Organizer: Thongchai Winichakul, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Chair: Susan Darlington, Hampshire College
Discussants: Benedict R. Anderson, Cornell University; James C. Scott, Yale
University
The recent debate concerning the future of area studies and global studies is unfortunate since the dichotomy is a false one. The promotion or defense of one at the expense of the other is misconceiving. "Southeast Asia," a constructed cartographic and cultural sphere, has historically been in the streams of many world civilizations while the "localization" processes, as O. W. Wolters puts it, never fail to materialize particular cultures and identities. Throughout the different phases of globalization, local processes are susceptible to global dynamism as much as the latter is indigenized by foundational traditions and identities. While global studies contemplate on the transnational, transregional processes, area studies focus on cultural specificity, historical particularity, and local dynamics. They are differing approaches and "styles" of studies of the non-Western worlds with valuable compensatory strength and weaknesses.
The aim of SEAC in sponsoring this panel is twofold. On the one hand, it seeks to reaffirm the significance of cultural and historical particularity in relation to global processes. Given the new environment in international studies strongly influenced by global studies, on the other hand, the panel seeks to explore innovative directions of area studies which embrace the issues and questions beyond a contained geographical location. The panel features papers on no single topic. Rather, the selected papers will illustrate how a study can be both ethnographically and theoretically rich, and can contribute to both our commitment to areas and global studies.
Globalism and Local Identity in Myanmar
Juliane Schober, Arizona State University
This paper focuses on the ways in which Burma-or now officially Myanmar-represents a limiting case in the discussion of global and area focused frameworks for the study of Southeast Asia. After decades of fierce economic, cultural, and political isolation, the ruling elite now actively seeks to participate in international and global settings while reasserting the political boundaries of a modern nation state that has been contested since its inception. The government's participation in global economic communities is therefore closely linked to internal, nationalist interests and cultural conceptions of power.
Burma's recent economic liberalization and its growing participation in global economics are integrally tied to; (a) the role of transnational Burmese Diaspora communities that offer access to and knowledge of global networks; and (b) a conscious, internal effort by the state to construct a modern vision of national culture and identity. Myanmar's governing elite is engaged in the construction of national culture to combat global cultural commodities perceived as "subversive" influences from the "outside." The government's rhetoric about "otherness" reflects the concerns of a modern nation-state. While fiercely anti-colonial in its rhetoric, Burmese public discourse nevertheless retains many colonial clichés and constructs categories of modernity, such as national culture and the identity of its citizenry in the authoritarian conceptions of a colonial, Victorian worldview.
Signed: A. D. Pirous
Kenneth M. George, University of Oregon
Alternative modernities and fantasies abound in the global traffic in culture and contemporary art. Although the globalized reproduction of things and selves has disturbed and undercut local culture in Southeast Asia, it has also disseminated cultural practices across locales, and so has propagated hybrid effects in regionally situated artworlds. In an increasingly commodified art market, ideas about individual genius, about a painter's style and signature, and about the singularity of the "work" persist as a basis for distinguishing between originals, copies, imitations, and fakes, and in part determine the production, legitimization, and circulation of paintings. With the commodification of culture, an increased demand for originals spurs the production of fakes, and leads to unruly anxieties about possessing the "real thing" and controlling the artifacts made by an authentic self.
This papers tells the story of several paintings-some faked, some stolen, and some retrieved-that circulated in Bandung for a brief period in April and May of 1994. All bore the signature, "A. D. Pirous"-the name of one of Indonesia's most distinguished contemporary painters. I joined Pirous in his pursuit to get to the bottom of things, and so came to learn about the cult of the autograph and the erratic prices of Indonesia's rapidly expanding art market, about stuttering art dealers and wayward apprentices, and about the deceptive objects, figures, and fantasies that inhabit and shape Bandung's cosmopolitan art scene, a scene that can alert us to art worlds emerging elsewhere in Southeast Asia and beyond.
Desire and Sexuality in Colonial and Post-Colonial Indonesian Literatures
Laurie J. Sears, University of Washington
Foucault's location of the power of the discourse of sexuality in the affirmation of the bourgeois self in the 19th century linked sexuality, desire, and power in ways that seemed persuasively European, but, as Ann Stoler (Race and the Education of Desire, 1995, 194) has argued, the politics of empire infused and permeated constructions of desire and bourgeois subjectivity. If Foucauldian desire is always sexual desire and desire and power are intricately linked in European societies and mentalities, Stoler has suggested that in colonial contexts desire is productive of other senses and sentiments, most importantly those nurtured in colonial homes where relations between servants and children contest hierarchies of race and gender, self and other.
Can critical and feminist theories developed from and through the ideas of Freud, Lacan, Kristeva, and Spivak elucidate Indonesian texts and textualities? In his two major works, Edward Said (1978, 1993) has shown how the "Orient" was constructed in European thought and how the return of the colonial repressed worked in even the most quintessential of European texts. If the politics of empire not only permeated but even inspired European literary theory, then that theory can be used as a starting point for the creation of cross-regional critique that can elucidate both European and Southeast Asian literary texts.
Are the claims for autonomous subjectivity put forward by formerly colonized men and women similar to those of European men-and later women-or must we make a space for "difference" in the construction of colonial and postcolonial identities? It is here where feminist and postcolonial theories have opened new spaces for Indonesian writers by suggesting that a split/hybrid subject was literally produced in the contested spaces of various colonial experiences. This subject was both constituted by and constitutive of the colonial world. As a target of increasingly aggressive advertising campaigns that seek to integrate Indonesian men and women into the networks of late 20th-century global capitalism, the Indonesian subject appears fragmented, both attracted to and repelled by the accouterments of consumer cultures. It is here where we must situate the notion of area studies and its usefulness in explaining the contradictions of a global postcolonial world.