During the pandemic when the Kahin Center was closed indefinitely, I entered quickly a few times to look for books that I had left in my office on the second floor. After climbing the creaky front stairs, I always paused for a moment to appreciate the Dayak painting by Jok Bato that was made in 1973 and acquired by Carol Rubenstein while she was researching oral literature in Sarawak, Malaysia. The painting features the “Tree of Life” motif that is often found in Dayak art, and it represents the constant intermingling of all forms of life.

Rubenstein was a scholar at the Kahin Center from 1992 to 1993, and as she reflected on the culture shock she experienced each time she returned to the U.S. from trips abroad, she also considered how cold and desolate Ithaca winters might feel to Southeast Asian visitors. Rubenstein thus hoped that this glimpse of verdant jungle tendrils would help all those who pass through Kahin to feel more “at home.” My time with the painting was a warm refuge when I missed gathering at Kahin for talks and events and ensconcing myself in an office to write.

Now that the Kahin Center is open again, I examine its interior with eager, fresh eyes, enjoying its carved wood panels, paintings, posters, Buddha images, maps, and sculptures. The art that fills the Kahin materializes SEAP’s history and the lives and interests of the individuals who have shaped it. Some works have been donated by SEAP alumni and visiting scholars, like a small bust of the Thai radical Chit Phumisak (1930-1966) given to Kahin by historian Charnvit Kasetsiri (PhD Cornell 1972). Chit sits on a shelf in the large meeting room and listens intently to Gatty lectures.

Art historian Nora Taylor (PhD Cornell 1997) gifted the striking gouache painting, “Faces,” by Hoàng Hà Tùng (b. 1956) created in 1994 that hangs in the front staircase, its leafy green hues extending to the row of plants that bask in the sun of the nearby window. Taylor got to know Tùng during her research in Hanoi, and he was trained as a set designer and worked in folk theatre (hát chèo), which he also uses as a subject for many of his paintings. Taylor recalls Tùng’s sense of humor and notes how his paintings are “rich with expression and deep observation about human nature.”

Some pieces at Kahin belong to the Johnson Museum of Art, and some have been gifted or are on loan from SEAP faculty members, like the Chinese propaganda banners acquired by Thak Chaloemtiarana at the Salt City Antique Show in Syracuse. Other displays are more ephemeral; graduate students enjoy decorating their offices with photographs from fieldwork that they might gaze at for encouragement during long nights working on dissertation chapters, or they cover their desks with vibrant printed batik cloths or hang reproductions of favorite paintings and prints that they can turn to for pleasure and inspiration.

In Room 212, a graduate student office, drawings of monsters used in the short film Kahin’s Last Scare directed by anthropologist Emiko Stock (PhD Cornell 2019) keep company with a Balinese painting depicting a scene from the Ramayana donated by SEAP alumna Donna Harvey (PhD Cornell 1974) and a temple rubbing of Angkor Wat. These works are a bricolage of media types, time periods, moods, and sensibilities, and they capture the dynamic spirit of the Kahin Center and its art.

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American Colonialism and the first generation of Filipino pensionados

Cornell University’s involvement in the US colonial project in the Philippines indexes the formation of colonial knowledge production in the service of “nation-building” projects. In 1899, Jacob Schurman, then President of Cornell University, was appointed to lead the United States’ First Philippine Commission in charge of making preliminary recommendations on the future of colonial governance. Traces of Cornell University’s involvement in the Philippines from a century ago can be found in the the Rare and Manuscript Collections in the papers of those involved in preliminary reconnaissance trips to the Philippines such as Frank Ernest Gannet (Class of 1898), Gerow D. Brill (Class of 1888), Bernard Edward Fernow (Professor, College of Forestry).

Given the focus of the United States on building educational institutions, a select group of Filipinos went to US universities, including Cornell, to contribute to nation-building “back home.” As part of the “Pensionado” Scholarship Program, Filipinos were among the earliest Asian students to enroll in Cornell, meeting international students from Asia in the “Cosmopolitan Club.” Notable Filipino Cornell alumni, such as Vidal A. Tan, Tomas Mapua, and Victor Buencamino would go on to establish foundational institutions in government, business, and education. Although less studied for their contributions to the genealogy of Philippine Studies, these scholars foreshadow the contours of modern knowledge production of and about the Philippines and the politics of location in such production.

The Philippines meets “Southeast Asian Studies:” Post-WWII nation-building

The post-World War II era of decolonization reconfigured new conceptual matrices for scholarship as well as new institutional, political, and academic networks in the study of the Philippines. At the institutional level, Cornell’s links with the Philippines remained strongest in the agricultural and life sciences as well as other technical schools. In 1952, Cornell partnered with the University of the Philippines-Los Baños to rebuild the university, which had been devastated by World War II. From 1952-1960, thirty-five Cornell professors participated in the project, serving one to three-year appointments at Los Baños.

This project was a foundational moment in the collaboration between Cornell and the Philippines in providing technical assistance for agricultural development projects. Thanks to the institutional connections built through this project, in 1960, the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) was established in Los Baños, which remains an important center for research in global agricultural studies. Furthermore, Cornell was home to scholars of the Philippines such as the economist Professor Frank Golay, an eminent specialist of Philippine economy and director of the SEAP Program (1970-1976), and Professor Robert Polson who established a rural social science research program in central Philippines.

Despite the historical predominance of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS) and the social sciences in the study of Philippine-related topics, the founding of the Southeast Asia Program (SEAP) in 1950 facilitated new interdisciplinary scholarly connections. Language was the link. In 1964, Professor John Wolff, a linguist of Bahasa Indonesia, proposed the Tagalog Program to provide students who were working in the Philippines an opportunity to learn Tagalog and/or Cebuano. Wolff developed new materials for Tagalog learning, including the foundational and still-standard textbook on Filipino (Tagalog). Through the years, particularly through financial support from the Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) program, students of the Filipino (Tagalog) language at Cornell would include not just American scholars involved in Philippine-related projects but also second and third generation Filipino-Americans and non-Filipino international students interested in the Philippine diaspora.

A “Cornell School” of Philippine Studies?

The 1970s was a watershed moment in Philippine historiography. Amidst the tightening rule of martial law under President Ferdinand Marcos, scholars began to question the nationalist historiography of the 1950s and increasingly linked the study of history with the struggle for social justice. At this time, Cornell already had a strong reputation among the academic community in the Philippines since it had produced some of the Philippines’ foremost scholars such as Cesar Adib Majul (Government, ’57) and David Wurfel (Government, ’60). Thus, by happenstance or personal connection, more Filipino students found themselves at Cornell, itself known for the political activism of its professors.

Several monographs now considered canonical in the field of Philippine Studies were first written as dissertations by Cornell graduate students: Pasyon and Revolution (1979) by Reynaldo Lleto, Contracting Colonialism (1988) by Vicente Rafael, Clash of the Spirits (1998) by Filomeno Aguilar, Making Mindanao by Patricio Abinales (2000), and Necessary Fictions: Philippine Literature and the Nation (2000) by Carol Hau. These pioneering works of scholarship foregrounded the discursive analysis of culture and politics to the study not only of the Philippine’s history but also of colonialism, nationalism, and imperialism more broadly.

If we can then call such a thing as a “Cornell School” of Philippine Studies, as Carol Hau suggests, it is in the “intellectually promiscuity” evident in these interdisciplinary works. Filipino students at Cornell occupied the position of “transnational intellectuals,” defamiliarizing and denaturalizing the Philippines via the comparative lenses offered by area studies. By working with specialists of other countries such as Professor James Siegel and Professor Takashi Shiraishi, these path-breaking scholars expanded the theoretical and narratological frames for unpacking the complexity of the Philippine historical experience.

Central to this story is Professor Benedict Anderson, whose deep commitment and scholarly interest in the Philippines made Cornell an intellectually rich environment for Philippine scholars. Towards the end of his career, Professor Benedict Anderson became interested in the Philippines and published theoretically provocative works such as Under the Three Flags (2007), as well as essays in The Spectre of Comparisons (1998). Such intellectual productivity was collaborative and bi-directional. Anderson taught his students as much as learned from them, serving as a teacher, adviser, and friend to a large community of Philippine scholars, such as Patricio Abinales (‘97), Carol Hau (’98), Andrew Abalahin (’01), Joel Rocamora (’74), Vicente Rafael (’84), and Filomeno Aguilar (’92). This generation of scholars at Cornell  broadened the possibility of what Philippine Studies could be by imbricating them in wider transnational and interdisciplinary frames of study. READ MORE

With support from the Henry Luce Foundation, the Southeast East Asian Language Council (SEALC) and the Graduate Education and Training in Southeast Asian Studies (GETSEA) consortia award financial assistance to students who incur tuition fees when studying a Southeast Asian language during the academic year at an institution other than their home institution via synchronous distance learning. This award is intended to facilitate cross-institutional collaboration and increase access to Southeast Asian language instruction, especially for students who seek to study a language or level of study not currently offered at their home institution.

SEALC and GETSEA consider several factors when awarding students and determining placements. The first is the mission of SEALC and GETSEA to uphold and expand institutional support for the teaching of Southeast Asian languages and Southeast Asian language instructors. In the interest of this mission, the SEALC-GETSEA awards support for distance, synchronous language classes taught by lecturers hired minimally as part-time staff by the North American host institution.

In addition to this mission, SEALC and GETSEA consider the requests and time constraints of the student applying for language tuition support when assigning placements in order to maximize the language gains of the student. These considerations frequently allow support of students looking for first through third year language instruction but rarely those who require more advanced levels. Finally, in order to support the greatest number of qualified students possible, SEALC-GETSEA strives to place students in high-quality courses with reduced tuition costs and looks forward to supporting additional institutions in their efforts to increase the accessibility of their Southeast Asian less commonly taught language courses via synchronous distance learning. 

To grasp the true significance of the SEALC-GETSEA language tuition support awards from the student perspective, please enjoy the article below by author REN Chao. Chao is a SEALC-GETSEA awardee from academic year 2020-2021 and a member of the GETSEA graduate student advisory council. His article highlights the academic, professional, and personal benefits of continued Southeast Asian language study made possible by the SEALC-GETSEA awards based on his own experience and his interviews with fellow awardees. 

From REN Chao, PhD Candidate in history at University of Michigan

“Mingalaba Chao, you look incredibly awake for what time it is where you are,” said Saya Justin Watkins, Professor of Burmese at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London. This is how I spent most of the Monday and Friday mornings of this past academic year—early morning hours, barely awake, holding tea in my Michigan mug, and dialing into my remote Burmese class from Russell Square, ready to crack another passage in literary Burmese. Since I was the only one in the class located in the Western Hemisphere, classes are scheduled at 8 a.m. or sometimes even 7 a.m. so that other classmates won’t need to stay up too late. These morning classes not only gave me—a notoriously non-morning person—a reason to get up early, but also offered me a precious refuge away from the constant anxieties of the pandemic and of unsavory domestic and international politics, which have quite literally plagued so many of us over the past year.

As a graduate student studying colonial Southeast Asian history at the University of Michigan, I have always wanted to learn the Burmese language systematically, but it is not currently offered at my home institution. In September 2020, I was fortunate to receive a SEALC-GETSEA award and enrolled in the remote Burmese language class offered by the School of Oriental and African Studies. This award has proved to be tremendously helpful for my studies, especially at this particular juncture. With the pandemic still ongoing around the globe, on-site research has become impossible, so many of us had to change research plans. Under such restrictive circumstances, language learning has become a wonderfully productive alternative to research, and a distracting mental health refuge.

I had always hoped to find some language preparation before diving deeper into the study of archival documents, but struggled to find rigorous and affordable Burmese language-learning opportunities in previous years. The SEALC-GETSEA language training award met this need perfectly. Despite the absence of Burmese language instruction at my home institution, the this award allowed me to further my training in the Burmese language and better prepare myself for future research.

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