Reports on 2024 AAS-in-Asia Yogyakarta (1)

Shigeto Sonoda

Following on from the last year, I attended 2024 AAS-in-Asia held in Gadjah Mada University, Yogyakarta in Indonesia, from 9^th to 11^th of July because I received invitation to serve as a discussant in a session organized by two Chinese female young scholars on critical review of socialist ideologies in contemporary China. By utilizing the opportunity to attend seven sessions in total, I want to make some comments on my observation of this year’s meetings.

First of all, I was impressed by the fact that a larger number of sessions on Southeast Asian studies, especially Indonesia studies, were prepared than one year ago in Daegu in South Korea. It must be mostly due to a geographical reason, but it was really a nice opportunity to listen to local researchers’ presentation in Indonesia which are not well-heard in East Asia.

Above all, the session The Study of Indonesia in Asia was impressive in the sense that it symbolizes “Asianization of Asian studies.” The contents of presentation and discussion, however, suggested that the coming age of “Asianization of Asian studies” seems a bit early to claim considering the fact that current status of Indonesian studies in Asia (namely China, Malaysia and Singapore) cannot be called “well-developed.”  Scholars from China and Malysia pointed out that the coverage of Indonesian studies is partial, mostly concentrating on the analysis of Chinese communities in Indonesia, while scholars from Singapore claimed that Indonesia studies in Singapore are at the mercy of political judgement by the government, which hindered sound and comprehensive development of Indonesian studies in Singapore. An Indonesian Ph.D. student in Japan reported history and characteristics of Indonesian studies in Japan, which showed different pattern from other parts of Asia; Japanese scholars are mostly using Japanese language, covering a variety of areas of research including IR which the reporter majors in. Here, paradoxically, I could confirm my previous observation in Dague that “Asian studies in Asia are so different   from each other due to locally different trajectories of development.”

Secondly, many presentations in the conference were made by the researchers who are “protected” by the language they use in their daily academic activities. Those who are doing Japan studies in Indonesia, for example, assume that the ordinary audience are not familiar with Japan, which will guide their way of presentation as well as the selection of the topics they will pick up. Their contents might be new and fascinating for Indonesian, but they are not so much so for the Japanese scholars who are more familiar with the phenomena that the Indonesian researcher is exploring. The same can be said to the case of Japanese scholars on China studies, Chinese scholars on Korean studies, and so on. In order to attract more broad audience and readers, I believe, scholars on Asian studies have to overcome language barriers by, for example, taking a comparative approach.

Thirdly and finally, it was quite meaningful for the organizers to set up a session to have a focus on non-English speaking local scholars’ expertise to identify those whose scholarly activities should be more well recognized by English speaking researchers. In a session this year, Prof. Takeshi Hamashita, who used to be a director of our institute (IASA), and his scholarly works on global history have been discussed by a variety of scholars, which I believe is a wonderful attempt. I personally want to hear more about the locally created concepts and theories on Asian studies in Asia in the near future.

 

 

Reports on 2024 AAS-in-Asia Yogyakarta (2)

Jiyoon Kim

I would like to continue my observation from the perspective of locality on the conference site, which I think is the foreground element that identifies the uniqueness of AAS-in-Asia. Keynote and film screening sessions might be centered to figure out such conference identity varied each year, so I chose an efficient route to experience the locality of Yogyakarta and Indonesia by prioritizing these two sessions. These sessions would show what the organizers decided to curate as a showcase of historical and contemporary issues of Indonesia for scholars of Asian Studies to pay attention to.

The Keynote Address, “Revisiting Freedom Vs Harmony Debate: From Asian Values to Decolonization,” was delivered by Dr. Zainal Abidin Bagir, a scholar of interreligious studies based at the Graduate School of Universitas Gadjah Mada (UGM). Touching upon the cases of religious harmony law versus religious freedom law in Indonesia, the speaker argued that both “harmony” and “freedom” are ambivalent ideologies influenced by the western hegemonic idea on freedom and emphasis on “Asian values.” To resituate both ideas of “freedom” and “harmony,” he suggested revisiting discourses of human rights, i.e. “decolonization of human rights,” built upon the tension between universalism and particularism, as well as the distinction between hegemonic and counter hegemonic. He emphasized that bringing human rights in practice back into focus and global conversation would be the methods for achieving it.

In the meantime, Film Screening and Discussion: “Documenting Differences, Voicing Hopes” was a powerful and impressive session that addressed the history and contemporary society of “Java” in particular. Two films, Annah La Javanaise (Annah the Javanese Girl, 2020, 6 mins) and Pada Suatu Hari Nanti (Someday, 2021, 30 mins), were shown, followed by the commentary and a Q&A session with the director, producer, film critic, and audience. Annah the Javanese Girl was a short but powerful animation film addressing human trafficking and colonial exploitation of a local Javanese girl sold to a European painter by her family in the late 19^th century. The film is half-fictional and half-historical in that Annah’s journey was reimagined, yet the painting of a Javanese girl remains as an art piece of Paul Gauguin. It might be a story of the 19^th century, but it is an ongoing issue in the sense that the painting and reputation of the painter continue, even though the local history remains unknown under the name of great art.

On the other hand, Pada Suatu Hari Nanti (Someday) was a documentary film depicting the daily lives of Farrah, a transwoman living with both AIDS/HIV and a physical disability. This 30-minute documentary touches on many topics, including queerness, disability, disease, discrimination, violence, religion, life cycles, community, education, and care, which this intersectional subject faces in her daily struggles and experiences. The director, Tonny Trimarsanto, has continued to film queer documentaries in West Java with themes of hidden identities (migration from big city to village), community, transgender infertility, and trans individuals with disability and the topic of care. According to him, documentary filmmaking is deemed advocacy for marginalized groups in Indonesia, and based on that tradition, he tries to keep making documentary films “when the issue is not finished in this country (Indonesia).”

These two films are rooted in the colonial history of Java Island and the tough lives of marginalized groups in contemporary West Java. The former film calls attention to the entangled lives of colonized and colonizing subjects that are still relevant to today’s cultural experiences, such as the art appreciation of European paintings based on the orientalist gaze on so-called indigenous women of Asia. Meanwhile, the latter film brings the question of care and community beyond discrimination and stigma by depicting a strong transwoman who actively intervenes in the lives of other transwomen in the region for their better and safe lives. Not only do these films critically illuminate the historical and contemporary issues of Java, but they also highlight how marginalized and precarious people faced their destinies, which they did not choose yet tried to restore their own dignity.

If combined, these two emblematic sessions, solely from my viewpoint, the keywords of locality that represent this year’s AAS-in-Asia in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, can be summarized as religious diversity, colonial history, and intersectional minority. As seen from the Keynote and film screening sessions, local histories, yet entangled global histories, seem to be the essence of AAS-in-Asia, held in varied Asian countries. I would interpret two films as presenting scenes of “human rights in practice,” facing daily discrimination based on gender norms, social and religious norms for the Farrah and her friends, and the recovery of freedom and dignity of an unknown girl who was hardly recognized under the tacit rules and ongoing ignorance of the power relations behind great art.

These two sessions kept me thinking about the meaning of “-in-Asia” in AAS-in-Asia, and the locality as embedded in the identity of the conference itself. Such continuous learning of locality and the process of learning about other Asias seems to be realized by physical presence at the conference, which might connect with the function of academic conferences. I continued a couple of days’ field trip in Jakarta by visiting local museums and historic sites and could also see some scholars from the sessions I attended. Similar to my experience in Daegu in 2023, I felt such field trips to local sites might fulfill this academic expedition beyond solely attending the conference and networking, by providing chances to discover or acknowledge the history and lived experiences of other Asian societies, cities, and people despite the short period of stay. “Academic tourism” is often criticized as hopping from city to city by the intellectual class who is affordable and qualified to move, but the mobility of academic people would have a positive function to educate oneself, especially when identifying oneself as a scholar in the field of Asian studies. The chance of “doing global Asian studies” not only by exploring the glocality of a hosting society, a broad range of topics, and varied regional focuses at the conference site but also by visiting local sites is a unique value of participating in AAS-in-Asia that I hope to continue to experience.