Transcript of Roundtable Presentation and Discussion
Link to Audio Recording File of Presentation and Discussion
Introduction
Cindy
We begin by acknowledging that we are on land that has been contested across history over the possession of women’s bodies, and the role of state violence in that history including the roles of Japan and the United States of America. We recognize that this roundtable is situated within the legacy of this violence and we remember the women of that legacy.
We begin by acknowledging that we are on land that has been contested across history over the possession of women’s bodies, and the role of state violence in that history including the roles of Japan and the United States of America. We recognize that this roundtable is situated within the legacy of this violence and we remember the women of that legacy.
Welcome again, to our roundtable, led and organized by Tara Tran and I myself, Cindy Nguyen, titled, “Troubling Narratives through Feminist Practice: Working through the Methods and Ethics of Southeast Asian Studies.”
First, I won’t claim to speak for all of us, our positionalities, politics, and we’ll all get a chance to introduce ourselves and our troubles. My role is to share where we come from as a collective, brought together by a commitment to ‘work through’ the challenges in our work as Southeast Asianists, working in Southeast Asia, through feminist practices, of troubling existing narratives, as well as the troubling ways of working through narratives of violence, erasure, and absence. There are so many layers here so in the spirit of inclusivity and to not perpetuate an exclusive theoretically driven assumptions of concepts like ‘feminism’ or disciplinary differences, I wanted to lay the groundwork for us to sow the seeds of our conversation today.
We as a panel, we recognize an absence, where feminist driven critiques of power are not theorized and situated within Southeast Asian Studies. The region is dominated by area studies, American centric, patriarchal, academy within knowledge production (for example: dominance of studies of war, colonialism, conflict, power, the state, all refracted through a Western, patriarchal lens. Essentially, where history is driven is by an imagined community of intellectuals, nationalist men). Here we are not just recognizing the absence of ‘women’s voices’ or ‘studies of women.’ But instead invite us all to be ‘feminists’, because key to the feminist project is the critique of power and its manifestations within gender and its intersections with race, class, ability; a historical situatedness within colonialism, violence, capitalism.
Second, we seek to create a space to speak, honestly and specifically, about the methods and ethics of doing work in/about/nearby Southeast Asia. We draw from our direct experiences, our training, our limitations, and our dreams for this next generation. We come from different disciplines and scholarly paths, we are female identifying, with personal relationships to the region of area studies. We defy the concept of the disinterested, detached scholar (assumed to be white, male, Anglophone, reflecting the dominance of existing scholarly discourse). In other words, this roundtable is going to be experimental, personal, political, reflexive, raw.
A bit of a pause, as I also navigate through the Google artwork of our toddlers on my notes, yeah, our collective toddlers. Alright, so. So, who am I? In a shorthand of all my identities, I’m Cindy Nguyen, historian of Vietnam, digital humanist, public multimedia artist. But ‘when’ (which is, who I was and who I want to become) ‘when’ I am, is more interesting to me. I’m starting a new academic position at UCLA out of privilege and abundance, I’m emerging like a dilapidated phoenix stumbling from the ashes of dark years in the job market layered with pandemic, postpartum, and death. My position as educator begins where I went to undergraduate, became a person, questioned everything, and started this academic rat race. I’m beginning again where I started but now seeking to rewrite a new script, new narratives of the same space. I’m eager to make waves, be a transformative educator, colleague, leader, all the while juggling my other identities as mother, partner, human. But how is it that I’m already so exhausted? To say that I’m overly tired is tiring, honestly, and reconfirms the capitalistic American centric work culture of academia. mMy feminist practice, my dream of transforming structures of patriarchal inequity, capitalist exploitation within academic labor, is to declare and enact the end of a chapter and a beginning of a new one. The end of laboring quietly, playing someone else’s unwinnable game. To beginning of new networks and communities of ethical transparent strategic mutually flourishing labor. And it begins with this roundtable.
I firmly believe that every conversation is a creative act. In this specific space, moment, that’s happening here, we bring together, this room, full together, at Kyungpook National University, and we create, through conversation, something together, and we leave transformed. So, we as in collective we, participants, presenters, audience, all of that.
My dream for this roundtable is to create a spirit of radical transparency, to create a new feminist culture of academic scholarly discourse and labor. This roundtable has been, and will be driven by care, meaningful exchange, and the space to speak freely without pressures to perform.
Over the past few months now, we’ve been connecting, celebrating, learning from one another, through the series of exchanges, from all paths around the world, from Cambodia to Singapore, and also to Thailand, there’s a lot of movements in between, to the east coast, the west coast, and together we’ve been building community. We’re actually like staying in the same house unit right now, we’re going to retreat together into the countryside right afterwards, so we are very committed to the act of thinking, learning from one another, and attending that journey, we hope you all join us as well.
I quote here from Johanna Hedva’s concept of ‘sick woman theory,’ because this roundtable has been, and will be driven by care:
“The most anticapitalist protest is to care for one another. To take on historically feminized, and therefore invisible, practice of nursing, nurturing, caring. To take seriously each other’s vulnerability and fragility and precarity, and to support it, honor it, empower it. To protect each other. A radical kinship … Because once we are all ill and confined to the bed, sharing our stories of therapies and comforts, forming support groups, listening to each other’s tales of trauma, prioritizing the care and love of our ill, pained, expensive, sensitive, fantastic bodies, and there is no one left to go to work, perhaps then finally, capitalism will screech to a halt. So I say let’s give it a try.”
Today’s roundtable is rooted within these three questions, its intent to care for one another, to spend time in the present, in our troubles: embodiment, imagination, and precarity. We’ll take turns working through each of the questions, interweaving ourselves and our troubles. There might be pauses, interruptions, side conversations, laughter, maybe tears. In our commitments to make publicly accessible the knowledge and labor that we produce here today collectively we’ll be recording, by Eric my partner here, the first part of our conversation for public dissemination. After answering the three questions and conversing with one another as a roundtable. And then we’ll stop recording and open the conversation up as an invitation to the audience to engage in conversation as well.
To begin our conversation, I will read from, from where are now:
We are troubled, by our minds, and by our bodies, in Southeast Asia—
by how our embodiment bleeds into the empiricism mandated by our professions;
by how our imaginations animate fragments into knowledge;
by how the precarity of these practices render us.
And yet, the troubles, abundant as they are, have been wildly abundant for our work across this corner of Asia.
And with that I invite Tara to begin embodiment.
Embodiment
Tara
How has the embodiment of your own self, subject matter, or archival space in “Southeast Asia” caused methodological or ethical troubles for you?
Hello everyone, thank you Cindy for, planting some dirt under our feet, to stomp on. And thank you also for bringing in this theme, which will appear through the conversation, which is this mandate to care, not only through practice in our everyday lives, but also in the ways that we approach our work, as scholars, in our methods, and also in the reflexive questions that we take as well, and it’s this theme of care, and also its opposite, of violence, that are the two back and forths that I want to go over today in this cycle of the roundtable on embodiment. I’ll just read off the questions and you can think about it:
How has the embodiment of your own self, subject matter, or archival space, caused methodological or ethical troubles for you?
I’m going to break this question down with three stories, and each of those stories is rooted in the three elements in this question, that is, the self, the subject matter, and the archival space.
First, talking about space here. I’m going to start with this story. This last week I’ve been spending some time at the National Archives in Cambodia, which is in Phnom Penh, and it’s, not the most lit building, such as this, it’s pretty dark, and when you spend a few hours in there as I did last Wednesday conducting some interviews and having some meetings, when I walked out of the front door, into the sunlight, I was having this flashback of all those other moments I had spent in the archives, say six to eight hours a day as a grad student – that moment when you come from the inside and go into the outside and suddenly you remember that there is a whole other world, that doesn’t care what you’re doing. And you realize that whatever you were doing for the last six to eight hours was just in your own little universe. And it hit me again, oh my goodness, I haven’t felt this way in a really long time. You know, your eyes start to adjust, because of all the sunlight, and there’s this kind of numbness that waves and goes through my body, and I realized, “Okay, now I need to go the supermarket and buy some milk.” And you know forget about all the dust that I’ve been breathing and all the papers that I’ve been going through and all these very esoteric and abstract kind of questions I’ve been thinking about or even mundane things. But the reason why I bring up this story is because it reminded me again about how much my experience, my embodiment of a particular state in particular spaces, not just, you know, concrete built archives, but elsewhere, have affected or shaped the different types of projects that I have, the types of questions that I have. And the first of my three series of stories that I wanted to illustrate this with took place in Cambodia a little over ten years ago. I’m going to do that with this photograph here.
This photograph is taken from the site of a local genocide memorial in southeastern Cambodia, in the province of Kep. Ten years ago, I was doing research on these local genocide memorials. During my travels, if I ever found one, I would kind of poke around the space, often times they were on the sites of local pagodas, and ask, is there a genocide memorial here? Quite often, there was one. This one had these dark, concrete purple walls on the outside, and this man here had the keys, as the somewhat caretaker of the grounds. He opened the door to me, complete stranger, and I just walked inside. I took this photograph while standing on the inside and looking over the threshold, with these remains, flanking me on the left and the right. It was at this, I often go back to this photograph, for presentations such as this, but also just personally in my mind, because it was a pivotal point when a lot of my work as a researcher, started to turn towards thinking about this concept of hospitality, and how much within hospitality there’s this contestation and this conflict between care, but also violence, because it’s [hospitality] is an intervention in a way. At the time, I was also thinking about histories of colonialism, and empire, particularly in the space of Cambodia, and that was in that moment when again, this embodiment of this space’s sense of, this very visceral feeling of being in the space and thinking about, you know, not only the invitation of it, and how I loved it, how they somewhat welcomed me, but also at the same time it was when this was when I beginning to have some ethical questions and speak about some methodological and ethical questions about whether it was right for me to do, to conduct research in such a way, that these were the remains of dead people who were unidentified, and I the Stranger was just allowed to come into this. This is what I did repeatedly throughout this particular project. I started to take some of these questions with me to the body of the buildings of traditional archives, and how these methodological and ethical questions about, is it okay for me to conduct this type of research, particularly on the histories of people who I don’t know personally, who are dead and cannot speak for themselves? For me to go into these spaces and take these stories and construct them into other stories, and build a profession out of it for myself. But I, kept going. Perhaps this can turn into a side question about a critique of that productivity that pushes you to get that story, to make something for yourself out of the lives of other people.
We move on from this space to thinking about, from embodiment of space to embodiment of your subject matter now. I took a brief leave of absence during graduate study to work with an INGO in South Sudan, where I was working primarily with local Dinka women – ethnic Dinka women. Here they are pictured here.
One of the activities that we had was building these tippy taps. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen one before, but they’re very simple, engineered hand washing stations. You just step on the stick, right here, and then the jerry can tips over and the water comes out. It’s supposed encourage people to wash their hands. Not that they didn’t already know that they should wash their hands – but this is a whole other conversation I could have about a critique of development projects – but, we did this, set them all up in each of the villages, funded it, taught them how to wash their hands, teach them about what germs were, as if they didn’t know what germs were. But one thing that we eventually found out, through our field staff, was that they were dismantling the tippy taps and using the jerry cans to go collect water from the rivers, from the streams, because, that’s what you need to do, you don’t have plumbing. So every morning, or throughout the day, you gotta go and collect your water. As practitioners who were pressured to meet our objectives and outputs – one of those being villagers had to have tippy taps and wash their hands – we directed staff to poke holes into the tippy taps on the sides so that the water could only be filled up to a certain amount for handwashing and not actually be used fully to go collect water from the rivers. That was, I could use a bad word here but, that was just not nice. But that’s what we did. I worked there for about six months, but the reason why I’m bring up this anecdote here, this particular story, this particular experience, is again to connect it back to that question of how has the embodiment of your subject matter affected your work or yourself as well, and it was really here where I started to think about the labor of women’s bodies – all the time. I mean, of course we hear about it, we read about it, we also personally experience it. If you didn’t catch, I’m a new mother, and now I really experience to an entirely new level. But this was when the lens that I took again to my archival space started to rotate a bit, and started to filter a bit more. So when I went back to the archives, back to the National Archives of Cambodia, all I was seeing in my documents, all I was looking for and really interested in were women’s bodies, and the way that these colonial administrators, or just everyday people during the colonial period in Cambodia, were talking about them, were mapping them, were putting them into statistics, and this is when some people might critique me for being presentist, but I just keep doing it – which is, constantly drawing connections between things that I was seeing in my present ethnography, if you will, or autoethnography, and then taking them into the archive with me. So in a sense, that embodiment of space, of subject matter, continuously penetrated my work, and at times, in the moment at least, it felt so productive and rich. But again, as I mentioned with my first story, I never could shake off some of those ethical questions about what it is that I was doing, that I was somehow profiting off of the experiences of others. And with that, I’m going to move onto the third story.
These are a couple of sources, taken from the National Archives of Cambodia, from the colonial collection. I was looking through a couple of boxes that they had, and they were newspaper clippings from 1935 to 1938 – just to see what they had. I noticed that there were quite a lot of clippings of summaries taken from the courts – brief stories of what the case was, what happened, and since again, I told you, I mentioned that I was constantly on the lookout for women’s bodies – metaphorical, literal – and I noticed quite a few clippings, there were always these court briefings that were about cases of sexual violence against women, specifically rape.
You can see – it’s not titled here – but this is a story of an alleged three Cambodian men who gang raped a Vietnamese woman. And over here in the column here, surrounded by advertisements on the right, and other kinds of announcements on the left, you have a short paragraph about a case of rape. And in addition to these newspaper articles, I also came across these medical reports, that were completed by these French physicians who were given court orders to conduct pelvic examinations of female victims of rape, female survivors of rape. These medical reports were quite graphic in the way that the doctor reported. When I was turning all of these sources, this quickly turned into a chapter about narratives of rape, but before that chapter even became a chapter, before I even got to writing, those weeks spent in the archive, with this extremely narrow tunnel vision, looking only for sources about rape – imagine just going through the archive page after page after page, and just looking for the word “viol” – I quickly started to have nightmares about it, about the sources, and this is when I move to that other part of the question – you know, how has embodiment of yourself created problems for you? It meant that I was having nightmares, and it was terrible for quite a while. It really started to hit me, about how, again, I was revisiting that question about the ethics of this kind of research, and not only the research, but that kind of seeped into the writing as well. How do I ethically, properly, empirically, go through these sources, narrate these stories without being a voyeur myself. I was actually critiqued for that by my reader, my advisor, who was reading this chapter and saying, “You know these are quite compelling, but at what point do you risk being a voyeur yourself, what are you trying to say with this content?” I attempted to work through that question in the revision and editing.
I share those three stories among many others to again fight and push against this point that Cindy brought up in the introductory statement about how I’ve stopped believing in this idea of distance and objectivity and empiricism, and the idea that I am here and the subject is there and this document is going to sit on the seminar table and I will examine it as the scientist looks at things in a petri dish and write about it and there will be this distance. But I found that distance is imagined, it’s precarious, and if anything, I just can’t escape it. If anything, it’s toxically occurring, recurring in these cycles and flinging me toward one project to the next. I don’t know if I need to cut it, or somehow work through it, work with it, embrace it in some way that could be seen as now only productive by the terms of my profession but also ethical by the terms of, who? Something I’m hoping we can work through, a little bit here, that we’ve all at one point addressed at one point or another.
The way that we want to move through the cycles here, is with each person, leading with these stories, but then we also want to open up that question amongst ourselves in this little roundtable. So I wanted to just pivot this point right now to my colleagues about this issue of embodiment of the self, it might be related to the stories that I brought up here, but I would love to just hear if there were any similar stories amongst yourselves about this problem that – let’s not call it a problem, but that imagined and precarious distance, space between one’s body and one’s mind and one’s work.
Embodiment
Conversation
Theresa:
I have a reflection, I actually have two reflections, but I’ll make them really quickly. So I’m an oral historian of sexual violence during the Khmer Rouge period in Cambodia. So one is this fixation on rape, on sexual violence. We’re kind of trained that okay that’s your research agenda, and you need to go and collect the evidence, and at one point, one of the women that I was interviewing said, so she mentioned that she had a strong experience of sexual violence, and then she went on with her story, and I, because I’m fixated on rape, I said, can you tell me a little bit more about that rape, can we slow down a little bit about that violence? And then she told me a little bit more, and then we continued onto other subjects. And then I asked her one more time a follow-up question, and she got so irritated with me and said, “You know, rape was not the worst thing that happened during that time. It was one of many things that happened to our bodies. But the things that stuck with her was that she had lost her past and lost her future, that they had taken something else away from her. It was really, of course, as an oral historian, all of this was recorded, where she’s teaching me a really important lesson about that filtration of what I thought was the most important topic, and kind of put it into perspective for me. I’ll talk a little bit more about my second example, which is this question of possession that I’ve mentioned in our conversations, that when you’re researching, there’s always not just the extraction, but the ownership of it. Research is like a colonial project, right? Where you possess it and you own it, but when you’re processing, it also possesses you, like literally the spirit of your informant or even internally begins to occupy your own body, and I definitely have had that experience also with nightmares and in fact not being able to write, because I feel so possessed by the trauma that I’m listening to, and now I’m actually experiencing it, as vicarious trauma. Thank you for sharing your experience, because it feels quite lonely, like you’re not a strong enough academic to listen objectively if you can’t hear those hard stories. But in fact maybe it’s just the opposite – that your empathy and compassion is what makes you a better researcher in relationship to your subjects.
Tara:
I just want to actually really briefly follow up on something Theresa said about in your first example, about why the fixation with rape, and I think, that’s a really great question that she asked you because one thing that I was noticing at least in my own colonial-produced sources is that these legal terms and legal categories constructed by colonial jurists – when I was comparing the French language sources about – let’s use a broader term such as sexual violence against women – the Khmer language documents were not being as consistent in their terms, say Khmer language court documents in their terminology as the French language ones, so you do see that there is definitely not this equal parallel in their understanding of defining a crime and giving value to it, or categorizing it – just putting that out there to point out the importance of language and thinking about the terms that we use, even if it’s feminism.
Nicole:
I think another question that I have here has to do with what Cindy brought up initially about the idea of care, and when we consider the place of privilege we have as scholars approaching this, and each of us is somewhat profiting or deriving some sort of professional advantage of the stories of other people. I wonder in what register how we can sort of provide that care for each other, how does a scholar ask for that care, especially from this position of privilege that we have, if it is, especially given the kind of work that you do, the kind of work that any of us do, where in the stories of these archives possess us even, but that’s not really equivalent to us, you know actually living these stories, but they still continue to possess us, how do we account for this kind of inherited embodiment in the way that we ask for care and the way that we provide it.
Tara:
That’s such a good question that I feel like I’m constantly working through and I don’t have a methodology, or best practices, but .. you know, Cindy, when I was first visiting your introductory remarks about this mandate that, this commitment that we have to care for others, you know that is the most important thing, I believe that, in theory and in practice. But then it was taking me back to so much of what I was reading about when it comes to theories of hospitality, and the colonial project – there was so much about the colonial project was this rhetoric to care for people, and to save people, and to improve their lives. If you look at the words, that’s what they were doing – and that’s what we believe too, right? Particularly for scholars, as feminists, postcolonial, and subaltern studies, professing that we want to raise the voices of the voiceless and the marginalized and the oppressed, you’re telling the stories of those who cannot tell the stories themselves – I used to be a journalist – I keep hearing this over and over again. My knee jerk reaction after doing some work in the aid industry, continuing to observe it, doing archival work, and current ethnography of the histories of humanitarianism and hospitality puts me into a position where I feel so uncomfortable and I’m asking myself, okay what are we doing that’s different from these prior histories of violence, that professed themselves, genuinely, authentically professed themselves as actors in the project of caring for others? What makes us different from them? There are differences, I believe. But so what are they? How might we be extra, extra conscious of them in our own work? Whether it be as historians, whether it be as practitioners, whether it be as social workers, or even within our personal relationships with each other. I think one term that I constantly keep coming back to in order to respond to that is, okay, is there some sort of reciprocity here, or conditionality here? If I do this, does that mean that I expect this from you? Or do I expect nothing from you? This was at least how Jacques Derrida defined or distinguished what he called infinite hospitality from finite hospitality, or the politics of hospitality from the ethics of hospitality. On one hand, there is this complete unconditionality, which is maybe, even impossible, at least for us human beings, maybe in some sort of spiritual realm it’s possible, but we can work towards that, perhaps, at least that’s what the feminist project is, to constantly work through, working towards, working towards. We might never get there, because there’s just so many systems we have to deal with and trip over, and get tangled up in along the way, but it’s a persistent aspiration, and we need other people to do it with, because then there’s cynicism and fatigue, and that’ll just push you over and you just become another cog in the machine, continue to do what you’re doing. Again, I’m always asking myself, “Is this right? Well, I don’t know, but I have this deadline and I did this application and I need to do things, I need to produce something, so I’m going to do it.
Cindy:
I’ll just quickly respond to something that Tara said that just, I mean think that you’ve, in some ways answered, some of the grapplings – you’re grappling, grappling, grappling, grappling … And it’s hard, exhausting, laborious, tiring … in various ways. So I think one way is to … finding moments of pause, reflection … what we do, is so laborious. The fact that we care to care, the fact that we care about ethics, the fact that we pause, that we think, we put ourselves in these positions, that we think deeply about where our work is going, how it’s going to be exploited, or how we are perpetuating exploitation – that itself, is labor. And it’s not to say that is enough, but I think there is something of dismantling the push to keep producing, and the push to, that what we’re doing is not enough. I think the other takeaway point from what Tara was saying, in thinking about extraction, and what Theresa said about possession. I don’t know is there a movement, a platform, in creating, collectively building, pausing, another type of visual type of process of how we can imagine our work. So I’ll just kind of pause on that so we can transition to the next question.
Tara:
Moving onto imagination.
Imagination
Nicole
How have conversations, artifacts, and processes, within and beyond your “field of study,” allowed you to confront troubling paucity and absence in your archives, sources, and methods, in order to imagine knowledge? What is your emotional response to the gaps and silences? How can feminist imaginaries counter other imaginaries that erase agency? For that matter, are feminist imaginaries—their ontologies and their processes—comparable to these other imaginaries?
I’m a book historian of the early modern Malay world. Some questions guide my thought around the theme of imagination: How can I describe the work that I and my colleagues working on early modern Southeast Asian texts do? Although historians of all stripes exercise some extent of imagination in order to do their work, it seems to me that historians of earlier periods do this at a much more extreme scale. The reason why I am particularising this realm of study within the broader umbrella of Southeast Asian history has to do with a fundamental problem of sources. Textual documents that survive of the period are relatively sparing (as compared to the archival excess around colonial and postcolonial societies). And so, what kinds of imagination do early modernists of Southeast Asia employ? Us early modernists make a lot out of what seems to be very very little: Based on one, or a handful of, textual sources, we spin a narrative around it to think of what might be a likely use of a certain text, when the exact details of its contemporaneous reception are not available in the archive.
What brought these questions up for me was a recent project of mine. The central aim of this project was to ‘excavate’ the social life of the Hikayat Anggun Cik Tunggal, a West Sumatran oral text about the 1511 Portuguese invasion of Melaka. I was particularly interested in reconstructing how it was performed from the nineteenth century and further back into its past. In general, as scholars consider how Malay political consciousness has formed, they have criminally neglected to consider sources that emerge of indigenous oral traditions. This is especially alarming, given how oral texts constitute a significant proportion of non-elite popular political discourse. Still, it isn’t an easy matter of simply opting to consult more oral sources when thinking about the history of Malay political thought. This is because all that survives of these centuries-old recitations are written sources. In the case of the text I was looking at, what survives of its earlier recitations is a printed text published by a colonial scholar in the twentieth century. There’s therefore this problem of distortion through medium and transcription. How do we look through the veil of print and writtenness to uncover the intellectual labour that oral performers were doing?
This issue of distortion through medium further compounds our issues with interpreting early modern Malay texts. As it stands, a problem of interpretation stands in our way. To the average student of History, Malay oral texts appear to be fantastical fictions, and nothing more. On the surface, this text seems to be fantastical. I’ve provided an excerpt of the Hikayat text I was working on, here.
In the opening scene, we are introduced to a Portuguese king, who has already acquired many colonies, but nonetheless has further designs to invade a Malay kingdom that was a centre of maritime trade. Later in the scene, he succeeds, and thoroughly desecrates the country. This sequence of fictional events so far is hauntingly reminiscent of the traumatic Portuguese invasion of Melaka in 1511. Like the Malay polity that the Portuguese king invades, Melaka was a bustling entrepôt city; in Melaka, merchants traded in spices and other sought-after merchandise. The Portuguese seized and sacked Melaka, and also ousted its Muslim ruler, all with the aim of gaining control of the Indian Ocean spice trade. After Melaka’s humiliating defeat, various colonial powers ruled the city and Melaka would not return into indigenous hands. Likewise, in the Hikayat, the Malay royal lineage is cut short, and the kingdom is ruptured from its past political glory. But there are certainly many differences between real historical events and those in the Hikayat. In the Hikayat it is not Melaka that the Portuguese invade; instead, they bombard the Malay kingdom of Tiku Periaman, whose name is a combination of the real-life townships of Tiku and Pariaman, which are both in the Minangkabau region of West Sumatra. These had never been Portuguese colonies. Instead, they had been under Dutch control from the nineteenth century.
What seems to be afoot here is a text that approximates ‘History’, but not really. The key lay for me in reconstructing a performance from a printed text, I drew from all manners of secondary literature about Malay oral poetics. I took a literary-logical approach to this source – in other words, I took this text to be a member of an oral textual tradition that shares similar forms and thus devices of reasoning. By tracing these lines of logic I was able to attend to what was really at stake for the creators a “fictive” text like this. While it appeared to be ‘fictional’ in the sense that it was fantastical, it was doing something interesting with the temporal frames by which it was telling the history of the 1511 Portuguese invasion of Melaka. In fact, it was telling of this history of sixteenth century Melaka, as an account of colonial Sumatra. In other words, what became apparent to me, was that this text seemed to be setting a history of colonial Sumatra in the very frame of Melaka, an earlier instance of European conquest in the Malay archipelago.
What does one do with a suggestion like that? Once I had noticed this, I struggled to find the language to convey what was going on. In order to articulate the workings of temporality in this text, what I did was turn to reams and reams of literary theory. Texts by Bakhtin, De Certeau, Chakrabarty were ones that I reached for. With the help of these theoretical resources, I was able to mount my interpretation of this text up in more systematic – but also more ambitious – terms. What I hypothesised was that this text I studied was a telling of the 1511 Portuguese invasion of Melaka, and later colonial Sumatra, in one fell swoop. Not only that, the tellers of this text could have taken the 1511 Portuguese invasion to be a narrative ‘cause’ of Sumatra’s colonial subjugation, even if the two events were not materially related.
The approach I took to this text was highly imaginative, in the sense that my interpretation was not borne of exhaustive philological cross-references across many different editions of the text. Simply because there were not these editions, to begin with. Rather, I was pulling together multiple kinds of secondary literature and theory to be positing the ways in which the text’s producers reasoned through the stuff of history. I’m not the only one to be adopting an approach like this to early modern Malay texts, but this is most certainly a path less trodden by scholars of the Malay world. Most are far more comfortable with the more empirical method of exhausting all editions available. But I’m acutely aware that taking philological editions to be the be-all of textual studies precludes so many kinds of claims we can be positing about early modern Southeast Asia.
By taking this epistemically riskier approach, I was able to make bolder steps toward trying to be more faithful to the kinds of knowledge that were closest to the Minangkabau West Sumatran purveyors of the text. The protagonist of the text Anggun Cik Tunggal is a Minangkabau Malay prince – indeed, many Minangkabau people believe themselves to have been descended from him. The history the text of West Sumatran kingship told was therefore the history of an entire Sumatran and Sumatran diasporic community. Clearly, there are significant fruits to proceeding with greater imaginative leaps. And these imaginative gains are thoroughly personal to Southeast Asian communities. But this is not to overstate the certainty I had in the way I studied this text. Throughout my process, I was constantly worried. Mine was the first ever attempt to interpret the Hikayat as empirical history, and also mine was the first ever translation made of the Hikayat into English. As one of the only voices in the space of academic research about this text, I was always asking myself about the damage I could be doing in interpreting the text a certain way that may not correspond with the vision its creators had. How engaged was the scholarship I was producing?
Let’s talk a little more about ethics. Not in the sense of “is this wrong, or is this right”, but in what might be a more expansive sense. Was I saying things that the nineteenth century creators of the text would have said, and in the same terms? Obviously it was impossible to ask them for myself. This is a huge disadvantage – Even the ethics of my interpretation couldn’t itself be verified indubitably. We can’t even say with certainty that ethical intentions will be realised. The best I can do is talk about the epistemic and disciplinary standards in force around this kind of inquiry that I was doing.
In particular, what I want to propose is centralising this idea of epistemic RISK. The reason why I am thinking about risk is that BOTH the dangers and the advantages of the work I do are uncertain. Risk is a way to frame the ethics of research in dynamic, improvisational terms while the results of the epistemic decisions we make may not even translate to the ethical results we had in mind when we first proceeded. Nor can we even confirm that ethical intentions come to fruition because our subjects are in the far past. Yet, at the same time, I’m reminded that being more imaginative begets liberational results that can’t be derived from more traditional philological methods! And that these forms of imagination may enable us to be truer to the communities that produce our sources. The work we do is important — and to discard it on the grounds of its uncertain methods and modes of verification is to forego what might be the only way to make these important claims. The value of reframing research ethics in terms of risk may make us think about how we can still afford to be bold even while our methods aren’t strictly speaking empirical or certain. And we can do this by performing the calculus of the kinds of epistemic risks one is prepared to take, and subsequently name, with respect to the kinds of imaginative possbilities they open.
These risks are even more pressing especially when considering the position that Southeast Asian subjects and researchers alike take in the global Anglophone academy. For example, one political risk that work like mine takes, is to presuppose a working idea of “logic”. What I’ve also noticed from my work on the Hikayat Anggun Cik Tunggal is also that I was using other peoples’ work on how “Malay” oral tradition or memory practices proceed – and then extrapolating these general principles (and logics, even) to the study of the specific text I was focusing on.
What is logic, in the very first place? On the surface, we might be able to say that we are able to study early modern Malay texts because they work on similar principles and structures of narrative reasoning. But, at what point do these pursuits or assumptions of a certain poetic logic underlying the Southeast Asian texts I uncover, slip into racist ideas of ethnic ‘mentalité’?
I am thinking also of the multi-directionality that this Orientalising “mentalité” can take. Other than the risk of orientalising Southeast Asian texts as operating on distinct, characterisable, logics, we also take a major risk when we even *name* these texts as historical objects. For instance, the epistemic traditions that were active in the ‘early modern’ continue to be in force today, and as such there is also that danger of idealising the ‘past’ as a subject of history that works on its own conventions. The way we study literary form in early modern Southeast Asia proceeds on different methodological convention from the way we talk about contemporary Southeast Asian film criticism or literature, for instance. More broadly still, to what extent is the subject of historical study – the ‘past’ – also an Orientalising or at least an idealising tendency?
I want to build further on my questions about the epistemic risks that we run in the study of Southeast Asia. As a textual scholar, I am approaching this question with an eye to questions of medium. What does it mean to make Southeast Asian texts into philological subjects? What is literary theory, and what does it do for our understanding of Southeast Asian epistemic practices? (Put more sharply, what does theory do in these methods?) When we mobilise literary theory around the study of Southeast Asian narrative, what is it that we are doing? Are we taking theory to be a repository of language by which we describe Southeast Asian textual traditions? In such a way, we presuppose that there is something that can be stably known of these textual traditions, that exists prior to the application of theory. Does theoretical intervention occur after the fact, as something that is challenged or fortified by Southeast Asian examples? Or, do bodies of theory issue the questions that we have not thought to ask about Southeast Asia?
I’m looking forward to hearing what you all think!
Imagination
Conversation
…
Precarity
Theresa
How do you acknowledge the precarious incompleteness of your archives, sources, methods as a feminist troubling knowledge production and its rootedness within empiricism, patriarchy, and colonialism, and the Global North? How can you embrace rather than elide the provisional nature of and evidentiary incompleteness of your work’s materiality? What are the political possibilities of these practices?
This is something like a transcript, passing over what, in excising, I determined of marginal interest, supercilious, and adding other imaginings. My concerns are different than others here. I’ve created an archive; I am not encountering one already established. The Cambodian Women’s Oral History Project (CWOHP) was conceived by survivors after appearing in a Women’s Hearing—a kind of people’s tribunal–on sexual violence during the Khmer Rouge genocidal regime organized by the Cambodian Defenders Project and Transpsychosocial Organization of Cambodia. After the hearings, the victims who spoke recommended a way to record these stories for posterity, the next generation of Cambodians who had already begun to forget in the onslaught of modern life the genocide, its victims and its survivors.
Every advocacy has its aim, and our target was the Extraordinary Chambers of the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, adjudicating crimes against humanity committed by the most-senior, still-living Khmer Rouge leadership. Violently forced marriages, long known to be an element of the atrocity, had been added to the charges in the eleventh hour. Crimes outside of this limited preview of sexualized violence would not be heard.
Now at TSGM in Khmer, where only other archives are the confession forced by the KR, which became a central criminal case file for the ECCC, a crime site. I want to believe there is a conversation going on between these two collections, and as faulty, messy, I blame byself for a 1000 shortcomings, it somehow speaks to those stories full of lies, full of hate, full of violence.
*****
CWOHP, like the advocacy aims of the hearing from which the project was born, has at its heart the political—to provide public space for voices long oppressed and suppressed of experiences discounted as tangential to the atrocity, or outright lies. As a feminist scholar, I trusted the women’s voices and aimed in its processes to disrupt the exploitation of women and extraction—distortion—of their stories and histories.[i] The CWOHP as a collection and an archive provides a countervailing voice to the denial of sexual violence in conflict globally and a long-held belief that sexual violence was not a distinct part of the Khmer Rouge tactics, and that survivors, especially women, would not share their stories. Without these stories, this aspect of the brutal history of the Khmer Rouge regime may have faded into oblivion.
I am a white, cis-gender, female U.S. citizen residing in Cambodia since 2012 (Asia since 2008). I am 59 as I write this, in my earlier and mid-50s when I collected the life-story oral histories. Most of the women are my age or older, a detail that helps me tremendously, but not as much as a coincidental resemblance to the Queen mother. I shake my head in sympathy and horror as their life’s arc moves over the U.S. bombing that riddled the country at the time. So much is lost in translation, but less so when I let the conversation happen before me, catching the words I can but absorbing without shield of language the emotional energy of the room, sometimes the re-enactments of the horror. I had spent my professional life not as an academic (only joined a faculty in 2016, sixteen years after my PhD in Literature) but as a senior expert on sexual violence in conflict for governments and the United Nations. I was on high alert for signs of triggered trauma, for vicarious trauma, for suppressed trauma first showing its face to memory.
“Who has the right to write [] suffering?” R.F. Kuang, Yellowface
I was excavating, I am filling in a gap, interrogate an absence. I was probing old wounds. I had all the best intentions.
*****
“Rape is not the worst thing that happened to us during that time, you know,” a narrator reminds me as I keep looping back to the violation, only half listening to what comes next.
Indeed, these gaps in women’s voices in dominative narratives has always been my focus as a feminist researcher, scholar, practitioner. I’m older than most of you, but my teachers were Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, bell hooks, so many others, who taught me how to read differently—the material, the bodily, the inarticulate. [Emily Dickenson’s shopping lists and her poetry in my dissertation archival work, mixing material culture with history with literature with women’s care kitchen work.] I never felt a tension wandering here and there in my scholarship. My attention is always wondering about the erasures, and also the hauntings of those excisions, repressions, suppressions of narrative, and how narratives continue to haunt us into the present.
[I was excavating old graves, counting the dead, pushing up dried bones.]More recently, I am deeply indebted to Christina Sharpe, In the Wake. I am so indebted to so many thinkers: Hartman’s Critical Fabulations, Avery on her own hauntings, Christina Sharpe and her work on the “wake” of US slavery and the power of past violence systems continue to haunt us into the present, mobilized and circulating in a constant unresolved state of tension and continual disruptions into the “real”. For feminist, like Sharpe, the aim is not to “heal” these disruptions—as in a development model that sees problems that are to be fixed—as though there is a pure place where the past can’t/won’t haunt us. Rather, I see the feminist scholar as lingering in those aporia, troubling them a bit to see what new things might be possible.
Sharpe’s idea of the “wake” troubles itself our sense of memory, of being in time and space, the boundary between the two become blurred. And other distinctions we make for ourselves—between fact and fiction, the literary and the historical, even the empirical and the subjective.
But not to possess, to dominate, to extract as such, striving for the “pure,” the coherent, the Hegelian dream of the encyclopedia, a closure on the “Truth”. I am not here to possess. Now, as I edit, manipulate, am I not trying to dispossess myself of these voices, as well as find method to dispossess myself of the settle language of property, as artifact, of archive as the museum of curiosities, static?
I find Kim Khem in the archive, my first interview for the project, the oldest survivor. She had been tied with her wrist behind her back with palms as sharp as knives. She had witnessed as her infant crawled out of her lap and into the center of their cell when spotted by a cadre and, picked up by pinned heels, swung again a central pillar and murdered.
Krystalli, the perfect victim. To see first-hand the bureaucracies of victimhood (Krystalli) when the person is reduced to the crime in total, nothing outside of that. I feel for it (slide), I photographed her scar, her wound, the fleshy remnant of proof. I participate in the bureaucracy willingly, fastidious.
“Little by little, little by little, all sensation aside from pain is being paralyzed; I’m losing the will to grieve or be indignant; I have been taken over bv pain. Pain is my master, and I am little more than its shadow.” Yu Miri, The End of August
Who owns that story? How do I take that story, which involves editing the story, changing the story to present it, translation to another language, how do I keep that story whole? I never want to hear it again, let along tell it forever in print. This doesn’t even touch on the question of benefit—what do I bring back to her in this exchange? [There was some benefit: Some of my interviews were adapted into a classical Khmer opera by Sophinline Cheam Shapiro, a survivor of the period herself, involving multiple workshops with survivors. The aim of the opera was to show that in collecting the stories, we heard the stories, we believed the stories, and to speak them back to the survivors for their ears, an echo of the future that we won’t forget).
Other photos of Khem Kim capture the context of our interview—her grass=-hut house; the chickens and buffalo that lived under the house, scratching and mooing and cawing in the noonday heat. It was remarkable the poverty so many of the narrators lived in decades after the genocide’s end; but Khem Kim in her story now had a past and future she could self-determine.
Photo as evidence, and also evidence of my fixation on evidence. I don’t even show her face, we don’t even know it’s Khem Kim. I should note she insisted I take the photo, to document her wound that she always kept covered with a bright bandana. Despite my life-story commitment, I was sucked into that judicial vortex, and I needed (we needed, she and I) to present her as the perfect victim, of the perfect crime that could be perfectly prosecuted and convicted. As an aside, at least some of the sexual violence that occurred during the regime—forced marriage in particular—were convicted, and the advocacy pressure, including Khem Kim’s story, played no small part in that. That’s a benefit.
That kind of evidentiary fixation is very static, very exclusive of so much more information about her life, suffering, surviving. I want to add the precarious, the human and non-human, care and violence, living in Buddhist Asia, I question opposites, care and violence do co-exist.
*****
Sharpe says, “The real is the fiction we tell ourselves is true.” It’s provisional, it changes over space and time, calling to question even the self, our sense of selfhood as unitary, cohered, singular. Indeed, is not the self itself beset continually? With its own contradictions: we invent and destroy and reinvent; we misrecognize ourselves and each other; we age. We are never the same. Ocean Vuong quote. Every time his aunties told there stories, the stories were different, because their bodies were different, their life stages and concerns were different. The stories changed with them across time, serving different purposes at each telling, each age.
I think I am getting somewhere in this meditation. I am deeply influenced by Anna Tsing, the arts of noticing, the polyphony of reality in different temporalities (the mushroom does not age on the same clock as the human), and the possibility to decenter the human so that we might be able to here other, even nonhuman, narratives: ghost stories. Buddhist time. “you must have been a victim in your past life,” I’m told when I can’t come up with a sufficient reason for my narrators as to why I do this research.
As a feminist I also brought to the work an attitude of oral history as an act of care because you are paying attention and providing a platform to talk about what is supposed to be unspeakable. . I am deeply influenced by Anna Tsing, the arts of noticing, the polyphony of reality in different temporalities (the mushroom does not age on the same clock as the human), and the possibility to decenter the human so that we might be able to here other, even nonhuman, narratives: ghost stories. Buddhist time. Not the narrative arc of Freytag’s triangle, but concentric circles of suffering told as an intricate mandala. It take hour upon sticky hour to tell and record. We take naps in the mid-day in hammocks swinging at a local hang bai.
*****
It’s a question of possession. One, I “own” these narratives now, and the weight of that is heavy. Two, I tried my best to care for the narrators and my co-researchers, their well-bing and safely, but did a really bad job of caring for myself. But also, I am a bit of a coward: 24 interviews, 26 women with stories I cannot bear to revisit, knowing that to revisit is to send me into a rage against the world I can barely control and so internalize as paralyzing depression.
But also, my motivation has changed over time. I’ve been writing this book for 10 years, after all. I’m older now. I realize how shaped I was by the vortex caused by the ECCC, its demand for evidence, my desire to push back to say, take this seriously, as crimes, adjudicate it.
“Our past lives have awakened us; they have trained us to become more vigilant.” Suon Sorin, A A New Sun Rises Over the Old Land
Precarity: uncertainty, itinerate, provisional, fragmented, incoherent. I know some of you in this audience, grad students and job searchers, experience this every day in the late-stage capitalist institution we call the academe. It is also in the academy that produces a yearning, there really is no better word for it, for the stable, the choate, the complete, the static, the thing that does change, the impossible dream of Hegel’s encyclopedia.
[Nexus in SEA, at a particular moment in time, where we need all the imagination and care we can muster to imagine new futures, create preferable worlds in the face of the existential crises of climate change (will we exist), the rupture of the real in terms of technology (do we exist), and the global traumatic rupture of COVID.] As Sharpe insinuates, we’ll need to agree on a new version of the real and the true. And those are always provisional—even the future is precarious these days—if we attend to Lee Ann Fujii, that meaning is always co-constructed, always relational precisely because it needs to be invented.In the same way that we have these and other contradictions in being human, we also have contradiction of care and violence as intimate, not separate from each other and now not to fixate on the one so as to elide the other. The end result is a simple, clean, visually appealing website. But it’s so messy, so precarious just under the surface. We polish it, proof it, style it, cut all kinds of corners, to make it seem choate, coherent, unified, singular. We self-exclude for our own self-presentation. And the transcript comes to a close.
Precarity
Conversation
…
Care & Conclusion
Cindy
I’ve been analyzing a visual encyclopedia of Vietnamese crafts, cultural practices, and technologies as a multivalent and plural authored text. Produced by a French colonial administrator and unnamed Vietnamese contributors (draftsman, annotators, informants, woodblock carvers and printers), the book Technique du peuple annamite – Kỹ thuật của người annam – Mechanics and Crafts of the Vietnamese People published in 1909-1910, comprises some 4,000 drawings, 4,000 captions in French, and 2,900 captions Vietnamese chữ Nôm (a logographic Sinitic writing system of Vietnamese language). Henri Oger’s intellectual vision for this project was an attempt of a totalizing ethnographic study within an encyclopedic form, informed by colonial constructs of objectivity and exoticized representations of the indigenous world. The corpus assertively divorced subjects from their social and human contexts to be representational diagrams of ‘material culture’. Using hybrid methods of close reading, visual analysis, digital humanities computational methods, I conduct a layered analysis of visual-textual representations of gender and labor, with a focus on how care is depicted visually and textually (in French and Vietnamese).
This is where feminist methods and analytical frames have been transformative for both my research and personal world. I began working on this text about 7 years ago, and have now come to realize that it’s impossible to move forward with working through this troubling archive without a feminist and decolonial lens. I’m working through layers of representation filtered through a matrix of power: a colonial administrator’s orientalist impulses to classify culture for a capitalist commodification potential, to exotify social worlds into racialized and gendered caricatures. I have remnants of unnamed contributors: from the Vietnamese captions to the drawings, to the subjects of the visual representations themselves whose eyes, gestures, bodies, perform some type of narrative voice filtered through the draftsman and woodcarver. And it’s through these layers of representation, of ethnographic exploitation that I ultimately ‘benefit’. I’m able to transport myself into some semblance of the social historical world of 1909 Hanoi, a place I have both intellectual and personal connections to as a Vietnamese American researcher of Vietnamese history. For personal and political reasons I commit myself to make a decolonial and feminist interpretation of the text by making transparent all of the layers of power in the reduction of social worlds into archival information. Yet to ‘trouble’ the existing narrative is both deconstructive and constructive. The what is ‘not’ there, the beyond the page, the critical fabulation, the extension beyond the document, the constant reflexive questioning interrogating of why…this is the methodological troubling I am embracing. The methods of reflexivity, of creativity, of uncertainty that I was never formally taught. That in official spaces of Western academic training was seen as too informal, unsubstantial, not yet rigorous, not ‘significant’. It’s immersing myself into the archive.
For example, let’s take this image from the archive: a depiction of two women and a baby. A woman cradles a child on her side, while another room crouches over their head, picking out lice. The French and Vietnamese captions focus on different elements of the scene. And these are the only traces of these three subjects–the captions and the visual depiction. And here’s where it gets messy in my intellectual wonderings: The first layer is the ‘event’ archival making: How exceptional or everyday is this event? Why was this deemed worthy of record? What is the relationship between draftsman and subject? How much of the scene is real versus imagined? The second layer is imagination, recognizing the unanswerability of an archive: Who are these women? What are their relationships? How did these subjects feel, in that moment of care? How did they learn to care in this way, using specific tactics, methods, gestures, words, remedies? Ultimately this brings me to reimagine to construct historical social worlds of care as labor and knowledge.
These depictions are all too familiar to my everyday present, a mother of now toddler navigating the labor of caregiving/receiving, and how care labor creates social bonds and collective knowledge. And probably the inserting of myself, the reflexivity pollutes and is dizzying to the research, but it’s all there. I’m obsessed about researching about care, because in the navigating of all new sensations and identities and practices and techniques of working motherhood, all I do is ‘carework.’ [The fact that I can conduct academic labor analyzing care networks in this archive is possible through the exchange of someone else’s labor caregiving for my child. The fact that I am here, my partner is recording this talk, is because a mother in law is caring for my napping child.] My own takeaway: I want to bring together the practice of radical transparency, a positional reflexivity of methods in truth claims/limitations of knowledge/doubt and uncertainty from feminist/decolonial critique and digital humanities, into studies of Southeast Asian studies.
Words from audience members:
Indecision
Hope
Slow
Watching thoughts
Messy
Contradiction
Cindy other notes:
Specter of my advisor: “passions die, significance lives on.” It worked for me at the the time to hone into my interests and learn to justify why I do what I do. But over time I want to push back in this claim. Who is defining significance? Who gets to make life choices and be included in this arena which depersonalizes dehumanizes in the pursuit of some type of scientific disinterested pursuit of knowledge ?
The field calling for this and that…. It that’s not enough, that type of motivation dies or at least kills you slowly..
I recall my journey of confronting what it means to be a viet-am scholar in Viet studies. I remember my first undergrad conference on nvv and a scholar who shall not be named publicly asked me my positionality. I froze confused as to why I had to ask that question…. In another conference I was called out for being Asian but not really?? thus began my journey of pretending to be a white man. I took theater courses, I changed the way I spoke, I stood, I tried to take up space.…but now,I’m tired of pretending to hide from my marginality. Not of a lack of something whether it be my race or class or education or gender…Essential question I’ve been dwelling on as I think about my own career transition from student to scholar, white man academic to something else…What is emergent, abundant from my specific positionality, (child of refugees who did not complete high school formal education, female, young, viet-am) what knowledge do we bring to the academy that is crucial now for our students for the field for us. What methods and practices so we want to change. This panel is about ‘practices’, everyday actions small and big to enact systemic and personal changes. How do we send down an elevator for others? How do we care for others and for ourselves? I want to platform (as verb), inviting in young scholars, first generations, those who don’t have the privileges of access to the ivory tower of academia. Producing public scholarship.
Q&A
Q: How can institutions integrate self-care and care in research? Tara: we need community to take care of self care
Q: How can we keep the boundary between the personal and professional in the context of care? And how to keep from collapsing into the two identities, the bifurcation of identity? Cindy: Sometimes compartmentalization is not a bad thing.
Q: How does the concept of care fit into teaching? Tara: research and teaching synergistic; Nicole: mental/emotional care shifted radically during pandemic, shifted to faculty.
Some other general observations and comments noted down: de-acceleration; slowing down, dwelling in rather than reconciling contradictions, messiness, indecisions. The perfect the enemy of the good, an ethics that can paralyze; “speaking nearby” versus for or even with. Importance of community building, experimental, intellectual, personal,
