Organizer and Chair: Laurie J. Sears, University of Washington
Discussants: Hendrik M. J. Maier, Leiden University; Glenn A. May, University of Oregon; Rosalind Morris, Columbia University; Anthony J. S. Reid, Australian National University; Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Harvard University; Laurie J. Sears, University of Washington
This roundtable has arisen in response to the recent attention that Southeast Asia has been receiving due to the Asian economic crisis and the fall of the Soeharto government in Indonesia. The unprecedented press coverage of Indonesia, in particular, has relied on short summaries of hundreds of years of history or ignored all but the most recent history of the nation and the region as a whole. This has led some of us to think about the ways in which the various countries of Southeast Asia have been studied over the past fifty years since the end of World War II brought independence to most of the region. It has also led some of us to look even farther back to the colonial and precolonial periods to see how the different peoples, ethnic groups, and polities have been represented in scholarship in response to Euro-American studies of nationalism. As Hue-Tam Ho Tai put it recently, "the problem for Southeast Asianists then became how to narrate diversity without letting go of the concept of nation." Tony Reid has suggested that "the best of regional (as opposed to national) history has arisen primarily from (within) the region . . ." and he has questioned "how do you teach diversity without making (the region) seem incoherent?"
Today in Southeast Asia we have seen the eruption of problems of ethnic diversity, problems that have often been suppressed by the arms and censorship policies of military-backed governments. The atrocities committed against ethnic Chinese in Indonesia in the fall of the New Order—possibly orchestrated by factions within the military—show the lurking brutality of these ethnic divides. The ideological suppression of difference in Thailand, Viet Nam, Indonesia, and Malaysia has certainly been a feature of the postcolonial Southeast Asian state and, as Roz Morris points out, there has been a move toward "the naturalization of the state as an ethnicized, if not overtly racialized, entity." In contrast to the postcolonial suppression of diversity, the colonial states often relied on ethnic difference to enact policies of repression and exploitation.
Keeping these issues in mind, the roundtable will address the ways in which historiography, ethnography, and literary studies have unfolded in Vietnamese, Thai, Indonesian, Malaysian and Filipino contexts. We intend to move from the pre-national to the postmodern and the transnational and to link older academic disciplinary priorities to more recent representations of the region in the media. We want to question the concept of Southeast Asia as a coherent region of study and to question its recent corollary, the concept of Southeast Asian literature. Through exploring these issues, we hope to engage our audience in debates that will allow all of us to feel a bit more informed about the broader politics of culture and history in Southeast Asia.