Critical Connections: Forum on Cultural Studies in Asia and Beyond
16 March 2012, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand

CONFERENCE KEYNOTE SCHOLAR AND GUEST SPEAKER

Assoc. Professor Adam KNEE                                (Nanyang Technological University)                                                                                    
email: <AdamKnee@ntu.edu.sg>

"The Place of Southeast Asia in Asian Cultural Studies"

Recent debates and discourses in the overlapping sub-fields of Asian cultural studies and Asian media studies have centered increasingly on the need for “de-Westernizaton” in their respective arenas, a shift conceptualized as comprising not only a self-conscious privileging of Asian subject matters and perspectives, but also, and significantly, as entailing a critical perspective upon dominant Western-originating methods of research and theoretical frameworks, in order to undo the marginalization of Asia.

While the proposed presentation does not deny that this has constituted a substantive and important shift, it will raise the concern that the sub-region of Southeast Asia has gotten short shrift within these discussions, which have been dominated largely by an East and North Asian perspective.  In effect, then, while combating their own marginalization within the dominant academic discourse, these arguments effect a new marginalization (or new marginalizations) in its stead, relegating Southeast Asia to the periphery as it purports to rescue it from such.  Given the real-world relationships between East Asian and Southeast Asian cultures, institutions, and economies, such a concern is not merely academic.
This presentation will approach the topic at hand initially through an analysis of how Southeast Asia has been figured (and/or has remained occluded) within some of these recent debates, looking in particular at a number of issues of the Asian Journal of Communication that have focused on the topic, as well as a number of important recent anthologies.  It will use this analysis to highlight the perils of a new kind of essentialism or chauvinism replacing the old (potentially replicating the problematic framework it seeks to destroy) and then pragmatically suggest ways such a theoretical and methodological impasse might be allayed (in particular by being open to conceptualize texts and contexts as multiply situated).