Center for Southeast Asian Coastal Interactions

Last Friday, SEACoast hosted our annual Muse Mentors, University of Hawaii’s Professors Barbara and Leonard Andaya, with a special event, Ocean Pulse: Historicizing the Modern. The event offered conversations and provocations across disciplines, as well as an opportunity to gather scholars of Southeast Asia from Santa Cruz and across the Bay Area.

Ocean Pulse: Historicizing the Modern began with Professor Leonard Andaya’s talk about the vantage points offered by locating the history of Eastern Indonesia, and the world, as they emerge through the historical, cultural, and environmental context of Oceania–a region historically considered as a collection of scattered, geopolitically insignificant islands. His talk brought us through how specialized commodities from Eastern Indonesia, like nutmeg, circulated in global trade and also built the trade networks themselves through the development of production nodes and port networks–infrastructures that had to ensure that goods, especially if their desired qualities were perishable, arrived in suitable states for consumption by their clients. The success of these nodes and their networks, however, are made possible only through a set of knowledge and practices that emerged through concepts of connectivity between land, rivers, seas, and oceans. An example of the knowledge and practices essential to global trade in commodities include navigational skills that rely on interpretations of clouds, stars, lightning, flying fish, and dolphins to sense proximity to land. Such practices are observed in Eastern Indonesian as well as micronesian communities, thereby emphasizing the centrality of seas and oceans that surround ‘scattered’ islands and how they trouble well-sedimented transnational spatial concepts such as “Southeast Asia” and the “Pacific”.

Andaya’s rich and energetic talk was followed by a series of comments and provocations offered by our distinguished roundtable discussants from UC Santa Cruz: Professors Carla Freccero (History of Consciousness); Vanita Seth (Politics); Sharon Kinoshita (Literature). Opening up the roundtable, Carla Freccero posed a set of provocations that set speakers and audiences onto questions about what constitutes “pre” or “early” modern in any field-timeline, and what do different timelines and periodization of modernity do in the world they interact with and establish? Rather than taking timelines and periodization as a corollary of articulating history as it really was, Freccero called for forthright explications of contemporaneous investments underlying the historical accounts we construct in our scholarship.

Further interrogations of our intellectual investments came by way of Vanita Seth’s set of ideas and provocations about self-evident facticity of the past. Characteristic of this mode of facticity are the irreversible linearity of time, the discrete separation of past from present, as well as the exclusion of nonhumans–both material and immaterial, natural and supernatural. Referencing Barbara Andaya’s talk in the later half of the event, Seth pointed out how non-human protagonists like sea monsters that populated premodern European histories are increasingly revealed by science as simply being figures of human imagination. While historians have endeavored to democratize history by pluralizing timelines and historical actors, Seth argued that “exploring the alterity of the past does not permit us to escape the ontological limitations of historical thinking”. Rather than doing away with a history sanitized by colonial epistemological standards of truth, Seth emphasized the critical labor of recognizing its stakes, possibilities, and limitations.

Building her talk on the previous rounds of talks and discussions, Sharon Kinoshita captivated us with the parallels and connections between studies of the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean that have sought to reconceptualize the geography and histories of the region, and Leonard Andaya’s scholarship that seeks to similarly build connections between areas like Southeast Asia and Oceania that have been studied as separate regions. Reflecting Janet Abu-Lughod’s, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350, Kinoshita described how the seminal text reframed an era characterized by destruction by Mongol conquest, to one of unprecedented integration and communication between overland and sea trade networks, creating overlapping spheres of global trade. These generative developments are well documented in the writings of Marco Polo, many of which meticulously detailed the types of highly valued commodities and where they can be bought or sold, including spices in Southeast Asia. By tracing the parallels and connections between two seemingly disparate worlds, Kinoshita underscored the significance of Leonard Andaya’s scholarship in contributing to a ‘new thalassology’ that foregrounds the knowledge, people, ideas, materials, communities, lands, and seas that often go under the radar, and whose rich relations are impeded by the periodisations and territorialisations of history and area studies writ large. Kinoshita ended her talk with a generous nod to SEACoast ventures as taking “a plunge into this ‘new thalassology'”.

Later in the afternoon, we were regaled by tales of sea monsters and maidens across space and time by Professor Barbara Andaya. Early historical accounts of monstrous krakens and beguiling mermaids, as well as contemporary accounts of deep sea exploration, scientific conspiracy theories about sea monsters, and popular media like The Little Mermaid, invites reflection on the sea as more than a mode of transporting and connecting people, materials, and ideas. The sea opens up passages between past and present to question deeply entrenched beliefs about maritime environments and exploration as treacherous terrain, surmountable by masculine heroism and modern technology. Focusing our attention on the shifting ways through which European and Southeast Asian societies dealt with the dangers and mysteries of the sea, underwater monsters and humanoid sea creatures can be seen as embodying prevailing and emergent conceptions of gender, land-sea connections, human-animal relations, as well as the unknown or not-yet known.

Breaking from the usual format of academic conferences, we rounded up our event with audiences and speakers gathering in a circle for a plenary discussion. Speakers and audience members, which included curious onlooking undergraduates from the UCSC campus, participated in this relaxed and casual conversation. Numerous threads from earlier talks and discussions were brought up and participants shared how various theories of territory and temporality, commodities, and monstrous otherness resonated within the particular fields of their study and geographies.

On behalf of SEACoast, we would like to thank our gracious Muse Mentors, roundtable speakers, and participants for the incredible day of engagements across disciplines, histories, and seas and fields of study.