Gatty Lecture, Mariam Lam, "Undercurrents: Southeast Asian Transnational and Diasporic Culture"

Mariam Lam, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Southeast Asian Studies and Associate Vice Chancellor for Diversity and Inclusion (CDO), University of California, Riverside

Undercurrents: Southeast Asian Transnational and Diasporic Culture

The 2015 Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Society Conference in Surabaya, Indonesia (August 7-9), co-hosted by the University of Indonesia and Airlangga University featured opening keynote speaker Abidin Kusno, University of British Columbia, Canada, and closing keynote speaker Melani Budianta, University of Indonesia, both expounding and expanding upon the conference theme of “Undercurrents: Unearthing Hidden Social and Discursive Practices.” The conference aimed at bringing the undercurrents into the surface, examining how they intersect with, subvert, or mold formal structures, hoping to open up new frontiers of inquiries in the inter-Asia cultural studies scholarship.  This presentation deploys the undercurrents of Southeast Asian history and historiography- the disruptions, interruptions, eruptions of the archive, or what I have elsewhere described as archival trauma- to continue my conceptualization of minor regionalisms.  The talk and project from which it comes assert the buried, subterranean, transoceanic, island cultures, and subcultures that need to work across genres, art and cultural forms, geopolitical spaces, and across traditional academic disciplinary policing and field formation boundaries toward more provocative and transgressive aesthetic futures.

Co-sponsored by Asian Studies and Comparative Literature.

Lunch will be provided.