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The Asian Financial Crisis was a tumultuous international event that also resulted in a crisis of faith in the nation and the state in the region, the most dramatic result of which were the anti-Chinese riots in Jakarta and elsewhere in Java in 1998. For the Chinese in Nanyang, or the “South Seas,” who had always occupied an ambivalent space in their adopted homelands, it was only one of the more recent key moments in a long timeline of historical trauma. But just as 危机 (Wei Ji), the Chinese term for “crisis,” consists of two characters that signify ‘danger’ and ‘opportunity’, Nanyang Chinese filmmakers found this crisis as an opportunity to critically re-examine the nation, bending time and expanding space in order to reimagine home, family, belonging and nationhood. After a historical survey of the Chinese in Insular Southeast Asia, this study looks at the ideation of a unique Nanyang Chinese culture through a textual analysis of two contemporary semi-autobiographical melodrama films commemorating the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997 and its after-effects in the years after. Babi Buta Yang Ingin Terbang (Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly, 2008), an Indonesian-language film, revolves around the emotionally disconnected members of a Chinese-Indonesian family making sense of the anti-Chinese riots. Ilo Ilo (爸媽不在家, 2013), an English, Tagalog, and Mandarin-language film, explores the relationship between a Singaporean boy and his Filipina nanny whose maternal nature provokes the jealousy of the child’s real mother. This Intra-Asian study will examine the intersections of nationalism and diaspora, as well as of Southeast Asian Cinema and Sinophone Cinema. Despite the differences in style, treatment, and language, these films seem to have a common goal, not as much countering as transcending the nation’s “empty, homogeneous time (and space)” in order to accommodate the Chinese Diasporic Imaginary.
2020, Proceedings of the International Conference on Business, Economic, Social Science, and Humanities – Humanities and Social Sciences Track (ICOBEST-HSS 2019)
2017, Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia
In addressing the issues of class and gender within the Indonesian modern canon, the comfort found in the postcolonial mythology of the heroic and authentic anti-colonial modern artist is disrupted. In the cracks, a discomforting matrix of relationships between modern painters and the women they painted is revealed.
2000, Modern Asian Studies
2007, The International Journal of Asian Studies
Page 1. International Journal of Asian Studies, 4, 1 (2007), pp. 113???136 2007 Cambridge University Press doi:10.1017|S147959140700054X Printed in the United Kingdom 113 studying women and gender in southeast asia Barbara Watson Andaya ...
2005, Journal of Asian Studies
What, if any, is the relationship between ritual transvestism of the early modern period, roughly the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries, and contemporary transgendered identities in island Southeast Asia? In asking this question, I do not assume any necessary connection between past and present practices enacted by gender transgressive females (and males). I am not tracing the “history” of transgendered females, nor am I suggesting the existence of a transgendered identity that transcends time and place, appearing in different guises. Rather, I am examining the cultural discourses and narratives that produce particular gendered practices deemed outside and therefore transgressive of normative gender in various time periods. I argue that these gendered practices are differently produced, understood, and interiorized in relation to the dominant religious, cultural, and social discourses of particular historical eras.
2020, Oxford Bibliography in Anthropology Online
This article situates ethnohistory historically, conceptually, methodologically, and geographically in relation to its intertwined “parent” disciplines of anthropology and history. As a named interdisciplinary inquiry, ethnohistory emerged in the United States in the mid-1950s in the “applied” context of academic involvement in Native American land claims hearings after 1946. However, anthropology (the science of humanity) has overlapped, intersected, or diverged from history (study or knowledge of the past) since becoming a distinct field in Europe in the mid-18th century and gradually professionalized as an academic discipline from the 1830s, initially in Russia. Anthropological approaches oscillated between historicization and its neglect or denial, with recurring tension between event and system, process and structure, diachrony and synchrony. In the late 18th and 19th centuries, ethnology (comparative study of peoples or races, their origins and development) was distinguished from the natural history of man and from anthropology (the science of race), initially in France. From the 1860s to the 1920s, Anglophone anthropological theory was dominated by the opposed doctrines of sociocultural evolution and diffusion—both superficially historical but largely ahistorical processes. For the next half century, prevailing functionalist, structuralist, and culturalist discourses mostly denied knowable history to ethnography’s purportedly vanishing “primitive” subjects. This uneven, agonistic disciplinary history did not encourage a subfield uniting anthropology and history. However, after 1950, in global contexts of anticolonialism, decolonization, and movements for Indigenous or egalitarian rights, anthropologists, historians, and archaeologists developed the hybrid fields of Ethnohistory and Ethnographic History, which flourished for half a century. Practitioners transcended ethnohistory’s spatial and conceptual roots in the United States and Canada to investigate Indigenous or African American pasts in Latin America and the Caribbean, Indigenous or local pasts in Africa, Asia, and Oceania, and non-Indigenous pasts in Europe and elsewhere. The need to incorporate Indigenous or popular histories and viewpoints was increasingly emphasized. From the 1980s, ethnohistory was condemned as Eurocentric, outdated, even racist, by postcolonial and postmodern critiques. The label’s usage declined in the 21st century in favor of the already established terms anthropological history or historical anthropology, or the emergent fields of Anthropology of History, historical consciousness, and historicity.
2019, Journal of the History of Sexuality
2019
It is over seventy years since the issue of systematized sexual abuse in the Asia-Pacific War came to light in interrogations leading up to the post-Second World War Military Tribunals. There was also widespread vernacular knowledge of the system in the early postwar period in Japan and its former occupied territories. The movement for redress for the survivors of this system gained momentum in East and Southeast Asia in the 1970s. By the 1990s this had become a global movement, making connections with other international movements and political campaigns on the issue of militarized sexual violence. These movements have culminated in advances in international law, where militarized sexual violence has been addressed in ad hoc Military Tribunals on the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda and is explicitly addressed in the Rome Statute which established the International Criminal Court. (https://apjjf.org/#_edn1) Cultural politics and the politics of commemoration have also been an important...
2012, The Journal of Asian Studies
My comments in this essay focus on recent scholarship on gender, sexuality, and the state in Southeast Asia and include brief remarks on some of the literature regarding Southeast Asians in the diaspora. In the interests of transparency, I begin by noting that I am an anthropologist by trade and that many of my observations pertain to writings by anthropologists and historians, though I also engage work in other disciplines.
This essay offers a critical reevaluation of the concept " world literature " based on a reading of a series of deliberations in Pramoedya Ananta Toer's penal colony memoirs The Mute's Soliloquy (Indonesian 1988 / English version 1999), in particular concerning German literature and history. In order to work with literature in a global context one needs to do justice to the material conditions under which literature originates and is being read; it also needs to be acknowledged that " literature " is a modern Western invention that has no precise equivalent in many other cultures. The essay argues against a Herderian-‐Goethean view of " world literature " as an accumulation of the qualitative accomplishments and values of a specific cultural community. It also problematizes the category of " understanding other cultures " in the reception of a text. Instead, it argues that " literature " can travel in many different directions and take on a variety of functions. Pramoedya's deliberations emphasize the importance of literature as memory work, with the understanding that the memories and real‐life experiences contained in literature can differ widely, depending on the circumstances of a text's reception. Only if we recognize the specific temporal and spatial circumstances under which texts emerge and are read, in particular also non-‐canonical texts, we can start to think about the object perceived as " literature " as not only fostering a sense of difference, but also as having the potential to reflect on what humanity has in common.
In this paper I draw on the work of the influential Indonesian author and leftist figure Pramoedya Ananta Toer to show how Marxism provides both promise and tension when used as a political expression of non-Western aspiration. Of interest is his well-known Buru Quartet, a momentous literary tetralogy chronicling the struggle of the Indonesian people under colonial rule. The conflict between the West and ‘non-Western’, or ‘indigenous’, modernity, is a well-known theme in the discourse of occidentalism, and I use occidentalism as a framework in which to locate and explore the quartet’s Marxist-indigenous paradox. What becomes apparent is that, albeit stemming from a rich anticolonial writing culture, the quartet represents a remarkable attack on Indonesian culture, and representations of colonialism in the quartet are as much a message to present day Indonesia as they are a strike on the West’s historic conscience. Such geographically particular writing evidences the difficulty that occidentalist scholars face when attempting to understand how the West is reified in the non-Western psyche. However, literary geography has the potential to unpack an intricate cognitive geography fraught with complex geographical representations, and in so doing can be a valuable ally of occidentalism.
2020, Archipel
2015, Australian Humanities Review
The Australian Government’s response to asylum seekers since 2001 has been much criticized, primarily by legal scholars from the standpoint of international and human rights law. The goal of this paper, in contrast, situates “The Pacific Solution” as part of a longer story of postcolonial sovereignty in Oceania. Rather than focus on the legal or human rights implications of offshore detention, I consider the necessary and prior constitution of Pacific Islands as potential external detention sites through a lens attentive to colonial history, decolonising desires and contemporary regional relationships. To do so, this essay examines key literary representations that address the postcolonial political imaginaries of Oceania. These include: The Crocodile (1970), Vincent Eri’s groundbreaking novel written in the waning years of Australian colonial rule in Papua New Guinea; a collection of satirical short stories from well known Tongan academic and writer Epeli Hau’ofa, Tales of the Tikongs (1983); and finally, the short story “Escape from Jayapura” (1997) by PNG writer Nash G. Sorariba. In reading these texts for their depictions of colonial and neocolonial relationships in the Pacific, I trace important transformations in the configuration of sovereignty, authority and territory. Such shifts, I argue, have created the pre-conditions for our twenty-first century moment in which the body of the asylum-seeker functions as a new form of global currency.
2020, Archipel 99
Media, be it fiction (Suryajaya, 2015; Heriyati, 2015; Wirawan, 2015) or factual—documentaries (Paramaditha, 2013), journalistic reports (Parahita, 2014), as well as videos conveying alternative perspectives of the 1965/66 massacres—have been used to enhance social memories of 1965/66. Such media have been distributed through new media platforms, including YouTube (Espena, 2017; Ikhwan, Yulianto, Parahita, 2019). Owing to its capacity to offer different means of interpreting and remembering the trauma of modern Indonesian history, cinema has become part of the battle for history in Post-Soeharto Indonesia (Espena, 2017: 59). Arifin C. Noer’s film Penumpasan Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI (The Eradication of the Treachery of the 30 September Movement/Indonesian Communist Party), more commonly known as Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI, has been widely propagated to produce an official memory of 1965/66 and its aftermath (Zurbuchen, 2002; Wieringa & Katjasungkana, 2019). However, since the collapse of Soeharto’s New Order in 1998, forty alternative films dealing with the 1965/66 massacre have been released . In the current digital era, the internet had been widely used to distribute films. As YouTube viewership in Indonesia is among the highest around the world (Katadata, 2018), the website has thus become one major locus of memory contestation (Ikhwan, Yulianto, Parahita, 2019). Within the context of the 1965/1966 Tragedy, both official and vernacular versions are available on YouTube. However, not much research has explored YouTube videos related to the 1965/66 tragedy within the context of the politics of memory. This study, therefore, asks how YouTube has interconnected with the politics of memory within the Indonesian state. How does YouTube reflect the politics of memory as a contested space and the dominance of certain social memories? Exploring Indonesia’s creation of social memories through YouTube is beneficial, as many countries have experienced similar traumas in the past and have used new media to contest such memories.
2021, Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature
ABSTRACT: This essay interrogates and expands conventional views of the archive by considering how subjects who write themselves engage in processes of archival thinking and practices of curation in autobiographical discourse. It tracks features of alternative archives of the self in life writing through six microstudies that engage different concerns in autobiographical texts by women over the last century. The issues explored are affective archives of feelings and impressions; archives for rewriting the past; the imaginary archives of possible selves; digital archives of embodiment and desire; archives in global circulation; and archival remediation. The conclusion poses questions for those developing theoretical frameworks and methodologies to interpret the archival imaginary in the lives women inscribe and the afterlives they acquire. This article looks to expand methodologies in the field of archival studies that do not sufficiently attended to the status of the evidentiary in autobiographical materials and the archival imaginary mobilized in some autobiographical acts and practices and their afterlives.
2017, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly
2020, Ethnomusicology
Abstract. This article draws on the recent boom in Indian Ocean studies to build a framework for registering the Indian Ocean in ethnomusicology. We show how the human experiences of movement across the Indian Ocean expanse have conditioned the musical traditions of ports and islands, and we put ethnomusicological writings on places like Zanzibar and Oman into dialogue with those from Mauritius and Singapore. We address how ethnomusicology’s area studies paradigm has inhibited musical studies of the Indian Ocean Region (IOR); the specter of comparative musicology; and the perils of modern Indian Ocean populations in light of postcolonial ethnonationalisms.
2020
As those who write themselves, life narrators are readers, interpreters, and curators of the archival material, both intimate and impersonal, accrued during their lifetimes. These materials form an archival pre-life that is extended and complemented by posthumous remediations of their narrated lives. Personal archives may include writing in journals and diaries, digital exchanges on social media and blogs, documents, and images in photographs and drawings, as well as the ephemera of recorded memories and impressions; as this archive is activated in life writing, its texts project an archival imaginary. Once a life narrative enters public circulation, the archive of self accrues future ‘afterlives’ as it is edited, reframed, and remediated in subsequent editions and by translation into other languages or media for different reading publics, both during and after a writer’s life. The interactive relationship of self-archives and afterlives makes clear that the texts of self-life-writ...
2020, Journal Religion, Taylor and Francis
This essay traces the life/works of Hoerijah Adam (1936–1971), known for her significance in co-shaping modern dance in Indonesia, providing a subversive discourse that decentres the conventional reading of Muslim women's bodies. Originating from Minangkabau, West Sumatra – the world's largest Muslim matrilineal society – exposed Adam to a hybrid upbringing of traditional home vis-a-vis localised progressive arts education combining Islamic teaching and Western-influenced artistic articulation. Her trajectory shows a woman's dancing body as paradoxical cultural processess, e.g., an interweaving of multiple discourses of Islam, matriliny, and modernism, informed by the innate resilience of Minangkabau culture in defending its core traits against the colonial powers. KEYWORDS: Hoerijah Adam, modern dance, Muslim, Minangkabau, matrilineal
2009
2009
2009
Dissertation thesis, introduction
Full thesis available on ProQuest, June 2019.
Social Anthropology 24(1): 5-19 (2016) Colonial archives constituted a technology that enabled the collection, storage, ordering, retrieval and exchange of knowledge as an instrument of colonial governance. It is not surprising that when such archives were inherited by independent nation-states they were not given the authority previously granted them and have often been neglected. What, then, is the future of colonial archives in postcolonial nations? How should we rethink these archives in relation to decolonial futures? This essay introduces a collection of articles that explore the repertoires of action latent in archives and how colonial archives are being reconfigured to imagine decolonial futures.
2018, Bovensiepen, J. (ed.) The Promise of Prosperity: Visions of the Future in Timor-Leste after Independence. Australian National University Press
ACLA Annual Meeting 2018
This paper will examine the representation of movement in, and around, queer bodies exemplified in texts such as Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2008) and Vu Tran’s Dragonfish (2016). These genre novels show how migrations disrupt conceptualizations of identity and citizenship across transcultural borders. A symbolic marking of queer individuals (using the expanded definition utilized by Judith Butler and others) is aligned with a literal one, becoming apparent through the movements made by the books’ characters. As José Esteban Muñoz tells us, ‘the here and now is a prison house’, and through the spectre of past and future, their bodies become constrained along axes that are simultaneously theoretical, cultural, and textual. This paper will examine the legacies of those transcultural and transhistorical migrations, linking with Jabir K. Puar’s description of ‘perverse racialized bodies’ to read the multitude of ways that perversion can be read, understood, and displaced to create what Díaz calls a kind of narrative counterspell. Ultimately, I will discuss how these texts are part of a growing corpus of cultural memory that destabilize static borders, often through narrative and genre devices that foreground liminality. Attending to their textual and cultural dynamics, this paper will discuss the implications of these books for a queer re-imagining of the transcultural that can be deconstructed through the world(s) of genre.
2019, Buddhist and Islamic Orders in Southern Asia: Comparative Perspectives
This volume aims to foster interaction between scholars in the subfields of Islamic and Buddhist studies by increasing understanding of the circulation and localization of religious texts, institutional models, and ritual practices across Asia and beyond. Buddhist and Islamic Orders in Southern Asia scrutinizes religious orders (here referring to Sufi tariqas and Buddhist monastic and other ritual lineages) that enabled far-flung local communities to be recognized and engaged as part of a broader world of co-religionists, while presenting their traditions and human representatives as attractive and authoritative to new devotees. Contributors to the volume direct their attention toward analogous developments mutually illuminating for both fields of study, drawing readers' attention to the fact that networked persons were not always strongly institutionalized and often moved through Southern Asia and developed local bases without the oversight of complex corporate organizations.
2012, Indonesia and the Malay World, 40: 117
This article explores how notions of loss and absence are constituted through Indonesian eksil (exile) life narratives including their development of private collections of leftist literature, personal diaries, obituaries and personal documents, in order to explore the interrelational aspects of materiality, acts of mourning and their place in the memorialisation of the left in diaspora. I suggest that both the acts of collecting and the individual narratives of failure, loss and absence have unifying effects and act as different agentic modalities that work towards redemptive hope for the future.
Colonial archives constituted a technology that enabled the collection, storage, ordering, retrieval and exchange of knowledge as an instrument of colonial governance. It is not surprising that when such archives were inherited by independent nation-states they were not given the authority previously granted them and have often been neglected. What, then, is the future of colonial archives in postcolonial nations? How should we rethink these archives in relation to decolonial futures? This essay introduces a collection of articles that explore the repertoires of action latent in archives and how colonial archives are being reconfigured to imagine decolonial futures.
2018, Ambitious Alignments: New Histories of Southeast Asian Art
2014, Routledge Handbook of Southeast Asian History, edited by Norman G. Owen