{"id":580,"date":"2022-02-07T17:55:28","date_gmt":"2022-02-07T09:55:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/caarchives.org\/?p=580"},"modified":"2022-02-07T18:12:07","modified_gmt":"2022-02-07T10:12:07","slug":"southeast-asia-2021-introduction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/caarchives.org\/southeast-asia-2021-introduction\/","title":{"rendered":"Introduction | Vincenz Serrano"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\u3010<\/strong>by<\/em> Vincenz Serrano, Dec. 2021\u3011<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2019, Irina Dumitrescu and Bruce Holsinger co-edited \u201cIn Brief,\u201d a special issue on brevity published in New Literary History<\/em>. Dumitrescu and Holsinger point out that although short forms such the tweet, GIF, meme, and emoticon seem ubiquitous in our present moment, the propensity for brevity has had a long history: fables, aphorisms, epigrams, haiku dialogues, and riddles have been around for centuries (vi-vii). Despite the short shrift short forms typically get\u2014i.e., tweets are misconstrued as illustrative of the \u201cquotidian smallness of modern distraction,\u201d memes are seen, often unfairly, as \u201csymptom[s] of fast living and short attention spans\u201d (i)\u2014Dumitrescu and Holsinger maintain the capacity of brevity-informed texts for \u201cconcentrated meaning, narrative technique, and artful deployment of gaps\u201d (viii). Put differently, short forms\u2014which are informed by brevity as an aesthetic and analytic resource\u2014engage with topics as cogently and substantively as their longer counterparts, without shortchanging their diverse publics and counterpublics of key features such as stylistic flair, tonal sophistication, political charge, and ethical orientation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This special issue of Critical Asia Archives: Events and Theories<\/em>\u2014\u201cShort Notice: Keywords for Our Moment\u201d\u2014takes its cue from \u201cIn Brief\u201d and gathers eight essays from South Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines that explore a literary, cultural, or theoretical text, phenomenon, situation, or condition that is of interest in Asia and to the wider world. Invited contributors were free to choose their topics, as long as they kept within the constraints of a one-word title and limit of approximately 1,000 words. In this sense, the authors were able to make the condition of constraint a generative one: the sense of a limit\u2014the pressure of compression\u2014generated essays that were crisp, substantive, thought-provoking, and timely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elmo Gonzaga\u2019s \u201cArchipelago\u201d explores the term from a number of fronts: its conceptual provenance, how the term denotes kinds of relationships between islands and continents, and the capacity of the term to trouble national boundaries, particularly in our current historical moment of climate change and rising geopolitical tensions. For Gonzaga, the \u201ctransboundary ethos\u201d of the archipelagic, however \u201celusive,\u201d is still worth pursuing: one response to \u201cthe aggression and violence of ethnocentrism and provincialism\u201d is precisely \u201cthe imagination and cultivation of a transboundary commons.\u201d Giselle Garcia\u2019s \u201cDramaturgy\u201d looks at dramaturgic practices from the viewpoint of cartography: on the one hand, finding affiliations between dramaturgy and mapping might reveal colonial mechanisms that are inscribed in cartographic practices, a \u201ccolonial fetish for discovery,\u201d dramaturgy as a \u201ccase of my own double consciousness.\u201d On the other hand, Garcia points out that dramaturgy-as-mapping can also resist colonial machinations: \u201cdramaturgical mapping as a set of cultural practices that focus on contemporary contexts that shape global storytelling.\u201d \u201cSanam \/ Field \/ \u0e2a\u0e19\u0e32\u0e21\u201d by the collective The Commoner\u2019s Archive of Feelings traces the historical origins, affective resonances, and political implications of sanam. The collective focuses on Sanam Luang, a famous field in Bangkok, and looks at how the use of the space changed since its establishment around 1782: Sanam Luang throughout various points in Thailand\u2019s history had been used as a space for royal cremations, festivals, markets, leisure activities, and more importantly, a venue for public dissent. More expansively, for the collective, the notion of sanam can also be seen figuratively: their publication aims to change the fields of meaning, particularly with the interests of ordinary citizen in mind. Virgilio A. Rivas\u2019s \u201cNotharctus\u201d examines in a series of brief yet interrelated fragments a diverse set of concerns, seen from a longue duree perspective: climate change, economic disparities, political formations, plants, biotic refuse, among other facets of the \u201cevolving story\u201d of Asia. In a style that engages with both the world-historical (Asia as incorporated into a world-system) and the speculative (\u201cNotharctus\u201d references J.G. Ballard\u2019s The Unlimited Dream Company<\/em>), Rivas considers a possible future: \u201cin Asia, all skies have become horizontal.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kiyeol Kim, in \u201cAuthenticity,\u201d identifies expressive individualism as one possible, though problematic, characteristic of authenticity: we would like, it seems, to be \u201ctrue to oneself,\u201d to have no contradiction between \u201cinward feeling and outward appearance\u201d\u2014a response to a present-day context marked by disinformation, spectacle, and the reproducibility of commodities. That said, for Kim, \u201ca paradox structures contemporary desires for authenticity\u201d: in our search for the good life, we might be unwittingly “enabl[ing] powerful institutions to profit from our desires.\u201d Jeremy De Chavez\u2019s \u201cHappiness\u201d places happiness alongside temporality, and by so doing, reveals distinct yet interrelated facets of happiness: the fractional condition of happiness, the anticipation of happiness as world building, the thwarting of happiness, and, happiness seen from the vantage point of redemption: in De Chavez\u2019s terms, \u201ca way to liberate ourselves from the demand to be happy and to make others happy.\u201d Simon Soon\u2019s \u201cSight\u201d reflects on wedding photographs published in the Malayan newspaper Tamil Murasu around 1936. Beyond the personal dimension evoked by the photographs, Soon underscores their \u201cseldom discussed political power\u201d: the photographs became a means by which Tamil culture asserted itself in Malaya in the early to mid-twentieth century. Moreover, Soon\u2019s essay reminds the present-day viewers of the photographs of the capacity of images to \u201cshape and to intervene into our reality.\u201d Anjeline de Dios\u2019s \u201cLivestream\u201d engages with livestreaming, with its attendant prospects and limitations, as a way of initiating and sustaining community. Reflecting on her own activities done on various platforms, as well as Elsa Jocson\u2019s Zoo<\/em> (2020), de Dios underscores the ambivalences of connecting with each other in digital spaces: the \u201cstrange exhaustion\u201d the accompanies the \u201cconstricted and interminable intimacy of mutual beholding.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By way of closing: in The Arcades Project<\/em>\u2014itself a collection, unfinished, of fragments\u2014Walter Benjamin distinguishes between the knowledge and thinking process that informs it vis-a-vis the text as the manifestation of one\u2019s thinking. \u201cKnowledge comes only in lightning flashes,\u201d Benjamin writes. \u201cThe text is the long roll of thunder that follows.\u201d Even if in the essays in this issue ofCritical Asia Archives: Events and Theories<\/em> the thunderclap of the text does not stretch too long, the illumination, though brief, is bright, and the storm of knowledge unsettles yet invigorates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\n

AUTHOR<\/strong>
Vincenz Serrano, Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n\n\n\n

WORKS CITED<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project<\/em>. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Belknap P \/ Harvard UP, 1999, p. 456.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dumitrescu, Irina, and Bruce Holsinger. \u201cIntroduction.\u201d New Literary History<\/em>, vol. 50, no. 3, 2019, pp. vii-x, doi.org\/10.1353\/nlh.2019.0019.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u3010by Vincenz Serrano, Dec. 2021\u3011 In 2019, Irina Dumitrescu and Bruce Holsinger co-edited \u201cIn Brief,\u201d a special issue on brevity published in New Literary History. 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