Welcome to the website for the roundtable on “Archipelagic Thinking in Southeast Asian and Southeast Asian American Narratives” at the Modern Language Association (MLA) conference in January 2022.
This roundtable is co-sponsored by the MLA Asian American Literature and Southeast Asia & Southeast Asia Diasporic Forums. Our roundtable description can be found below. Click on participants’ names in the menu above to view their respective pages. Click on Archipelagic Links for a list of related links and scholarly/critical resources.
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The rise of archipelagic studies has delivered innovative frameworks for analyzing island geographies and cultures, especially focused on the Pacific Islands (given the important work of writers such as Epeli Hau’ofa, Alice Te Punga Somerville, Teresia Teaiwa, and Rob Nixon) and the Caribbean (propelled by Édouard Glissant, Wilson Harris, Lanny Thompson, and others). More recently, in their introduction to Archipelagic American Studies (2017), editors Brian Russell Roberts and Michelle Ann Stephens address Indonesia in order to argue that archipelagoes are not necessarily geologically coherent entities and that “the concept of the archipelago” can “mediate the phenomenology of humans’ cultural relation to the solid and liquid materiality of geography” (7). The archipelagic thus provides a rubric for examining the relationship between identity and geography, within histories marked by colonialism, nationalism, and globalization. Roberts and Stephens’s argument for a “decontinentalization” of American studies is underscored by this intellectual field’s foundational attention to large geographic land masses. This attention sometimes treats outlying and disparate island formations as inessential even to postcolonial critique, redoubling empire’s epistemological violence. Roberts and Stephens’s analysis of Indonesia as an oceanic neighbor to American colonial and neocolonial territories in Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands is therefore crucial to their archipelagic determination. Similar analytic interventions are called for in Michelle Ann Stephens and Yolanda Martinez-San Miguel’s editorial introduction to Contemporary Archipelagic Thinking (2020).
Building on these critical energies, our roundtable session draws attention to the archipelagic (as distinct from a transpacific, diasporic, or postcolonial) potential in Southeast Asian and Southeast Asian American literary and cultural studies. We ask: How do archipelagoes and archipelagic lifeworlds inform literary and cultural narratives? How can archipelagic thinking challenge, inflect, and reconfigure existing frameworks for reading literature, art, poetry, and film? What new ways of relating Asian America and Southeast Asia might emerge through archipelagic approaches?
Our panelists explore these questions to Southeast Asian and Southeast Asian American world-making. Cheryl Julia Lee works on Merlinda Bobis’s fictional myth of the Fish-Hair Woman across several texts—radio play, novel, dramatic adaptation—to consider Philippine history from an archipelagic aesthetic. Trisha Federis Remetir examines Duc Nguyen’s 2008 documentary Bolinao 52, which accounts for a group of refugees from Vietnam stranded at sea and rescued by Filipino fishermen in 1988, wherein forgiveness and memorialization manifest as critical categories illegible to anticolonial nationalism. Nazry Bahrawi conceptualizes the “perantau,” or island-hopper, as a literary trope derived from the travel fiction of Haji Abdul Malik Karim Abdullah, or Hamka, whose novels The Sinking of Van Der Wjick (1938) and Director, Sir (1939) show Indonesian world-making through flaneuresque perantau characters. Kimberly Quiogue Andrews scrutinizes the poetics of Monica Ong’s Silent Anatomies (2015) to assess the merits and limits of multimedia forms (diagrams, photography, text, and installations) whose uneasy juxtapositions illuminate the history of bodies in diasporic East Asian / Southeast Asian writing. Jennifer Goodlander questions notions of migration and female identity in Indonesia in Luna Vidya’s play, The Kitchen and Vanessa Alputila’s song, “Gunung Salahutu / O Honolulu Ku’u Home.” Niccolo Rocamora Vitug probes the controversy surrounding Edilberto and Edith Tiempo, whose work in Philippine literature has been regarded as being complicit with US empire; Vitug argues that an archipelagic context may yield important insights not just on the Tiempos, but also on Filipino identity more generally. Kathleen DeGuzman analyzes terraqueous environments to discern an archipelagic kinship in Elaine Castillos’s novel America Is Not the Heart (2018).
The variety of texts, areas, and theories among our panelists will animate discussion along multiple axes, and would be relevant for MLA attendees working on postcolonial and transnational cultural studies across the world. More pointedly, our panelists foreground archipelagic impulses driving the multilingual US. The importance of multilingualism means enabling frameworks that can disrupt the logics of monolingualism and continentalism. The gravitational forces of empire and globalization continue to shift the balance toward dominant landscapes and languages, but the emergent energies of the archipelagic suggest there are other cultural practices and perspectives that can more urgently and incisively address the multilayered and multilingual histories before us.
To foster exchange and discussion, we will create and publicize a roundtable website using MLA Commons in Fall 2021 that includes talk abstracts and materials or resources complementing our talks. We will circulate talk drafts to potential attendees using Google Drive a week before the MLA convention. We will have 8-minute presentations to allow ample time for conversation with the audience.
(Cover image credit: photo by Mario Dobelmann on Unsplash)
[updated July 15 2021]