEST))

Panel 5: Politics and Poetics of Nature

7:30-9pm HK/SG / 12:30-2pm BST / 1:30-3pm CEST / 7:30-9am EDT / 4:30-6am PDT

^[1] See Donna Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin”, Environmental Humanities 6 (2015): 162.

^[2] T.J. Demos, ‘Blackout: The Necropolitics of Extraction’, Dispatches, Issue 1, October 1, 2018, http://dispatchesjournal.org/articles/blackout-the-necropolitics-of-extraction/

Abstract. This essay proposes an alternative regard to suffering, as depicted in Franscisco Balagtas’s poem Florante at Laura, that moves from the frequent reliance on the figure of Christ as the primary locus of understanding, and toward a wager on “pre-colonial” folk wisdom, as embodied by dalít, a species of folk poetry. In doing so, a decolonized articulation on the phenomenon of the wound, particularly in its the vernacular renditions as sugat and sakuna, is initiated. What shall emerge then is an ideation of a Philippine folk traumaturgy or trauma-work that is most tropical in its modus: capable of turning any given moment to whichever direction, and hence harnessing of an ambivalence that could permit even the deepest of woundings to transform, as if thaumaturgically, to an instance of the erotic. This procedure is nominated as pagdalumat, a gesture which is at the cusp of “understanding,” “suffering,” and “adorning.” 

Keywords. Florante at Laura, Philippine poetry, trauma studies, tropicality, súgat, sakuna, dalumat 

Bionote. Christian Jil Benitez teaches at the Department of Filipino, Ateneo de Manila University, where he obtained his AB-MA in Filipino literature (2016/2018). Hailed as Poet of the Year 2018 by the Commission on the Filipino Language, his critical and creative works have been published in Katipunan, Kritika Kultura, eTropic, and Philippine Studies, among others. Presently, his critical engagements primarily move around Philippine time, as perceived through the tropical, the mythological, and the material. 

Day 3 – (May 29, Sat HK/SG time)

Panel 8:  Cold War Traumas 

11am-12:30pm HK/SG / 4-5:30am BST / 5-6:30am CEST / 11pm-12:30am EDT / 8pm-9:30pm PDT

The 2005 World Summit not only marked the beginning of UN support for the One Laptop Child project (OLPC), but it also marked the beginning of Thailand’s interest in technological education reform through introducing computers into classrooms. Forged at the MIT Lab, the project promised a low cost and durable laptop for developing countries. Like other developing countries, this project gave Thailand hope to catch up with other developed countries while closing the gap in socio-cultural, economic, and technological aspects. Technology thus was seen as a viable solution.

This presentation will look at the development discourse about techno-solutionism from a Science and technology perspective. Since the early 2000s, OLPC has been at the center of debates among scholars. Christo Sims (2017), Roderic Crooks (2018), Anita Say Chan (2014), and Morgan Ames (2019) conducted rich ethnographic research looking at the disruptiveness of computer technology in classrooms, the encounter between OLPC engineers and the local, and the mismatch between the engineer and philanthropists’ technological design and the local. However, they have paid less attention to the development discourse as a dominant site of knowledge production. Furthermore, the shift in the Thai government interest from OLPC technology to Chinese made technology provide an interesting case in their perspective of development.

Building on critiques of development Ferguson (1994) Li (2007), I will examine the narrative of Thailand’s educational technology policies focusing on one laptop per child project through analyzing media and official documents.

Day 3 – (May 29, Sat HK/SG time)

Panel 7: Developmental Urbanisms

9:30-11am HK/SG time / 2:30-4am British Summer Time (BST) / 3:30-5am Central European Summer Time (CEST) / 9:30-11pm US Eastern Daylight Time (EDT) / 6:30-8pm US Pacific Daylight Time (PDT)

Modernist city planning theories, including socialist modernism, assume that planning ideas should correspond with the actualities of built forms. This assumption turns out problematic in Hanoi, where productive development of built forms takes place not because of planning ideas but despite planning ideas. Using two sets of ethnographic materials that relate to the idea of “public” built environment, this paper shows that the looseness of correspondence between planning ideas and built forms is precisely what affords “publicness” of built environment to emerge. Through these empirical discussions, I show that there is room for decolonising the idea of “public” built environment. This is the first of the two contributions that this paper makes to the workshop. The second contribution, then, is a methodological one. Whereas “public” built environment emerges despite planning ideas, local city planners deploy the idea of “public” in ways that align with mainstream social science discourses. This is a complex situation where local theories are themselves modernist and yet they conduce to unexpected practices of making and living built forms. Key is to distinguish between the amorphous local practices of urban inhabiting and the modernist local practices of planning intellectuals, while also acknowledging that both are “local”, and that either of these two does not operate in the absence of the other. By positing these local practices as theory in action, I show that local practices cease to be a unique figure that should be interrogated against the ground of modernist, mainstream social science categories. Instead, I use local practices as themselves a ground, against which to interrogate mainstream theories. This is an anthropological method of figure-ground reversal, useful for shifting blind spots. The paper presents this method as itself an effective path for decolonial theorisation from Hanoi. This method calls for materialist perspectives, and it also enriches the theoretical question of universality and specificity. The paper also amounts to one unique take on the idea of creolisation.

Takanari Fujita is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. Takanari’s current research asks how the city of Hanoi is made and lived in processes that involve both human worlds and physical worlds, and he pursues it through ethnography of socialist collective housing. He aims to scale this research as an intervention in social science categories of thought about the relationships between humans and physical materialities. Other aspects of his interest include: co-constitution between socialism and urban materialities; built and population density as method; and scale and affordance in theorisation. He has keen interest in some strands of so-called “ontological anthropology”. Takanari studied at the University of Tokyo and SOAS before, and he also has some professional background in the fields of international aid and disability.

Day 3 – (May 29, Sat HK/SG time)

Panel 7: Developmental Urbanisms

9:30-11am HK/SG time / 2:30-4am British Summer Time (BST) / 3:30-5am Central European Summer Time (CEST) / 9:30-11pm US Eastern Daylight Time (EDT) / 6:30-8pm US Pacific Daylight Time (PDT)

Building on my current work focusing on the biopolitics of inclusion in Singapore, and in conversation with the important work of scholars in mobilities studies, critical access studies, and geographies of disability (Hamraie 2013, 2017, 2018; Gleeson 1999; Imrie 2000; Boys 2017; Cresswell 2010, 2014), this paper examines the mobilities of disabled bodies in society as a key aspect of inclusion, in particular, its related aspects such as physical accessibility, physical infrastructure, policy legislation, social mobility and the aspiring mobilities of disabled people themselves. In centering disability mobility as a key fundamental analytic, the paper aims to theorise how inclusion in different locations in Southeast Asia has functioned as a biopolitical strategy (Foucault 1978; Esposito 2008; Agamben 1998; Mitchell and Snyder 2005; Puar 2017), focused on the mobilities of disabled bodies. It considers inclusion within international and transnational instruments around disability rights, and national strategies on inclusive citizenship, manifested in law and legislation, which are increasingly dominating the ways in which we see and know disability. With specific reference to events in Singapore and other Southeast Asian locations, the paper looks to examine how these dominant ways of inclusion, often seen within the lens of a universal disability rights agenda, imposes particular demands on disabled bodies, and the kinds of tensions, contestations, and contradictions as well as the mobilities/immobilities that occur as disabled bodies are folded into life. I consider the following questions: How can the biopolitics of disability mobility functions as a means to theoretical lens to understand and examine disability in and across Southeast Asia? What can disability mobility tell us about transnational flows of ideas such as disability rights and how have different locations localized such ideas historically and in the present? What kinds of futures and bodies are foretold by disability mobility? What are the implications of reading the biopolitics of disability mobility as theory in Southeast Asia?

References

Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo sacer. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

Boys, Jos. 2017. Disability, space, architecture: a reader. Vol. Book, Whole. London: Routledge.

Cresswell, Tim. 2010. “Towards a politics of mobility.” Environment and planning D: society and space 28 (1): 17-31.

—. 2014. “Mobilities III: moving on.” Progress in Human Geography 38 (5): 712-721.

Esposito, Roberto. 2008. Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction. London: Penguin Books.

Gleeson, Brendan. 1999. Geographies of Disability. London: Routledge.

Hamraie, Aimi. 2013. “Designing Collective Access: A Feminist Disability Theory of Universal Design.” Disability Studies Quarterly 33 (4). https://dsq-sds.org/article/view/3871.

—. 2017. Building access: Universal design and the politics of disability. U of Minnesota Press.

—. 2018. “Enlivened city: Inclusive design, biopolitics, and the philosophy of liveability.” Built Environment 44 (1): 77-104.

Imrie, Rob. 2000. “Disabling environments and the geography of access policies and practices.” Disability & Society 15 (1): 5-24.

Mitchell, David T., and Sharon L. Snyder. 2015. The Biopolitics of Disability: Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism, and Peripheral Embodiment. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

Puar, Jasbir K. 2017. The Right to Maim. Vol. Book, Whole. Durham: Duke University Press.

Kuansong Victor, Zhuang is a PhD candidate in Disability Studies and Cultural Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Macquarie University. His work centres on the contemporary claims to include the disabled within life in Singapore and examines the biopolitics of inclusion through a reading of various cultural texts.  

Day 3 – (May 29, Sat HK/SG time)

Panel 9: Disability, Discourses, Disruptions

1:30-3:30pm HK/SG / 6:30-8:30am BST / 7:30-9:30am CEST / 1:30-3:30am EDT / 10:30pm-12:30am PDT

This paper deliberates about the nature of the Cold War in Southeast Asia by looking into the civil war in Portuguese Timor in 1975, which was then described by foreign observers as the “Cuba of Southeast Asia,” and in which opposing sides described themselves as “communists/leftists” and “anti-communists.” It traces how Timorese and Southeast Asian people imagined what were actually multiple local conflicts as parts of one global conflict, and how, because of such imaginings, they ended up inviting international reactions and interventions into the region. This chapter proposes the terms “the Cold War”—crossing out “Cold” but leaving it there—for clarifying the local and actual (hot) nature of warfare on the ground, while, at the same time, highlighting the un-erasable traces of the global conflict within local conflicts. As such, the paper intends to offer a theoretical standpoint for viewing Southeast Asia’s Cold War as a simulacrum constructed by local leaders and peoples’ simulation of the global confrontation between the capitalist and communist camps.

Day 3 – (May 29, Sat HK/SG time)

Panel 8:  Cold War Traumas

11am-12:30pm HK/SG / 4-5:30am BST / 5-6:30am CEST / 11pm-12:30am EDT / 8pm-9:30pm PDT

The Straits Philosophical Society (1893–1916) was a monthly meeting of educated and esteemed Singaporean residents (who were largely colonial administrators), forming a de facto intelligentsia in colonial Singapore. The Society was a space of negotiation between coloniser/colonised perspectives, with frequent interaction with other “learned societies” within the Southeast Asian region. There were only two ‘Asiaticʼ members of the Society, Tan Teck Soon and Lim Boon Keng (the former being a founding member and the latter being the last active member). Their participation in the Society were significant wayposts for the development of both the laws and culture of the country: e.g. Tanʼs debut response in 1893 was an important footnote to the development of the Criminal Procedure Code enacted in 1902, while Limʼs engagements paved the way for his later involvements in social reforms in Singapore. Yet, Tan and Lim understood their racialised identities in dialogue with the other members of the Society in distinctive ways.

Paying attention to their articles written as both essayist and critic during the Societyʼs meetings and taking inspiration from Hung (2009), we argue that their negotiations of the imaginaries ‘Singaporeʼ, ‘Chinaʼ, and ‘Britainʼ are tied to their constructions of racialised identities. These twin processes were situated within the ongoing dialogue between them, the members of the Society, and the wider public. In this paper, we attend to how this specifically manifests in the various ways in which they discussed and deployed creolised Chinese philosophy in the context of the Society: Tan favouring the flexibility and “broad spirit” of the Zhuangzi, while Lim gravitating towards the benevolent embrace of the Confucian tradition. This allows us crucial historical insight into the production of critical knowledge by Straits Chinese intellectuals at the height of the British Empire in Southeast Asia.

Day 1 (May 27, Thu HK/SG time)

Panel 3: Folk and Creole Epistemologies

3:30-5:30pm HK/SG time / 8:30-10:30am BST / 9:30-11:30am CEST / 3:30-5:30am EDT / 12:30-2:30am PDT

Southeast Asia has always been a productive region of confluences and circulations, where different intellectual traditions meet. This very plurality across the region does not allow it to fit comfortably within existing frameworks for writing the history of medicine. In this paper, I reflect on how we write about health and medicine today, as well as how Europeans historically wrote about their interactions with local actors in Southeast Asia about matters relating to health and medicine. By looking closely at cross-cultural interactions between Europeans and local actors in Southeast Asia, I hope to unpack mediated knowledge production and vocabularies from Southeast Asia. This paper attempts a close reading of three Dutch texts: a vocabulary book by Justus Heurnius (1650), and travel accounts by Nicolaus de Graaff (1701) and Johan Splinter Stavorinus (1793). Analysing these Dutch texts from the perspective of book history and production, I unravel the processes of observing, writing and packaging vocabularies from the region for an European audience. Through trajectories of knowledge circulations across Southeast Asia, to Europe and back, this approach offers future possibilities for considering intra-regional resonances, and positioning Southeast Asia within the global circulations of knowledge.

Melinda Susanto is currently a PhD candidate at the Institute for History in Leiden University, where she is working on the histories of medicine in the Indian Ocean between 1600 and 1800. Prior to this, Melinda was an assistant curator at the National Gallery Singapore, where she worked on 19^th and early 20^th century art of Southeast Asia and art of the British Empire. Melinda holds an MA in Colonial and Global History from Leiden University, an MA in the History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art, and a BA in Art History and Ancient Greek from the Australian National University.

Day 1 (May 27, Thu HK/SG time)

Panel 3: Folk and Creole Epistemologies

3:30-5:30pm HK/SG time / 8:30-10:30am BST / 9:30-11:30am CEST / 3:30-5:30am EDT / 12:30-2:30am PDT