Southeast Asia Spotlight - October 18, 2024 - Seven Questions for Southeast Asia with Yi Ning Chang

Yi Ning Chang
Ph.D. Student, Department of Government, Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences
 

FOCUSING ON THE PARTS THAT PERTAIN TO SOUTHEAST ASIA, WHAT IS THE FOCUS OF YOUR ACADEMIC WORK, AND HOW DID YOU ARRIVE AT IT?

Working as a political theorist, I am developing an account of anticolonial politics that begins with a Southeast Asian story. The project focuses on 1950s–60s Indonesia, Malaya, and Singapore. I read texts and archival material from this period, tracing the ambiguous and changing role that anticolonialism played in the making of these three postcolonial states. 

Southeast Asia is the place I most call home, and I have been puzzling over it for a long time. I first started doing research on questions of race, history, and politics in the region in 2012, and in a way I have simply kept going.

WHAT IS THE BIGGEST UNANSWERED QUESTION IN YOUR RESEARCH?

I have two main questions. Once we take Southeast Asia as our starting point, how must we retell the history of anticolonial politics? And what role, then, did global anticolonial politics – itself an unstable term – play in the making of Southeast Asia in the middle of the twentieth century? 

WHAT DISCIPLINE, OTHER THAN YOUR OWN, DO YOU THINK COULD ADD AN INTERESTING DIMENSION TO YOUR WORK AND WHY?

I have recently been thinking about how political theorists can draw upon Comparative Literatures’ methods for textual analysis. In a place like Southeast Asia, it seems to me that thought and action is always already constituted through the interplay of multiple languages. Comp Lit’s attentiveness to language, translation, and poetics seems particularly important for the study of such a place. 

HOW WILL THE NEXT GENERATION OF SCHOLARS LOOK AT AND STUDY THE REGION DIFFERENTLY THAN PRIOR GENERATIONS?

My home discipline, political theory, is undergoing a pluralization decades in the making. The increased appetite for political theorizing grounded in contexts outside the Euro-Atlantic, combined with the decades-long decline in area studies, is producing political theorists with a different orientation toward the problem of the particular vs. the general. There is a demand, I think specific to our historical moment, for us to say something that illuminates both a particular case and a general problem in political theory. 

WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE AT HARVARD IN SUPPORT OF SOUTHEAST ASIA STUDIES?

Speaking as a graduate student, research support is always appreciated! Aside from funds, support with language and fieldwork are two other things that would matter greatly. 

WHAT IS A RECENT BOOK, FILM, OR OTHER MEDIA (ACADEMIC OR OTHERWISE) FROM OR ABOUT SOUTHEAST ASIA THAT YOU RECOMMEND?

Rachel Heng’s The Great Reclamation is an instant classic. 

WHAT IS THE MOST MEMORABLE SOUTHEAST ASIAN MEAL THAT YOU'VE HAD?

It’s not a single meal, but I was once on a reporting trip in Myanmar that brought me across a couple of cities and to many different kinds of cuisine. Coming from my side of Southeast Asia, each dish was so familiar yet so uncanny. I still think about those meals.