Organizer and Chair: Mary M. Steedly, Harvard University
Tasks and Masks: "Caliban" Revisited, or Has the Subaltern Spoken?
Ray W. Chandrasekara, University of California, Berkeley
This paper will seek to consider the role of nyai Ontosoroh in Pramoedya’s Bumi Manusia. It will consider how dissident articulations of non-conformity to the historiographic canons of colonial orthodoxy taints the discourse and undermines the manufactured truths of Dutch colonial assertions. I will also attempt to show how the nyai’s liminal status in the culture of empire allows her to read and understand colonial intentions as both threat and possibility and how modes of alterity can and do serve as gateways to identity.
It is no accident that in Bumi Manusia, gender functions as the dyad through which the crisis of the community is revealed, and mediated. If colonialism was the key paradigm for representing and understanding the community, and if the crisis of identity in this period arose from the displacement of the myth of Dutch apparatuses as a "seamless organic continuum" then the nyai is ideally placed, to understand the ways in which alterity itself is constitutive of identity. Nyai Ontosoroh, unable to find a detour around the issue of imperial repression but determined to tell her story within the national signified—provides the inevitable conduit to the larger story that encompasses the nascent nation. By positing gender as a site for representing and reconstructing new identities, the nyai establishes that condition of existence which previously had been muted, elided or unrepresented/unrepresentable in dominant discourse and its situations of production.
But we are indeed confronted with some very important caveats: how does one read an oppositional discourse that derives its authority and identity from the institution of empire and imperial praxis? How does one deal with the native woman of empire and explain or rationalize female subjectivity and institutional function beyond male discourse or desire? Is the nyai merely an intercessor of a social relation in which she is deployed as mediator of racial anxieties or objects of fantasies? Can a terrible undertaking such as imperialism also function as the avenue for new subjectivities or lead to a reconfiguration of gender roles?
Perhaps the important figure of nyai Ontosoroh represents itself as both the absolute form of alterity encountered in masculinist discourse, (a stereotype defined by Bhabha as the fetishized and fixed "form of difference"), and a free agent staging its consciousness of freedom within the limits imposed by imperialism, fixed yet constantly shifting.
The Vietnamese Catholics During the War of Independence (1945–1954) Between the Colonial Reconquest and the Communist Resistance
Thi Liên Tran, Institute Etudes Politiques de Paris
The national feeling of the Vietnamese Catholics became all the more violent in 1945 as it had been denied before; so that some of the clergy didn’t hesitate to launch straight into political and military action. This need of political involvement in the fight for independence could be explained by the desire to put an end to the accusation of "traitors to their homeland" (they were accused to be at the origin of the French conquest). The Catholics soon faced a dilemma: the keenest fighters for independence were communists and their project of society was far from their aspirations. Between the minority that chose to rally the Viet Minh, and the one that collaborated with the French, a major trend rose, refusing both the French reconquest and the communist hegemony in the resistance to the French.
From 1945 to 1949, the theme of the fight for independence prevailed, then from 1950 to 1954, the theme of fight against communism took over, without suppressing the nationalist ideas. The experience of living under Viet Minh power and international events (communist China, Korean War) caused a progressive rallying of the Catholics to the Bao Dai’s solution. Far from raising enthusiasm (the Bao Dai government was completely independent from the French), this alternative was the only one left. It was not by chance that the Catholic politician Ngo Dinh Diem came out at the Conference at Geneva, as the nationalist alternative in South Vietnam, to face the communist regime in the North.
Crime and Punishment in Mid-18th-Century Batavia: Slavery and Forced Labour under the Dutch East India Company (VOC)
Kerry Ward, University of Michigan
This paper is based on an analysis of the VOC criminal records of mid-18th century Batavia. Focusing on crime and punishment leading to the creation of a forced labor pool for the VOC, this paper brings into sharper focus categories of bondage in the urban center of the VOC Asian empire. A detailed study of crimes brought to trial in Batavia demonstrates how people categorized as slave or free were treated before the law. It also reveals the interaction between the Batavia "underclasses"; the lowest ranks of the VOC shared social space with Chinese, free indigenes and slaves in ways unrecognized by existing histories of Batavia. A common punishment for crimes was a sentence of exile with hard labor in chains, often for life. I would suggest that categories of slavery and bondage in the VOC realm need re-evaluation in light of the VOC legal system. A focus on individual case studies adds greater nuance to the examination of the institutions and practices of 18th-century law in the VOC empire.
"To Counter the Terror of Uncertain Signs": Mythologizing Vietnam in Interiors
Jennifer Way, University of North Texas
How can we make sense of American art world involvement in and representations of Southeast Asia during the 1950s? One response involves reconstituting the meaning and significance representations of Vietnamese peoples held for the American State Department, press, and middle class.
In 1955, the State Department’s new International Cooperation Association hired industrial designer Russel Wright to tour Southeast Asia (November 1955–February 1956). The article Wright subsequently published in the art world’s Interiors magazine (August 1956) metonymically represented South Vietnam by emphasizing peoples who had moved there between 1954–55. The State Department and press considered their status problematic. They’d fled the Viet Minh but might be swayed to communism by southern guerrilla forces.
I argue that Wright’s article supports this view. Further, I demonstrate how especially the photographs diffuse anxiety about the refugees’ vulnerability to ways of life Americans perceived to threaten their (and a global) political economy and middle-class lifestyle. Using semiotic analyses Roland Barthes applied to the mass media during this period, I discuss how the refugees function not only as an "uncertain sign" in the photographs in Wright’s article, but also as "mythology." I conclude that the peoples Wright deems "The Refugee Problem" thus appear ready for salvage, and I show how Wright’s article accommodates their visual representations to American discourses of work. As fears about communism spreading in Southeast Asia increased, the American art world maintained the hegemony of some American priorities.
Colonialsim and the Collaborationist Agenda: Pham Quynh, France, and the Invention of a Neo-Confucian Vietnam
Sarah Womack, University of Michigan
Considered by many Vietnamese revolutionaries (and Western historians) to be the arch-collaborator of the colonial period, Pham Quynh—translator, author, editor, philologist, minister, and "traditional" conservative—was an extraordinary figure who nonetheless typifies many aspects of the complex and largely overlooked category of indigenous collaborators with colonial regimes. Although viewed as traitor and lackey to French colonial ambition, Pham Quynh saw himself as a patriot, a visionary, and a social revolutionary. Arguing that we must see collaboration as inside an actor’s agenda, this paper is a preliminary analysis of Pham Quynh’s articulation of his own project within the context of the French colonial state in Vietnam.
My study is founded on the premise that "collaboration" and "collaborators" can offer students of colonial history subjects and frameworks of analysis that are lacking in the simple colonizer/colonized dichotomy. Collaboration, if seen as the active engagement with colonial policy and administration by indigenous agents, can also destabilize the illusion of overwhelming and unitary power of colonial regimes. It opens a space for the consideration of the possibilities of a colonial hegemonic project by focusing not only on what sort of consent was manufactured among "native colonialists" and by whom, but on a corresponding effort by indigenous agents towards the state itself. The new possibilities and realities created by the colonial state were a laboratory for both colonizers and colonized, and in that context of experimentation there is much to be learned about visions of the colonial and post-colonial future.