Translationscapes of Southeast Asia: Rethinking Translation as Regional Method across Text, Voice, and Media
Description
To designate a space as “Southeast Asia” (SEA) is to engage in a particular epistemology and toponym. Positioned as the marginal extension of both Indian and Chinese spheres—hence the colonial coinage of “Indochina”—the landscape of what we now call SEA emerges from competing imperial imaginaries, translated into political discourse and variously reappropriated in local traditions. Since its articulation as a modern geopolitical category, SEA has delineated a fluid spatial formation, shaped by layered cartographies of Western colonial regimes (French Indochina, British Malaya, Burma and Borneo, Dutch East Indies, Spanish East Indies, American Philippines, Portuguese Timor), Cold War security alliances (the 1954 U.S.-led SEATO), and postcolonial regionalism (ASEAN’s vision of intra-Asian cooperation). The regional frame has come to signify a porous configuration wherein the translational operates as a mode of imagined community.
As Phrae Chittiphalangsri asks in Of Peninsulas and Archipelagos, what does it mean for a region to be imagined not through origin but derivation, where continental solidity meets the fragmentary expanse of maritime archipelagos? Might we then understand SEA’s landscape of epistemic tension as a “translationscape”—a geography constituted by acts of translation and one which, in Vicente Rafael’s terms, unfolds through the traversal of spaces marked by indeterminacy? How might we rethink SEA not simply as a place translated, but as a translational force in its own right?
This seminar welcomes proposals exploring translation and conceptual forms of multilingualism in, from, and of SEA, conceived as both artistic and strategic practice. We are especially interested in the reimagination, or striking undertranslation, of SEA in global literary circulation. Areas of interest include: the translation of indigenous literatures and religious scriptures into dominant Southeast Asian languages; the disjunction between premodern and non-Westphalian formations—such as the mandala polity, the Malay world, or Arabic and Chinese contact zones—and the modern boundaries that overwrite them; and the role of translation, transculturation, and transterritorialization in reckoning with (post)colonial histories and mediating emergent notions of regional solidarity.
We also invite interdisciplinary approaches to translation across languages, media, and modalities, spanning orality, visual storytelling, and intermedial expression—from James Scott’s Zomia to Karen oral traditions, from Kuo Pao Kun’s quadrilingual theatre to wayang kulit and diasporic SEA performance and dance. Ultimately, this seminar explores how Southeast Asian imaginaries emerge at the intersection of multilingualism and the asymmetrical dynamics of inter-imperiality, signaling new directions beyond national or colonial territorialization and toward a polyphonic, multidirectional vision of SEA in motion across scripts, tongues, bodies, and screens.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Camellia Linh Pham is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at Harvard University. Her research examines the poetics and politics of translation in colonial Vietnam, the literary history of French Indochina, transnational Sinophone Southeast Asian literature, and comparative Asian colonialisms and modernisms. Her MA thesis at Dartmouth College received recognition from both the ACLA and the Vietnam Studies Group of the AAS.
Speaker Bio
Rex Tsung-wei Lin is currently a graduate student at the Institute of Taiwan Literature, National Taiwan University (NTU) with an academic background in sociology. His research interests span queer theory, media studies, cultural sociology, gender sociology, and children's and LGBTQ+ rights. Rex's current research project focuses on the cinematic and cultural history of Taiwan's queer "scenes," exploring the interplay between representation, queer identity, and social contexts.
Speaker Bio
Sebastian is a Singaporean legal trainee and youth ambassador, bilingual in Mandarin and English, promoting Singaporean and Southeast Asian voices in global literary and translation discourse. He emceed and translated for events across Asia, performed traditional lion dance, and explored haunted sites across Southeast Asia. He is currently researching and writing a book on the region’s ghosts, sharing personal ghost encounters and examining their translationscape and intersections with law.
Papers
Speaker Bio
MK Long is a lecturer in the Dept of Religion at Dartmouth College. She is a historian and ethnographer of Buddhism and gender in Myanmar, where her research is driven by questions of vernacular textuality, contested religious authority, and institutional belonging. Her current book project offers the first study of writing by Buddhist monastic women in Myanmar, investigating how Burmese biographies have been shaped both by Buddhist narrative tropes and global circulations of literary modernism.
Speaker Bio
Lillian Ngan is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California. Her research interests span transregional Asian studies, focusing specifically on the intersections between East Asian and Southeast Asian studies, with a particular emphasis on transpacific Vietnam.
Speaker Bio
Yen Vu teaches at Fulbright University Vietnam and is a scholar of 20th century Vietnamese literature. Her book project “Language as form: the politics and poetics of writing in French in 20th century Vietnam” explores questions of language, freedom, and intellectual history. Her writing has appeared in Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Diaspora, and Environmental Humanities and she co-hosts a podcast called Nam Phong Dialogues that makes Vietnamese history accessible to the general public.