Notes from the Field | Wong Tian An, Should Southeast Asian Studies exist? Field notes from an interloper
I am a Malaysian scholar, writing from my embedded location in the US academy, authorized by various departments of mathematics and statistics over the last decade or so. I found my way into Southeast Asian Studies in the last two years or so, after a long and winding side path beginning in postcolonial studies and critical international relations in my undergraduate days, to transdisciplinary excursions in the Black radical tradition, Asian American studies, and liberation theology in the intervening years, and finally here, seeking to find my way “home” in both politics and praxis. I came into the field hoping to learn more about this region that I am supposed to be a part of, and found more and less than I bargained for.
These fragments represent notes from my field site: the academic “tribe” of Southeast Asian studies outside of Southeast Asia. My ethnographic work includes group texts with Southeast Asian graduate students in the US and beyond, taking classes through the GETSEA consortium (and Tyrell Haberkorn’s JSEA Lab), seminars and podcasts by Western Southeast Asian networks such as NIAS, SSEAC, NYSEAN, and many others. My interlocutors are those who speak of this place known only by its name. My preliminary observations may be either unwelcome or naïve — perhaps both — but are recorded with the sincerity and clarity of a Southeast Asian insider-outsider.
My working hypothesis, which is as yet unfalsified, is that Southeast Asia studies has not come very far from its colonial and imperial beginnings.
“Southeast Asia studies has not come very far from its colonial and imperial beginnings.”
But first, let us be clear about some structural tendencies of the academy, not specific to Southeast Asian studies itself: First, the gatekeeping nature of each academic guild, which requires the mastery of a particular canon, methodology, and performativity — a tribal rite of entry which has been critiqued at length by Ariel Heryanto’s incisive “Can there be Southeast Asians in Southeast Asian Studies?” Second, the extractive nature of knowledge production, wherein “research” commodifies cultures and lifeworlds, not (directly) for financial gain, but for the construction of individual research programs and the accumulation of the currency and status marker of academic publications. This has also been properly critiqued, for example, in Linda Tuhuwai Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies, in the context of research and Indigenous peoples. The extracted knowledge is transmuted into further knowledge through theory, leading to what we might tentatively call a capitalist/academic mode of knowledge production, wherein the research subjects are alienated from their own knowledges. It is fruitful to pursue the analogy further and more precisely, which I do not do here. For example, academic publications here act as the money form, in which the exchange values of the produced knowledges are congealed. Whereas publications are not fungible in an exact sense, each carries a relative symbolic value which measures the exchange value of each paper, used to communicate to other academics the worth of the produced knowledge, without being able to understand or judge the content (use-value) of the paper on their own. These papers cannot be exchanged per se, but the theories that they produce, which have relative value measured by publication prestige and citations, is then used (exchanged) to produce further knowledges.
My empirical observation is that Southeast Asian studies in the present reproduces these problems but faithfully. The problems inherent to the academy—elite capture, class privilege, racial and sexual difference, Western hegemony—are further exacerbated such as by neoliberalization and academic shock doctrine, and Southeast Asian studies is far from exempt. I am of course painting with a broad stroke, but those that object will only raise exceptions that prove the rule.
The impossibility of decolonization
On to specifics. Take “decolonizing,” an apparently new word in the field, which also reflects a larger trend to decolonize many other things, as Smith’s book’s popularity shows. Within the US, the urtext for this is Tuck and Yang’s “Decolonization is not a Metaphor,” which has become a parody of itself by being cited over and over again with little material effect. What use does Southeast Asia, as an almost entirely post- (or neo-)colonial region have for such a theoretical tool? The fact that I am referring to decolonization as a theoretical move already belies the immateriality of this intellectual racket, which entirely goes against Tuck and Yang’s original intention. Less well-known is Tuck and Yang’s R-Words: Refusing Research that directly gets at the problematics of the research enterprise. They lay out three axioms that Southeast Asian studies is yet to properly reckon with as a field: (1) The subaltern can speak, but is only invited to speak her/our pain, (2) there are some forms of knowledge that the academy doesn't deserve, and (3) research may not be the intervention that is needed. Post-colonial theorists of old have long written about the psychic residue of coloniality, and have already learned to ground it in materiality following Chibber’s important critique. Of course, there is a core thread in Tuck and Yang’s argument that concerns indigenous sovereignty, repatriation, and anti-settler colonial critique, which admittedly needs further exploration within Southeast Asia.
On the other hand, what use does Southeast Asian studies, as a field, have for decolonization? The answer, it seems, is everything. The real question, in the final analysis, is if Southeast Asian studies were to decolonize, would anything be left? Could we stand to have places like Cornell University be the “Mecca” of Southeast Asian studies? Would it be any better for the National University of Singapore to take its place? Why are John Furnivall, Benedict Anderson, James Scott, and Clifford Geertz still the “big four” that form the foundation of the Southeast Asian studies canon? Of course, there exists a constellation of early Southeast Asian Southeast Asianists, among whom some might count Barbara Andaya, Syed Hussein Alatas, Chua Beng Huat, Wang Gungwu, Rey Ileto, Vincente Rafael, and Thongchai Winichakul, but none have established what might be widely accepted as “canon” in Southeast Asian studies. Of course, there are the perennial questions that clamor in the background, such as what Southeast Asia signifies, what is the value of theory versus ethnography, and what canon even means.
As a participant observer in such matters, it is not necessary to adjudicate on these questions, but rather to reflect on the technologies of power operating within the façade and the performance of Southeast Asian studies. A respected (White) Southeast Asianist in an Anthropology department, who was not themself an anthropologist, once discouraged me from a PhD in Anthropology for two reasons: one, the prevailing market forces offer little guarantee of employment after seven years of rigorous graduate training (which, I note for any graduate student reading this, was lucidly captured in Marc Bousquet’s “The Waste Product of Graduate Education”), and two, Anthropology departments, in their vigorous and very appropriate self-critique, leave themselves defenseless against administrators in arguing for their continuing existence despite budget cuts. Once again: if Southeast Asian studies were to properly decolonize, would anything be left? Indeed, as some have argued, one necessary response to decolonizing research, is simply to produce less research. Producing research for the sake of research—or, more cynically, job security and academic acclaim—does little for the subaltern or proletarian Southeast Asian that cannot speak.
In one of my classes, we read Derrida’s Archive Fever as a way to think about Southeast Asian archives. In this introduction to a Freud archive, Derrida fixes upon a written lamentation of Freud about expending material and work of himself and others in order to “expound things which are, in fact, self-evident,” thereby articulating a drive to conserve, or archive, that is in continuous tension with a death/aggression/destruction drive. The irony is that even as the archival desire is indissociable from this “anarchivic” drive, the archive ultimately prevails because it is not destroyed. Similarly, even as Southeast Asian studies is able to rise to self-criticism, it cannot ultimately pull the trigger. Heryanto puts this better: “they recuperate, most likely in unconscious ways, the sort of domination and discursive practice that these approaches were originally meant to attack.” The proof of this, of course, is the fact that the writings of Derrida and Foucault (and Benedict Anderson and James Scott) remain unassailable as theorists that one needs to be able to be in dialogue with, however critically, in order to be well-regarded.
Heryanto’s article from twenty years ago suggests to me that little has changed in the intervening years. Indeed, more recently, Tharapi Than’s moving exploration of “Why Does Area Studies Need Decolonization?,” together with Chu May Paing and Than Toe Aung’s powerful “Talking Back To white 'Burma Experts',” put the challenge forcefully not only to White or Western researchers, but all and any who reproduce the coloniality of knowledge production. To ask a researcher not to produce research, of course, is anathema. But it should be clear by now that the ethical pitfalls abound. It is perhaps easier for the social scientist to be wary of my home field of mathematics, a predominantly positivist endeavor, where one might instead caution against a drive to quantify and quantize, or call for guardrails on the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics.” Such coloniality, I claim, maps quite easily still onto Southeast Asian studies in the Western academy.
If the subaltern is allowed to speak, with whom are they allowed to speak? Do they even want to speak? If a Western researcher promotes a local researcher from native informant to co-author, how much of the power structure is dismantled rather than reconfigured? (In referencing Spivak here in the context of the politics of representation and area studies, it is important to recall that Spivak and the broader school of Subaltern Studies are primarily Brahmin scholars.) As wide-ranging critiques of the politics of representation such as by Glenn Coulthard (Indigenous studies), Keeanga Yahmatta-Taylor (Black studies), and Suraj Yengde (Dalit studies) have already shown, increasing representation without paying attention to the intersections of class, caste, and sex merely reinforce unequal power relations along other axes. Coming from the perspective of one more familiar with postcolonial studies, which is concerned with the afterlife of colonialism, and Asian American studies, which preeminently privileges standpoint epistemology, the lateness of the decolonial turn in Southeast Asian studies appears somewhat surprising, particularly given the long interactions between cultural studies and area studies. But perhaps this speaks to the ultimate immateriality of postcolonial and cultural studies as far as the general subaltern subject is concerned, and more broadly just how impossible decolonization truly is.
Imagining the impossible
Let us now attempt to briefly imagine a decolonial future for Southeast Asian studies in which the Western academy is preserved, approximately as we know it today. How do students come to Southeast Asian studies? If from Southeast Asia, they most likely come from an upper-middle class background, with some degree of racial privilege and network that exposes them enough to assimilate into the Western academy, both in terms of language and culture. Unless their political consciousness is raised by some external means — for example, through graduate student labor organizing, racial justice movements, or social upheaval in one’s home country — it is reasonable to expect that the student will continue, if at all, along the typical tenure track or its equivalent, which is an inherently conservative force not amenable to full-scale decolonization (a program of complete disorder, according to Fanon).
It is possible, of course, to reprise the role of the (model) minority very well to one’s own advantage, at a time of increasing Diversity Equity and Inclusion efforts, with no concern for communal uplift. Theoretical decolonial research agendas are perfectly harmonious with the contradiction of the an/archivic drive in critical theory. Such a scenario is the one outlined by Heryanto, wherein a new canon of self-referential theory is produced, that can serve the multiple functions of critiquing post-colonial despots, depreciating the lives of those who live under said despots, and enhancing one’s academic credentials. This cynical view of theory might be balanced with bell hooks’ meditations on Theory as Liberatory Practice. Even then, she warns that theory is “not inherently healing, liberatory, or revolutionary. It fulfills this function only when we ask that it do so and direct our theorizing towards this end.” In any case, the jargon of high theory functions less to communicate to the “uneducated” masses as it signals belonging to a particular academic “tribe,” or as psychologist Dio Turner II called, “academic gang signs,” if we are to talk about symbols on an anthropological level. An incomplete—or metaphorical, shall we say—decolonization is a Faustian bargain at best, wherein the colonized intellectual or indigenous bourgeoisie projects a sufficiently convincing form of decoloniality that achieves acclaim (say, a Duke University Press book) whilst betraying the masses, as anti-colonial revolutionaries Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, and Walter Rodney have separately warned. The only alternative, for Southeast Asians in Southeast Asian studies, is to carry out the program of decolonization to the bitter end as what Rodney calls revolutionary intellectuals, grounded with one’s people.
If from outside of Southeast Asia, one is first struck by the degree of serendipity that presents itself as the raison d’être of many scholars’ careers. Indeed, in Anderson’s assessment of his success, he credits luck, chance, and accident as having played important roles in his academic trajectory. On the other hand, the elephant—or Leviathan—in the room is the role of the state, capitalism, empire, and Whiteness all acting in concert, quite uncoincidentally (an important example being James Scott’s less well-known role as a CIA informant in Myanmar and elsewhere before entering graduate school). As has been recounted elsewhere in great detail by others, Southeast Asian studies in Europe began as a colonial enterprise, and later developed in the US in part as a Cold War initiative, then later funded by non-profit organizations such as the Ford, Rockefeller, and Fulbright Foundations, the former two expressly built on the exploitation of Black workers and anti-Black violence, more broadly. Whereas such privileges and complicities are typically down-played, often for the simple purpose of focusing on the work itself (a fanciful story that mathematicians also love to tell themselves, lest it be thought that I have am not aware of the plank in my own eye), historian Emily Callaci insightfully showed that such glimpses can be found in the acknowledgments or self-disclosures of Southeast Asianists in their fieldwork reporting. Even as such thanks given to one’s interlocuters, supporters, and teachers are no doubt heartfelt, the issue at hand is not the sincerity or nobility of one’s intentions, but the larger power structures and field of relations in which these interactions play out.
To put the point more bluntly, a 2020 Title IX related inquiry at a colleague’s department concluded that while it did not find “the conduct of any one individual constituted discrimination in violation of university policy,” it also found that the university’s policies prohibiting discrimination were “violated by the aggregated gendered conduct of multiple individuals, which contributed to an environment in the Department that multiple women reasonably found to be hostile or offensive.” In other words, while no individual was singled out as responsible as the cause of the alleged “unwelcome environment based on gender,” the larger system of violence maintained by each member of the department was enough to cause the person in question to resign from a tenure-track position after seven years. Sexism without sexists, echoing Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s racism without racists. Or in our case, coloniality without colonialists. This form of impersonal, bureaucratic, or shall we say, academic violence gestures to David Graeber’s dead zones of the imagination. According to Graeber, human relations founded ultimately on violence, or vastly unequal power differentials, relegates to the powerless “the responsibility to do the interpretive labor required to allow the powerful to operate oblivious to much of what is going on around them, who thus tend to empathize with the powerful far more than the powerful do with them.” This phenomenon is most salient when the violence itself is “least visible, in fact, where acts of spectacular physical violence are least likely to occur,” such as in mundane, bureaucratic academic departments. The crucial lesson here is that even a department full of decolonized, enlightened academics is still highly capable of dealing violence to graduate students, contingent faculty, and even tenure-track or tenured faculty, let alone their subjects of study.
Returning to the larger systems in which Southeast Asian studies is embedded, how might we justify the existence of a decolonized Southeast Asian studies in the Western academy? One of the most important innovations, I would like to propose as a preliminary conclusion, is an entirely new and reciprocal set of relations with not only Southeast Asian studies in Asia and Southeast Asia, but also with Asian American studies, for example. It is natural enough to ask for a rebalancing of the scales between centers of knowledge production within Southeast Asia and without (see recent reflections of Thiti Jamkajornkeiat on what forms should and could Southeast Asia area studies take in Southeast Asia that diverges from the hegemonic “American style”), but equally needful, I would argue, is for a wall-to-wall theorizing of Southeast Asian and Southeast Asian American studies. That is, a recognition of the inherently transnational nature of Southeast Asian studies and its constitutive relations determined by diaspora communities, between the professoriate and the proletariat. It is worth noting that the minority position of Southeast Asian studies in Asian studies is very much mirrored by Southeast Asian American studies in Asian American studies.
This also gestures towards Third World Studies, which historian Gary Okihiro argues is what Ethnic studies ought to have been and ought to be. Whereas it is widely understood that Southeast Asia is an imagined community, the day to day research operations continue to work neatly within national, geographic, and often also disciplinary boundaries. Any decolonial future for Southeast Asian studies must see these boundaries repeatedly transgressed. One potential area of inquiry that this can open up is a complementary theorization of the transpacific slave trade and its afterlives, complementary to the fundamental role the transatlantic slave trade plays in the Afropessimism and the Black radical tradition. What contributions and challenges might be made to the ontological claims regarding global anti-Blackness? On the other side, critical refugee studies in the US is beginning to take shape, and is doing the much needful work of providing critical research and intellectual resources for Southeast Asians who have lived in the US, even since the European conquest of the Americas. To move away from the interests and investments of the state and capital, Southeast Asian studies can make themselves enduringly relevant if they can make meaningful connections with Southeast Asian communities already in their midst. Of course, even this will not completely free Southeast Asian studies from all complicities, but it will bring it all the more closer to social justice.
Dr. Wong Tian An is an assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Michigan-Dearborn.
To cite this essay, please use the entry suggested below:
Wong, Tian An, “Should Southeast Asian Studies exist? Field notes from an interloper,” criticalasianstudies.org Commentary Board, April 18, 2022; https://doi.org/10.52698/FFXT6632.