Asian American Studies

Highland Tales in the Heart of Borneo (2015) documents Indigenous oral histories and mythologies which span half a dozen Orang Asal communities across East Malaysia and Indonesia. In this article, I propose two interconnected readings of Highland Tales, demonstrating how the text is entwined with postcolonial capitalism and Malaysian multiculturalism. First, I argue that Highland Tales is a form of capitalist survivance that employs the very systems which exploit Indigenous peoples in order to celebrate Indigenous culture. Analyzing the form, production, and circulation of the text, I demonstrate how Highland Tales serves as a unique example of what Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor terms “survivance” – Indigenous “stories that mediate and undermine the literature of dominance” (Manifest Manners, 12). In Highland Tales, capitalist survivance is both transindigenous and transnational, employing a strategic partnership with state ecotourism. Second, I suggests that Highland Tales functions as a critique of state multiculturalism and postcolonial capitalism. The government persistently markets Malaysia as a uniquely diverse nation where racial harmony is bolstered by rapid development. Postcolonial capitalism in Malaysia is thus structured according to a narrative of multiculturalism and modernization which, as I illustrate, relies on the exploitation of Indigenous peoples, lands, and resources. Employing the tools of postcolonial capitalism, Highland Tales disrupts narratives of racial harmony and development by amplifying Orang Asal narratives and advancing Indigenous cultural and economic interests.

In this article, I focus on a 2012 performance by Jo Kukathas titled "The 1Malaysia Virus." In the role of Ribena Berry, an ex–beauty queen of mixed Chinese and Indian heritage, Kukathas delivers an unflinching diagnosis of the effects of Malaysian multiculturalism on national politics and culture. Adopting the language of viral disease and metaphors of sickness, she details the state’s attempts to control Malaysian identity, illuminating the failures of Najib’s 1Malaysia campaign and of Malaysian multicul- turalism more broadly. I read The 1Malaysia Virus as an example of what Diana Taylor terms “the repertoire,” a performance that “en- acts embodied memory.” As Ribena Berry, Kukathas revives memories of political corruption, cultural decay, and racial divisions, reinscribing these histories in the national consciousness. This performance—itself a form of what this feature refers to as “memory work”—does not only enact embodied memory; it also archives, replays, and transforms the failures of the state on stage. As Taylor has noted, “the relationship be- tween the archive and the repertoire is not by definition antagonistic or oppositional” (36). Kukathas’s work, I argue, functions as a theatrical repertoire that archives national and cultural histories by enacting the characters, events, and perspectives that state multiculturalism conceals. Her performances suggest that memory—a refusal to comply with “state- sanctioned forgetting”—is central to an accurate diagnosis of the state of the nation and to political action.

Through both the actual performance and its online circulation, Kukathas requires her audience to “participate in the production and reproduction of knowledge by ‘being there,’ being a part of the transmis- sion” (Taylor 2003, 20). This act of participation is crucial to the archival dimensions of Kukathas’s performance. If this Field Trip feature asks, among other questions, how “‘memory work’ offer[s] alternative ways of seeing and experiencing justice, particularly when faced with profound belatedness and nonrecognition,” then one answer I propose here is that audiences’ participation in acts of collective memory makes possible the kinds of recognition denied by corrupt state systems. The creation, performance, and viewing of The 1Malyasia Virus engenders laughter and outrage precisely because it recognizes state dysfunction in both the past and present. As a result, the performance itself, as well as audiences’ engagement with it, disrupt state control and invigorate public debate about race, rights, and identity.

In this essay, I examine the rapid rise of Southeast Asian digital theatre in the early months of the pandemic. I trace how three theatre makers – Jo Kukathas (Malaysia), Sim Yan Yang (Singapore), and Kwin Bhichitkul (Thailand) – designed innovative forms of digital theatre that reconfigured geographic, cultural, and material boundaries. By providing an inside view into these theatre makers’ perspectives, shared during a Facebook Live roundtable hosted by Singapore’s WILD RICE Theatre, I illuminate the creative and critical approaches that guided the digital turn in Southeast Asian theatre. I demonstrate how these artists have circumvented established boundaries for performance and participation; crossed national boundaries in circulation and collaboration; and exceeded the boundaries of form and convention. In charting these new routes, these artists have intervened in urgent conversations surrounding race, identity, and belonging and they have brought global audiences along with them.

Call Her Ganda (dir. PJ Raval, 2018) chronicles the murder of transpinay Jennifer Laude by a US marine, and the subsequent court case. This essay draws from theories of necropolitics and hauntology, as well as the author's experience as a documentary producer of Call Her Ganda to raise critical questions about the representation of trans death, and to reflect on the possibilities and limitations of documentary as a trans activist tool. In doing so, the author lays out a looping logic as a parallel proposition to the vortical violences of colonization and transmisogny. This loop begins with the film's apparitional aesthetics, which rouse contemplation of the trans activisms that survive in the wake of trans death, and it continues with the film's activating address and impact campaign. I posit that such efforts can feed back into the communities from which a documentary has been extricated, working through/against the othering and exploitation endemic to documentary practice.

Queercore is a queer and punk transmedia movement that was instigated in 1980s Toronto via the pages of the underground fanzine ("zine") J.D.s. Authored by G.B. Jones and Bruce LaBruce, J.D.s. declared "civil war" on the punk and gay and lesbian mainstreams, consolidating a subculture of likeminded filmmakers, zinesters, musicans and performers situated in pointed opposition to the homophobia of mainline punk and the lifeless sexual politics and exclusionary tendencies of dominant gay and lesbian society. More than thirty years later, queercore and its troublemaking productions remain under the radar, but still culturally and politically resonant.

This book brings renewed attention to queercore, exploring the homology between queer theory/practice and punk theory/practice at the heart of queercore mediamaking. Through analysis of key queercore texts, this book also elucidates the tropes central to queercore’s subcultural distinction: unashamed sexual representation, confrontational politics and "shocking" embodiments, including those related to size, ability and gender variance. An exploration of a specific transmedia subculture grounded in archival research, ethnographic interviews, theoretical argumentation and close analysis, ultimately, Queercore proffers a provocative, and tangible, new answer to the long-debated question, "What does it mean to be queer?"

In 2011, the State of Hawai‘i completed a 630-meter conservation fence around Ka‘ena Point, with the stated purpose of keeping out predators to protect endangered wildlife. However, lawai‘a (fishers), who are Native Hawaiians and non-native locals who have fished at Ka‘ena for generations, see the fence differently: as part of a strategy of displacement to make the space amenable for tourism. Based on ethnographic research with lawai‘a, this article argues that indigenous paradigms premised on interdependent relationships between humans, the environment, and spiritual realms reveal significant capacity to shift the structures and logics of enclosure and displacement. As a result, security strategies contain the possibility of noncapitalist economies predicated on indigenous self-organization. Theorizing the compromise between local efforts for environmental self-determination and state imperatives to control land, this article introduces the concept “carceral conservationism:” a practice and ideology that partitions living space with the stated aim of resource protection while criminalizing existing populations in order to displace them. Regulating land-based relationships, carceral conservationism secures land to advance the twin projects of militarization/war and tourism/capitalist accumulation. In contrast, lawai‘a demonstrate the potentiality of place-based identity to forge broad alliances against carcerality and displacement on a global scale.

This article approaches "ea"--a Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) concept meaning life, breath, and sovereignty--as a vital mode of abolition ecologies, and proposes accompaniment as a methodology for mutual collaboration toward this endeavour. Research draws from ethnographic fieldwork on the Wai'anae Coast of O'ahu in Hawai'i, a predominantly Native Hawaiian community, and reflects upon the author's positionality on Wai'anae's insider-outsider borderlands. The argument is multifold: Carceral geographies inscribe racism by cleaving humans from the environment and each other, depriving life-giving resources from populations deemed a threat to a dominant socioenvironmental order. At the same time, abolition ecologies entail worldmaking predicated on the interdependence of all life forces, employing syncretic practices that join disparate struggles, people, and places to generate possibilities greater than the sum of its parts. Accompaniment works against racism's practices of criminalisation and containment while contributing to radical, syncretic placemaking as part of an expansive liberatory practice.

Hawai'i faces a crisis of homelessness due to the high cost of housing across the islands. Many without formal housing establish interdependent communities unsanctioned by property regimes and refer to themselves as "houseless" because intimate relations with place and expansive practices of care provide an adequate home. Attending to the experiences of Hawai'i's houseless, I unpack the meanings and practices of organized abandonment while proposing that some face structural neglect by "living with abandon." I argue that the rupturing of life-giving relations entwined with particular places serve as a foundation of organized abandonment. Devolution, state retrenchment, the intensification of land use for revenue-oriented development, and a punitive carceral state layer upon this foundational rupture to propel the continual abandonment of shared resources. This enables the ongoing circulation of capital through the environment. In response, people live with abandon by rejecting, or holding an ambivalent relationship with, aspirations to thrive within capitalism. Living with abandon is a form of creative improvisation that cultivates connections in the face of broken relations, yet remains defined by uncertainty and heartbreak. It both invokes the fullness of time and space and mourns the losses that have produced the tenuous present.

Maui residents are reckoning with tourism in the aftermath of the 2023 fires. Drawing from historical sources and popular media reports, we argue that beyond the island's strained relationship with the tourism industry, residents are contending with the slow emergency of plantation disaster capitalism. We draw from Naomi Klein and Kapua'ala sproat's (2023) concept of plantation disaster capitalism which identifies the plantation industry's domination of resources as the basis of tourism's untethered control of land and water on the island. these crisis-driven industries perpetuate dependence through ongoing cycles of accumulation by dispossession. the concept of 'slow emergencies' further accounts for how, while the Maui fires rapidly destroyed lives, over a century and a half of settler colonial, racial, and capitalist relationships had already restructured landscapes and livelihoods and set the stage for the 2023 disaster. in critically addressing calls for tourism's resurgence, this conceptual paper contributes to emerging scholarship on plantation disaster capitalism in tourism destinations.

"Asian settler colonialism" calls attention to the simultaneous denial of Kanaka 'Ōiwi dispossession and the celebration of descendants of Asian immigrants as industrious members of Hawai'i's multicultural middle class. While we acknowledge the importance of confronting settler colonialism, we argue that Asian settler colonialism reinscribes an inaccurate understanding of Hawai'i Asians today and over time. Tracing Hawai'i history from the Kingdom era to the present, we show that Hawai'i Asians are not inherently settlers by virtue of being non-natives living and working on Indigenous land; rather, many Hawai'i Asians hold a generational responsibility and political affinity within the nation of Hawai'i. Further, as Hawai'i's hierarchies have evolved amid economic restructuring, the privilege and power held by some Asians have been incorrectly attributed to the native-settler binary of settler colonialism while overlooking the interplay of race, class, global economic shifts, and political dynamics reinforced by military action.