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Contentious Sites and the Colonial Public Sphere in South East Asia
24-25th Jan 2013
What do sites of everyday sociability such as coffee shops, cafes, bars,
book stores, dancehalls, theatres, community centres, barber shops and
the like serve in the shaping and transformation of publics and public
spheres in colonial Southeast Asia? Such taken for granted spaces have
had little
attention and the few relevant scholarly works tend to address them as
spaces for mere idling and escapist preoccupations. By putting
inordinate focus on consumption patterns, entrepreneurial strategies,
business networks, and everyday multiculturalism, as well as the
architectural make-up and migration flows, previous works on such sites
were written mainly within the overarching framework of what Dipesh
Chakrabarty calls a “transition narrative, of which the over-riding (if
often implicit) themes are those of development,
modernization and capitalism.” One upshot of this is the failure to
register the ways in which these places provided the arenas for the
negotiation of selves and identities, independently and collectively.
These everyday sites enabled the articulation of aspirations,
frustrations and demands of the ordinary people, and how such
articulations became public issues.
This workshop aims to provide a forum for scholars of colonial Southeast
Asia to rethink and offer new lenses through which sites of everyday
sociability could be studied. We seek papers/texts that provide
empirical, conceptual and theoretical perspectives as to the ways in
which coffee shops, cafes, bars, book stores, etc became spaces of
discontent that proved troublesome for colonial regimes. The workshop
welcome papers that highlight those neglected quotidian spaces where
common folk acted out their discontentment and
strategies of resistance to better their conditions. An intended outcome
of the workshop is to expand studies on the practices and rhetoric of
individuals and collectives that populated these contentious sites under
the ambit of colonial rule, and how these places and their participants
became contributive forces in the expansion of a more active colonial
public sphere.
CONTACT DETAILS
Convenors
Syed Muhd Khairudin Aljunied, [log in to unmask]
Malay Studies, National University of Singapore
Wong Yoke-Sum, [log in to unmask]
History, Lancaster University
--
best wishes,
Mark
_____________________________
Dr. Mark Jackson
School of Geographical Sciences
University of Bristol
Bristol, United Kingdom
BS8 1SS
ph.+44(0)117.928.9109
fax. +44(0)117.928.7878
[log in to unmask]
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