รายงาน 04. Reading Asia: experiences of (European & British) colonial empire
Searching web and family archives
[This report comes from a place of searching through histories: If you spot historically inadequate descriptions, please let me know.]
There’s been a lot of talk about decolonising and decolonial methods, in both the arts and in some of the agricultural circles I’m in. Combined with talk of anti-asian racism after the shootings in the US already some weeks ago.
>> weirdly, a @VOANews vid on #AntiAsianRacism in the US has SG's Ngee Ann City in it. And a hawker center. Maybe it's related to a quote in the article on how Asians grew comfortable in the US, though it’s a weird mix of contexts?? “I think a lot of the progress was actually related to food,” an interviewee, Nguyen said. <<
I’ve been thinking about how the Chinese dynasties—which feature strongly in Chinese period dramas and popular imagination—how these descended into the Communist Revolution, and the Red Guards.
I’ve heard about the Red Guards, but I never realised how young they were, and how they handled arms. They seem like the equivalent of other young militia popular in cultural imagination—radical, young, with an energy of “defeating the oppressors”. But Communism in China and its cultural revolution also opened it towards a culture of independence, the rupture of generations as youth overthrew the old. Within communist culture there must have been shards of individualism (yes, I’ve also been watching Adam Curtis and 20 minutes into Episode 2 and I am almost over the initial pleasure of it).
Revolution is happening again in Myanmar, and it may go on for a while.
The workers’ revolution in China was a revolution against the same-old dynastic power that held fast through dynasties of monarchic and feudal rule. It was an opening up of a power structure into one more equally distributed—as with other countries we’re seeing now (e.g. Myanmar, the latest, but also Thailand), the grasp of democratic rule or federation pulls history through the sieve, and a less popular monarch creates grounds for instability (as China’s multiple long and short dynasties showed). The rotting of an empire becomes fertile ground for war and new power. But the kind of deeply self-invested, wounded self China seems to be now, outwardly, had also been shaped through the Opium War - two wars declared by the British, with the help of its friends, in the name of taking down and weakening an empire in order to force trade.
The Japanese, learning from their neighbours’ weakened state, did everything they could to modernise and increase might in the 1860s. That situation later leads to war with China in the 1930s, which leads to the US supporting China, increasing boycotts against Japan (cutting off steel and petroleum), which perhaps triggers the Japanese to activate targeted attacks in Pearl Harbour and Malaya, in December 1941……
Where does greed, and expansionist appetite come from? How shall we break that cycle?
Reading about China’s history, I realize that the remote anger, aloofness, and coldness I sometimes feel in me, is also something my near-ancestors may have had. The aloofness of a great-grandmother needing to care for two young sons on her own. Of living in a China trapped in the opium wars.
Trinh T. Minh-Ha writes, in her essay Speaking Nearby,
“Multivocality, for example, is not necessarily a solution to the problems of centralized and hierarchical knowledge when it is practiced accumulatively — by juxtaposing voices that continue to speak within identified boundaries.
Like the much abused concept of multiculturalism, multivocality here could also lead to the bland "melting-pot" type of attitude, in which "multi" means "no" — no voice — or is used only to better mask the Voice — that very place from where meaning is put together.” (85)
For me, this recalls Singapore. Our multiculturalism conjured a flattening, but in the flattening of emotion also space for a new understanding emerged. I would like to resist the idea that flattening of intimacy has to happen in order for safety to be found, but I acknowledge how a politicized desperation could form and be formed, to depict a narrative of a society grasping at comforting blankness (the new Singapore /Asian modern as CJW-L Lee says), in the space of emotive reactivity.
Capitalism’s blank consumption was revered as an antidote to the emotional upheaval of wartime violence - a violence instigated by Western imperial powers’ conquests of other nations and continents - fear and silence only went inwards.
“On the other hand, multivocality can open up to a non-identifiable ground where boundaries are always undone, at the same time as they are accordingly assumed. Working at the borderline of what is and what no longer is anthropology one also knows that if one crosses that border, if one can depart from where one is, one can also return to it more freely, without attachment to the norms generated on one side or the other.” (85)
This gets at something very raw in me, the peeling edge of a wound waiting to be undressed, to be seen more clearly. It’s not a rotten wound, it’s a well-anointed one.
“it merits looking a bit harder at the Vietnamese culture — at its music, to mention a most explicit example — to realize how much it has inherited from both China and India. It is not an easy task to deny their influences, even when people need to reject them in order to move on” (88).
Perhaps that is what is needed. Ruptures and poetry, are means of moving on.
Context helps understanding - so what happens for people without context?
What a euro-centric audience may call essentialising may merely be a lack of context. I saw this in a reading group I was in, where people critiqued a scholar personally for insufficient ethnography, the unspoken critique being his ‘whiteness’ in a Southern setting. What was more likely the case was their lack of experience with the place he was describing, or with the experience of living hybridity. With experience, seeing a variety of scenes are not essentialising but something else—a witnessing, a play, as TTMH comments in her film Reassemblage. What’s presented becomes meaningful as sign and symbol, through the seeing eye, the seeing “I”.
Subject and object are always entwined. To go back to TTMH, once again,
“The play effected between literal and non-literal languages can be infinite and the two should not be mutually exclusive of each other. Everything I criticize in one film can be taken up again and used differently in another film. There is no need to censor ourselves in what we can do.” (86)
This month I am…
very slowly removing the rust from my Thai, and doubling between feeling energised and feeling like I can’t learn it fast enough to do what I’d like to do
speaking at the American Association of Geographers’ conference this year, 9 April - on Re-assembling Agroecological Scenes
listening again, this time in full, to Marshall Rosenberg’s 9 part series on Non-violent Communication
reading Kenneth Dean and Brian Massumi’s amazing 1992 book, First and Last Emperors
exploring Silence and Intimacy, in The Enclosed Garden, in Bangkok
> Residency : 04.04 - 17.04
Research & creation in Nakhon Chai Si, a rural area north of Bangkok.
> Exhibition preparation in Bangkok : 18.04 - 22.04
> Nighttime exhibitions : 23.04, 24.04, 25.04
Three nightly shows, with an audience limited to 30 people for each show.
Reads and References
Chen, Nancy N. 1992. “‘Speaking Nearby:’ A Conversation with Trinh T. Minh-Ha.” Visual Anthropology Review 8 (1): 82–91. https://doi.org/10.1525/var.1992.8.1.82.
Wee, C. J. W.-L. 2007. “The ‘Modern’ Construction of Postcolonial Singapore.” In The Asian Modern, 33–51. Singapore: NUS Press.
Wee, C. J. W.-L. 2007. “The Asian Modern.” In The Asian Modern, 15–30. Singapore: NUS Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107415324.004.
Some links:
>> Taiwan Biennale is taking Latour to new heights <3<3<3
https://www.tfam.museum/File/files/02exhibition/201120_20TB/TB2020_Guidebook_EN_Digital.pdf
>> A pretty well-produced 1/4 episodes on the US-China Trade War and relations by CNA
>> Special Webinar Broadcast for the Day of the Landless - organised by the Asian Peasant Coalition: Facebook replay
>> A Growing Culture: RICH EARTH, RED EARTH & THE FIGHT FOR LAND JUSTICE IN THE PHILIPPINES
I’ve been thinking more about the (queer?) relationship between… well, relationality and 关系 (guanxi), and non-violent communication and care…. more next time~
~Huiying