June 27, 2024

Tracing Authoritarianism: Linking Southeast Asia and Southeast Asian America Through Archives, Language, and Pedagogy

Influenced by social justice movements, critical archival studies seek to question power differentials assumed in frameworks of archival collecting and access, and center curatorial responsibilities in communities who may re-interpret, re-define and use materials for community-based public memory projects. For example, when official colonial archival collections are made more accessible via online or other methods, populations have the opportunity to appropriate and reinterpret them. Using their own perspectives and vocabularies, they are adding layers of new meaning that speak to the personal experiences of communities whose voices are otherwise absent from official records.

Critical archival studies scholars often explore ethical methodologies addressing both the silences and multiplicity of voices in collections, sometimes adding context to records, sometimes refraining from assuming a context that might be contested within communities of memory, and often amending records to reflect changing language practices and sensitivities. Community archiving projects have emerged as a critical counterbalance to official records in understanding personal histories of displacement and loss.

Over the past 4 years, the UW Libraries Southeast Asian Studies Head, Judith Henchy, has been co-PI of a Luce Foundation-funded program aimed at developing new methods to bring Southeast Asian Studies and Southeast Asian American Studies into dialogue through consideration of histories of colonialism, war and trauma. The project recognizes the growing influence of critical refugee studies within the field of Asian American studies, bringing into closer focus the roles of empire, race and violence in Southeast Asia in the creation of Southeast Asian American identities. This evolution in Asian American Studies is paralleled by new critiques of archival practices, which also recognize the unequal and racial power relations reflected in archives, and whose stories are represented there. 

One of the primary components of the project, “Tracing Authoritarianism: Linking Southeast Asia and Southeast Asian America Through Archives, Language, and Pedagogy,” focusses on challenging and re-interpreting the archival collections on which knowledge creation in both fields of study has depended. The project explored methods to rethink collections by centering Southeast Asian and Southeast Asian American identities, connecting with students whose families have connections to the region, and encouraging discussion of how archives can be used as a means of reclamation for communities whose histories have been overlooked.

The Libraries’ role has involved working closely with UW faculty in History, Anthropology and UW Bothell, as well as overseas partners, to consider the ethical issues around collection and representation of museum and archival artifacts and their impacts on divergent community memory-scapes.

During the life of the grant, these dynamics were explored in a workshop at UC Riverside, and two archives conferences: one held at the Bophana Audiovisual Resource Center in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and another at University of Washington, in Seattle. The Seattle conference, “Contaminating Archives: Documenting Power and Resistance in Southeast Asia and Southeast Asian America” in February 2024, brought together keynote speakers Michelle Caswell and Ricky Punzalan , founders of the field of Critical Archival Studies, Chuck Crisanto, the Executive Director of the Human Rights Violations Victims’ Memorial Committee in the Philippines, and Pheaktra Song, the Director of the Toul Sleng Genocide Museum Archive in Cambodia, and a number of scholars working in different disciplines from around the world. Their perspectives explored themes of decentering the official archive, empowering community voices and how archives of violence present ethical questions of privacy, retention and access as historical records.

“The Seattle conference was a highlight of the project for me, bringing together all the themes of the grant, says Henchy. “The archives of violence that were discussed, the self-reported and the forced confession, both of which currently serve as evidence in courts of law, present different but equally challenging ethical questions of privacy, retention and access as historical records.”

Feedback from the Seattle conference underscored the problematic dynamic that theoretical work on the power relations of the archive rarely suggests practical ways of addressing these imbalances. As one participant noted, “Many communities in the Southeast Asian diaspora are positively hungry for connections to the past, but I feel that historians have still not managed to bridge the gap between archival theory/praxis and popular representations and desires to know the past. We are good at criticizing ideological and politicized uses/abuses of the past, but how do we educate without condescending?” 

In addition to the conferences, the program created a fellowship to increase graduate student understanding of archival practice, giving them practical experience working with the archives, introducing them to the critical themes of the project, and helping to facilitate more dialog between archives practitioners and theoretical scholars. The Fellowship’s collections of focus were selected for their collaborative potential with local communities, and research institutions in Southeast Asia. Four fellows were funded, resulting in a redescription project with the Burke Museum, an online exhibit of ethnographic materials, and a proposed cartoon book.

 

Image: A portion of an illustration from Archives Fellow Dimas Ramadhan’s presentation: “Tristuti Rachmadi’s Shadow Play Manuscripts as Cold War Archives.” Using an unpublished collection of wayang manuscripts, Dimas shows how dissident and imprisoned wayang puppet master Tristutu Rachmadi used traditional epic themes as allegory for the political violence of the Indonesian military regime that was in power from 1965–1998. He hopes to tell this story in Indonesian and English translation through cartoons. See full illustration.

Image: Archives Fellow Caroline Bacey worked with materials from the Alaska Yukon Exposition of 1909 in various museums and archives around Seattle. She was particularly interested in the artifacts created by the visiting performers from Ifugao who were brought over for the popular “Igorot Village” installation. She found that some of these artifacts, including the bulul figures depicted here and created for sale at the exposition, had been misrepresented as genuine sacred objects in museum inventories.

Projects like these establish UW and the studies of Southeast Asia and its diaspora communities as a model for reclaiming archival collections. 

“We anticipate that at least one publication will result from our workshops, establishing the studies of Southeast Asia and its diaspora communities as a model for considering archival collections as transglobal resources that can be refigured in didactic and artistic projects that redress the violence of their creation,”  says Henchy.

The origin of this project dates back to 2005 when the UW SE Asian Studies Center received a major grant from the Ford Foundation under the auspices of its Difficult Dialogs program. The UW grant focused on the difficulties of teaching the violent histories of SE Asia to refugee and diaspora SE Asian communities of students whose families are impacted by that violence. At the time, Henchy was already working on a collaborative UW faculty volume  Knowing Southeast Asian Subjects, a work that looked at the colonial assumptions of scholarship on the region. Henchy authored the chapter “Disciplining Knowledge: Representing Resources for Southeast Asian Studies in the Libraries of the U.S. Academy.” Since then Henchy has continued to pursue similar projects related to Critical Archival Studies.

Looking back at the history of this and related projects, Henchy reflects on the impact of this collective study and work by all partners,

“Many of the principles of the project are embedded in SE Asian Studies faculty practice. The Southeast Asian Studies Center was renamed the Center for Southeast Asia and its Diasporas in 2022 to reflect our focus on foregrounding pedagogical parallels in the curriculum. Some of our work with archives has now become mainstream in contemporary critical thinking about provenance and description of collections, which is meaningful to me, personally.”   

Acknowledgements from Judith Henchy

“My primary collaborator on the conferences and fellowships has been Jenna Grant, a scholar of Cambodia in the Anthropology Department. Other faculty involved in the project are: co-PI Celia Lowe, Anthropology, and Director, Center for Southeast Asia and its Diasporas, Vicente Rafael in History, Linh Nguyen in American Ethnic Studies and Raissa Desmet at UW Bothell. Center Managing Director, Michael Walstrom, has been critical in the logistics of all our programming. 

In the Libraries we are greatly indebted to the work of our former film archivist, Hannah Palin, and to Andrew Weaver, for their work processing and beginning the digitization of the Cowell collection. The late Nicolette Bromberg and Mariam Fakouri were critical in negotiating rights issues around Elizabeth Becker’s material, and I am grateful for the recent work of Benjamin Riesenberg, the Metadata Implementation Group, and my Luce-funded SE Asian Studies librarian trainee, Cari Coe, for preparing that collection for ingest into CONTENT-DM.” 

Explore Collections

“…the interview with Pol Pot included in the collection, is the inspiration for French-Khmer filmmaker Rithy Panh’s latest film “Rendez-vous avec Pol Pot” that just premiered at Cannes”

Age of the Kampuchea Picture: Rare Witness: A Discussion –  The photographs and notes from journalist Elizabeth Becker’s trip to Pol Pot’s Democratic Kampuchea in 1978 were featured in a 2017 Libraries installation that won an award from the Center for Research Libraries. Becker’s trip, and the interview with Pol Pot that is included in the collection, is the inspiration for French-Khmer filmmaker Rithy Panh’s latest film “Rendez-vous avec Pol Pot” that just premiered at Cannes.

Fifty Years of Opium and Conflict in the Shan State of Burma: A Visual Retrospective: Event Details  British filmmaker Adrian Cowell’s extensive film archive from his multiple television series on the drug and ethnic wars in Burma’s Shan State spanning from the 1960s to 1990s was the subject of a Libraries conference in 2015. Cowell’s collection includes extraordinarily rare political and ethnographic footage from Shan State filmed by award-winning cinematographer Chris Menges, from their trips there in 1966 and from the 18 months they spent trapped behind enemy lines in 1974-5. Before the Feb 2021 coup, young filmmakers there were interested in using the historical footage in documentary work to promote what had been successful moves towards peace and reconciliation with the ethnic border states

Learn More

• Knowing Southeast Asian Subjects
• The Collector and the Collected: Decolonizing Area Studies Librarianship
  • Tracing a cosmopolitan subject: dislocation and haunting in the Southeast Asian archive (Chapter by Judith Henchy)
• Southeast Asia Luce Foundation Archives Projects: Libraries Luce Foundation Projects
• Connecting Southeast Asian community members to their heritage through collections