Sparse, sporadic, unspectacular: parahistory and Afro-Southeast Asian affinities
Carlos Quijon, Jr., Serubiri Moses and Simon Soon
16 May 2021
12pm—1.45pm (SGT)
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Writing in 1965 about the possible affinities between Africa and Southeast Asia, political scientist Fred von der Mehden remarks that the relations between the two regions “remain sparse, sporadic, and unspectacular.” While this remark might translate to a disavowal of obtaining historical affinities between Africa and Southeast Asia, the panel is interested in discerning in this annotation a condition of historical imagination that eludes conventional approaches of looking at and writing about this affinity. In articulating a history that is sparse, sporadic, and unspectacular, the panel seeks to employ methodologies and materials that instead of consolidating a global and hegemonic history of relations between the two regions, annotate zones of contact or spheres of influence that play out compelling coordinates and narratives of affinity or implication. Looking at histories of diplomatic travel and technologies of citation and assemblage, the panel explores the potential of a parahistorical approach of appreciating transregional affinities where historical narratives emerge from events and objects that exist beside or alongside “official” or hegemonic historical accounts. Informed by theoretical accounts of the “paratext,” textual apparatuses that annotate textual bodies, or what literary theorist Gerard Genette considers as “a threshold, or—a ‘vestibule’ that offers the world at large the possibility of stepping inside and the outside, a zone without any hard and fast boundary on either the inward side (turned toward the text) or the outward side (turned toward the world’s discourse about the text), an edge,” the panel sets out to write a history of Afro-Southeast Asia edgewise of the hegemonic historical accounts.
Diplomatic excursions, spheres of influence
by Carlos Quijon, Jr.
This excursion considers diplomatic travel as a framework in prospecting historical coordinates of Southeast Asia regionalism and its place in Afro-Asia imaginaries in the 1960s. The presentation maps out the path of two trips that were undertaken in 1963 and 1964: (1) Philippine President Diosdado Macapagal’s trip to the African continent after attending the wake of US President John F Kennedy in December 1963 and (2) US Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s mission to the Far East in January 1964. In tracing the trajectories of these two diplomatic trips, the presentation foregrounds the complexity of diplomatic negotiations and neocolonial entanglements that structure the period’s particular articulation of Southeast Asia regionalism inflected by a pan-Malayan worldview through Maphilindo, a confederation between Malaya, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Each trip’s itinerary disclose motivations of “common interests” and the expanding and maintaining “spheres of influence,” two tropes that configure the Cold War world order in Southeast Asia.
Trade Routes: Footnotes and Citations
by Serubiri Moses
Okwui Enwezor’s curatorial thesis for the Second Johannesburg biennial lay in an examination and interrogation of the nation and citizenship. His research and collaboration with curators such as Hou Hanru, Kellie Jones and Gerardo Mosquera, reveals an expanded field of practice (less one defined by Rosalind Krauss in her thesis on public sculpture, and one defined by global South solidarities in art) that catalyses the expansiveness of art in the biennial context. In this paper, I aim to unpack Enwezor’s framing of the exhibition around what he called “new temporalities.” While it is easy to fall into the trap of the post-national and post-racial discourses when faced with post-1990 biennials and so-called “identity politics,” I want instead to fall back on some of the historical markers that enabled Enwezor’s theorization of “new temporalities.” By disengaging briefly from a thesis of modernity that is rested on forms of national and urban development in dialogue with identitarian struggle, I hope to further clarify the “Alternative Currents” that led Enwezor to be optimistic about “trade routes”–along the Indian Ocean trade–joining expansive geographies.
Assembling Distraction: Memory Work on Africa
by Simon Soon
This presentation turns to the bricolage procedure of poor theory, to repair and mend a picture of the future that is also a vision of the past. I will begin by assembling a personal history of distractions in the belief that historical consciousness can emerge out of a memory practice. Such a practice would wrest meaning and significance out of a range of moments made up of distractions through which Africa as imaginary, fantasy, theory, method, might’ve fleetingly brushed against our lives.
Here, I suggest we could cultivate a citational practice that prioritises distraction as a productive way to think alongside Africa. Such a practice might offer new conceptual and narrative thrusts for rethinking the horizons of the Southeast. In doing so, black-faced minstrel chorus, Vodou verver, Sufi shrines, black atlantic mandingan, Zulu costumed jinriksha pullers can serve as parahistorical and the paratextual sigils charged with the transformative power of consolation and prophecy, to liberate us from restraining burden of representation, as well as bestow on us the promise of vision and idea.
About the Panelist
Carlos Quijon, Jr. is an art historian, critic, and curator based in Manila. He was a fellow of the research platform Modern Art Histories in and across Africa, South and Southeast Asia (MAHASSA), convened by the Asia Art Archive, Dhaka Art Summit, and the Institute of Comparative Modernities at Cornell University. He writes exhibition reviews for Artforum among other publications and his research was most recently published in the book From a History of Exhibitions Towards a Future of Exhibition-Making (Sternberg Press, 2019)