Speakers and Abstracts

Panel 1:  

Princess Mandalika’s Many Lives: Managing Cultural Multiplicity in Indonesian Tourism Projects

Connor Rechtzigel 

Abstract: In 2022, the Indonesian Ministry of Tourism and Creative Economy funded a project to produce a book about Princess Mandalika, a legendary Sasak heroine and the namesake of Lombok’s Mandalika Special Economic Zone. Primarily associated with the island’s southern coast, Mandalika’s story centers on her impossible choice among several suitors. Rather than selecting one and risking conflict, she vanishes into the sea, transforming into seaworms (nyale) that emerge annually during the Bau Nyale festival. Transmitted primarily through oral tradition, Mandalika’s story takes many forms: some accounts say she deliberately leapt into the sea, while others claim she transcended into a higher divine realm, enabling different villages to claim her as their own. Drawing on my fourth dissertation chapter, this presentation focuses on a two-day focus group discussion in which nineteen male cultural authorities negotiated how Mandalika should be represented for state tourism development. Rather than resolving competing claims about her meaning and value, I show how project organizers strategically managed their coexistence through linguistic negotiations. This process materialized “stakeholders” as masculine subjects able to negotiate across competing value systems, consolidating their control over cultural meaning and access to state recognition. 

In Konfrontasi’s Wake: Indigenous Subjects as Illegal Immigrants in Malaysian Borneo

Darren Wan

Abstract: While indigenous communities in upland central Borneo have had long histories of migration, state representatives started viewing their mobility with suspicion from the late 1950s onwards. How and why did Orang Ulu—recognized as “natives of Sarawak” by the Constitution of Malaysia—get disproportionately cast as illegal immigrants and had their claims to Malaysian citizenship denied? This paper proposes that anticommunism was central to bureaucrats’ preoccupation with “indigenous illegal immigrants.” In particular, Konfrontasi (1963–1966), Indonesia’s undeclared war against Malaysia on the eve of its formation, compelled the militarization of a border that was notoriously difficult to police. In the eyes of the state, communities that straddled this border were at best out of place, and at worst threats to national security. While the scholarship on the Cold War in Maritime Southeast Asia has focused on how anticommunism shaped social life in diasporic communities like the overseas Chinese, this paper argues that anticommunism had more broad-based effects that cut across the settler/indigenous binary that canonically structures histories of race and racialization. Combining oral history with archival research, it also demonstrates how statelessness in Malaysian Borneo today sheds light on the long shadow that Konfrontasi has cast.

Talk: 

Sun Bear Hunting: Faunal and National Futurities in a Malaysian Hinterland

Joshua Kam

Abstract: This paper considers the ecological turn in Malaysian studies and its investment by the state, private industry, and ideologies of the child to manufacture visions of a fruitful national future, teeming with life. Drawing on archival work on colonial British hill-stations and field work in western Pahang (2024-2025), I argue that the renewed urgency of growing food and protecting jungles in the face of climate change has situated Malaysian rainforests and their fauna as ideological sites which must be controlled in defense of a future. In Pahang, I encountered a hinterland hotly contested by entrepreneurs, illegal palm magnates, and conservationists allied with petrol corporations, all brought into tenuous intimacy with native Semai foresters, who hunt the last of the world’s sun bears. This paper explores how these Orang Asli hunters, figured alternately as nature-defenders or perjured as poachers, resist the easy mapping of a state which divvies its hinterland between conservationist and consumerist uses of land. I note how Semai forests produce counter-maps of their own, akin to Sophie Chao’s “living maps” used by the Marind people of Indonesian-held Papua. I borrow Lee Edelman’s work on the figure of the child to consider charismatic megafauna, like the tapir, the sun-bear, and tiger, made to represent the national life-drive on billboards, magazines, and murals, even as their habitable futures are steadily foreclosed. Intervening on this life drive, I consider the spectre of death drives within the national: more-than-human forces which plunder the optimisms of the future in favor of insistent, survivalist presents.

Listening for the Khmerican in Anthony Veasna So's Straight Thru Cambotown

Brian V. Sengdala

Abstract: Reviews for Anthony Veasna So’s first book Afterparties: Stories, which included “Three Women of Chuck’s Donuts,” the first story published in The New Yorker by a Cambodian American author, hailed him as someone who could have been the next literary star. Those above reviews mention how his writing was different for Asian Americans, expressed a certain wit about them, and held away from a sensational account of what it might be to be Cambodian American. Ironically, So was sensationalized in these regards as someone whose life ended prematurely—and with so much left to write. 

This essay starts there, where what is left to write is and remains and will remain unwritten. It focuses particularly on the chapters of Anthony’s unfinished novel Straight Thru Cambotown which were published posthumously alongside his other essays in Songs on Endless Repeat: Essays and Outtakes. In order to closely read where the writing stops, I follow up with works he’s mentioned or used as reference points for himself, and other objects, like the audiobooks and a reading he’s done which was recorded and published as a YouTube video as a point of analysis. I transcribe this video which attempts to closely replicate the speech that is heard on an audio recording by including disfluencies which include pauses and repetition. As I also demonstrate in my reading, I compare the gestures of my own transcription with one that has been edited for publication in order to rehearse the methods that hold onto memories of Brown life. This essay follows what I have been thinking about performances as silence (and vice versa) in explaining how one listens to text, how one listens to reading, and what one makes out of all of that. The stories and my yearnings when I read them with performance studies, hear with sound studies illuminate a Cambodian American worldmaking.

Panel 2: 

Transfer of Darkness: Neon Signs and Protests against Japan’s Capitalist Expansion in Tokyo and Jakarta

Tsuguta Yamashita

Abstract: This paper traces the post imperial circulation of neon signs from Tokyo to Jakarta, showing how their brightness inverted—from an emblem of progress to a marker of the vulgarities of Japanese capitalism. Initially dominated by displays installed under the U.S. occupation, Tokyo’s neon came to signify postwar reconstruction as rapid economic growth took hold. By the 1960s, Japanese neon spread across Southeast Asian cities, announcing Japan’s expanding economic presence. In Jakarta, President Sukarno sought to refashion the capital into a symbol of anti-imperial nationalism using Japanese postwar reparations, commissioning modern high rises for Japanese firms. Under his successor, President Suharto, the liberalization of foreign investment turned those buildings into platforms for out sized Japanese neon, provoking anti-Japanese sentiment. In early 1974, neon was dimmed in both Jakarta and Tokyo—amid protests and riots in the former, and in response to the oil shock in the latter. The Jakarta upheaval, in turn, resonated with day laborers in Tokyo confronting economic crisis. The resulting darkness in both cities became a shared alternative futurity, mediating a transnational vision of protest against Japan’s capitalist expansion.

Vietnamese Women’s Life and Work in Chinese Nightclubs in Kenya 

Xinlei Sha  

Abstract withheld 

Talk:

Warring Paradises: Cold War Visions of Futurity in Laos (1954–1975)

Anna Koshcheeva 

Abstract: Conventionally, the Cold War is understood as a conflict between the superpowers and is a subject of political history. This perspective, however, reduces the de facto central role of Asia in the global Cold War to a geopolitical periphery and proxies. Moreover, it recolonizes capitalist and communist models of modernity as intellectual products of the superpowers, leaving Asia to adopt and adapt them. Conversely, my research approaches the Cold War from a vantage point of an overlooked but exemplary Asian periphery—Laos—and investigates how capitalist and communist ideals were conceived locally.

As the Cold War in Asia was folded into processes of decolonization and nation-building, I approach it as a conflict of futurities—the visions of an ideal future for a postcolonial modernizing nation. Specifically, I study the modernizing ideals of the communist movement in Laos, the Pathet Lao, and the US-supported Royal Lao Government. Examining architecture, cinema, print, and radio broadcasting as articulations of ideal futures, I propose the framework of warring paradises to theorize the Cold War.

Analyzing capitalist and socialist warring paradises, I pay specific attention to the ideal socialist future. Firstly, because it won public support, bringing the Pathet Lao to power and defining the outcome of the Cold War in Laos. Secondly, it exposes the vernacular specificity of Asian socialism and the cultural technologies of popularizing it. Building on unprecedented access to the communist caves—the underground capital of the Pathet Lao during the Vietnam War—this research is a pioneering study of the pre-revolutionary Lao socialist vision and global socialist cooperation on an Asian frontier.