Panel 5: Gender and Nation in Southeast Asian Literature

Chair: Taylor Easum, Indiana State University

Panelists

Jennifer Goodlander, Indiana University Bloomington, “Home/Indonesia/Women: Travel and Identity in Pulang by Leila S. Chudori”

Narratives and experiences of travel capture the imagination and provide a vital contribution to world-making since the last few centuries. Stories of travel map fact and fiction, experience and imagination, knowable and unknowable, strange and familiar, onto constructions of identity and culture. Travel, especially travel to Asia, became not only a means to know the world, but also a means to know oneself in contrast to the uncivilized “Other.” This paper is part of a larger project where I look at how Indonesian women and authors have inverted these paradigms in their lives and work.

Pulang (“Home”) by Leila S. Chudori, destabilizes ideas of home in relation to identity and the nation of Indonesia. The story spans multiple generations and shifts narrators, but at the center is the story of Lintang, who was born in Paris to an Indonesian exile and a French mother. Lintang only knows Indonesia through food and the puppet stories her father and his friends tell her. She travels to Indonesia to make a documentary about her father and to discover her origins. Literary scholars have theorized home as a central symbol of women’s oppression, which echoes Indonesia’s State Ibuism that relegates women to roles of good wives and mothers in service to the nation and as part of their kodrat, or “nature.” In this paper I engage with history and phenomenological theories of place and identity to examine how Chudori rewrites the idea of “home” for women in Indonesia.

Taylor Easum, Indiana State University, “Len Prawatisat: Playing with Thai History and Politics”

This paper aims to use games and gaming as a lens through which to examine popular conceptions of Thai politics and history. In this essay, I examine three concrete examples of gamified representations of Thai politics and history: “Koenig von Siam”, “Coconut Empire”, and “Patani Colonial Territory”. All three games represent both the potential and peril of popular representations of Thai politics and history. The first shows the influence of mapping and colonial-era notions of competition through a popular genre of board game that reflects a more royalist-nationalist view of late-nineteenth century history. The second, however, plays on popular critical notions of Thailand as a flawed democracy, and uses the coded language of gameplay to critique the entrenched military, royalist, and political elites in Thai society in the political transition after the 2014 coup. The final game, produced by activists in Thailand’s deep south, advocates a local narrative of history that was challenged by the central state on the basis of historical accuracy. I argue that although games might seem unserious by nature—they are, after all, “just games”—they are in fact worthy of serious consideration, either as problematic avenues where conservative notions of history, identity, and power persist, and as a potentially powerful critique of the political status-quo and the standard narrative of history. As such,these games fit into a long history of Thai political argument couched in the language of play.