1. An explanation of the topic and the way in which it will be treated.
Since the end of the twentieth century, several Southeast Asian nations—like much of the decolonizing world—have strategically rearticulated, represented, and reconfigured their histories and experiences of colonialism as a means toward instrumentalized economic imperatives. In the wake of martial law, during the Philippines state’s supposed “return of democracy,” Corazon Aquino rearticulated a form of liberalism in striking continuity with older American colonial rhetoric. Under the People’s Action Party, the Singaporean state represented its rapid post-independence economic development by contradictorily framing it as both an inheritance of colonial collusion and an expression of decolonial autonomy. In 2019, the Indonesian state, under the Jokowi administration, attempted to consolidate political-economic control by reconfiguring remnants of Dutch colonial law—a move that sparked the largest mass protests since the Suharto regime. This panel seeks to explore the relationship between Southeast Asia—and its massive global diaspora—to “postcolonial capitalism.” How do the dynamics of postcolonial capitalism play out in Southeast Asian contexts and beyond? Cheryl Narumi Naruse has theorized and used the term “to describe how capitalist cultures are motivated, rationalized, and strategized through a consciousness of colonial subordination and racial capitalism, both past and present.” We are soliciting papers that investigate how Southeast Asian representational narratives, forms, and genres register the ways in which “a consciousness of colonialism helps represent capitalism as a politicized, moralized, and curative response to historical injustices, even as capitalism reproduces the very economic systems that facilitate the spread of extractive, colonial violence” (Naruse).
2. The rationale for organizing a session on that particular topic.
Southeast Asia is an region intimately connected to the rise of China and East Asia in the capitalist world-system.
3. An explanation of how the topic relates to existing scholarship.
The panel's theme "postcolonial capitalism" is an explicit reference to Cheryl Narumi Naruse's recent book, Becoming Global Asia: Contemporary Genres of Postcolonial Capitalism in Singapore. Dr. Naruse will be the respondent.
4. An explanation of how the session will operate within the allotted time while allowing for at least 15 minutes of unstructured discussion.
Four presenters will have 12 minutes to present. As the respondent, Dr. Naruse will have also 12 minutes--leaving 15 minutes of unstructured discussion and Q + A.
5. Brief descriptions of the individual presentations (or talking points for roundtable sessions) and explain how they relate to the topic of the session.
"Ports of Art: Postcolonial Capitalism’s Perpetual Transits."
Examining queer Singaporean artist Ming Wong’s Wayang Spaceship (2023), which montages Hong Kong opera cinema with early black-and-white, international science-fictional films on a traditional makeshift Cantonese opera stage overlooking rows of container stacks and automated gantry cranes, and highlights Singapore’s postcolonial paradox as a permanent transit for foreign labor, capital, and now, art.
"Trans Subterfuge: Toward an Anti-National History of the Philippines"
"Endangered and Dangerous OFW Bodies in Southeast Asian Anglophone Literature"
Pairing texts by Minfong Ho, Balli Kuar Jaswal, and Jose DalisayI this paper situates the Overseas Filipino Worker in conversation with the racial and gendered dynamics of postcolonial Southeast Asia to ask two questions: how do states use the Filipina worker to narrate their nation’s development, and how are those narratives contested in Southeast Asian Anglophone literature?
6. A brief statement about how this selection of panelists incorporates a diversity of voices.
This panel consists of an associate prof, assistant prof, postdoc, and PhD candidate. Multiple gender, sexual, and racial identities are also represented.