The year 2020 proved in many ways to be an extraordinary one, particularly for the theatre. Theat... more The year 2020 proved in many ways to be an extraordinary one, particularly for the theatre. Theatres around the world have been closed for months or compelled to operate under new rules affecting viewers and creators. Rather than step into a real theatre space, a trip to the theatre is now, more often than not, a virtual journey into the internet. A new pandemic theatre sub-genre is being created at an accelerated pace. It is being realized in several forms: streaming of performances played live, but without the audience; interactive performances shown over Zoom, video calls and video conferences; performative readings conducted via probably every possible platform and communicator; and endless resources of archival performances to which theatres, artists or fans themselves provide access. Discussing the situation of theatre during the pandemic raises an increasing number of questions about how the internet influences theatre and how theatre influences the internet. Admittedly, 2020 is not the first meeting of these two worlds—the theatre has been flirting with radio, television and the internet since their inception.
Introductory chapter to the book _Escaping Kakania:
Eastern European Travels in Colonial Southeas... more Introductory chapter to the book _Escaping Kakania: Eastern European Travels in Colonial Southeast Asia_, which(the whole book) is available for download here: https://ceupress.com/book/escaping-kakania . Henk Maier wrote a sweet review of the book, which gives a good sense of what I talk about in the Introduction: "“Reading Escaping Kakania is like walking into a disorienting web of intertextualities, a hall of convex mirrors: there is no escape from Kakania, that imaginary empire of Eastern Europe, that early 20th century state of unsettledness, heterogeneity, and desire. A fascinating collection of essays about early modern travelers venturing from Eastern Europe to Southeast Asia, both regions long defined in terms of colonialism and authoritarianism, these essays explore how these travelers—engineers, doctors, soldiers, teachers, Czechs, Hungarians, Poles, Galicians, Serbs—had great difficulties finding place and stance in a double world, in-between, off-center, seeing home mirrored in faraway lands. Written by 21st century Eastern European scholars, the essays sympathetically look back at the experiences and adventures of predecessors; they provide reading with yet another convex mirror by writing in English, the ultimate colonial and imperial language. Escaping Kakania makes an important contribution to the discussions around the relevance of postcolonial and decolonial studies, focused as it is on regions, topics and histories beyond conventional centers of interest.” Hendrik MJ Maier University of California, Riverside
Pavel Durdík (1843-1903) grew up in a provincial Czech town, studied medicine in Prague, spent te... more Pavel Durdík (1843-1903) grew up in a provincial Czech town, studied medicine in Prague, spent ten years working as a physician in Russia, and, from 1878 to 1883, was employed as a military doctor in the Dutch colonial army. He took part in the Aceh War, the bloodiest (anti-)colonial conflict in the Dutch Indies, and later spent two years on the remote island of Nias. This chapter explores how he experienced the colonies through the prism of a particular clash-blend of experiences and concerns – medical, Czech, Russian, Slavic, human – and their various ironies and contrary motions. Serving as an army doctor in Aceh was the crux of such contraries: he was a doctor, eternally rushing to save human lives, and a Czech patriot admiring Acehnese “patriotism” and “defence of homeland” – while in the service of the colonial army, whose “massacres,” “cruelty,” “injustice,” “lyingness” and “hypocrisy” he documents. In the colonies, all kinds of physical, mental and social pathologies played out – including those chronically endemic in Bohemia and Europe. Farthest from home, Durdík writes about connection to native soil – Aceh/Bohemia – and imperial violence most incisively.
Published in _Escaping Kakania: Eastern European Travels in Colonial Southeast Asia_, ed. Jan Mrazek, CEU Press 2024. The whole volume is Open Access and can be downloaded here: https://ceupress.com/book/escaping-kakania
What's the Use of Art?: Asian Visual and Material Culture in Context, edited by Morgan Pitelka and Jan Mrazek, 2008
A thing, such as an art work, is perceived and experienced differently by different people and in... more A thing, such as an art work, is perceived and experienced differently by different people and in different situations. This obvious fact, and the fact that art history makes people experience things in specific ways, is often concealed by the pretension of the discipline that its way is the most informed and objective way of seeing art. This chapter shows the limits and prejudices of art historical vision by reflecting on a particular Javanese artistic and cultural phenomenon, wayang, which can be preliminarily glossed as shadow puppet theater. Delicately carved and painted wayang puppets are presented as "art objects" in some art history books, museums, and art history classes. One of the points of this chapter is that the "wayang" of mainstream art history, or wayang as "art object," is a different kind of animal than the wayang that people most commonly encounter in Java, even though art history pretends that its "wayang" is the Javanese wayang. In the later part of the chapter, I will look more broadly at the encounter of art history with Southeast Asian art, and finally I will briefly relate my ideas to other chapters in this volume. (This text was published as the introductory essay in _What's the Use of Art?: Asian Visual and Material Culture in Context_, edited by Morgan Pitelka and Jan Mrazek, University of Hawai'i Press 2008).
The SVD ethnologist/ethnographer mostly known as Paul Schebesta (1887-1967) was often introduced ... more The SVD ethnologist/ethnographer mostly known as Paul Schebesta (1887-1967) was often introduced in Czechoslovakia as “our Czech” Pavel Šebesta. Querying origins, selves and homelands, his own and in his writings (ethnography/travelogues/fiction on “dwarfs” in the “primeval forest”), this essay traces the multiplicity/borderlands/nomadism of Schebesta/Šebesta, also in his relation to the “Other,” a concept/distinction/border that is thus destabilized or blurred. Interweaving apparently separate questions about his life and scholarship, the essay finds continuities and mirroring across distance and otherness. Following-mirroring Šebesta/Schebesta, we recognize the familiar in the strange, Silesia/Moravia in Malaya, the contemporary in the primeval, the “native” in the ethnologist, the head-hunter in the biological anthropologist. The essay’s motley style mirrors what has been described as his “jumbled” writing, “highly coloured … scarcely in consonance with the scientific material”; it reflects his nomadism, emphasis on “experiencing together,” and the conflict that he sensed between “theories” and “life, rhythm, poetry.” (Part 1 of a 2-Part article)
The essay juxtaposes, as in a poetic metaphor, Czech sea voyages to Southeast Asia in the late co... more The essay juxtaposes, as in a poetic metaphor, Czech sea voyages to Southeast Asia in the late colonial era, as described in the travellers’ writings, and the author’s recent voyage on a container ship from Rotterdam to Singapore. A reflection on sea travel and an experiment in historical research, it is an account of accessing the past through the experience of a voyage. The essay reflects on size, speed, time, and modernity; on containers, classes, nations, colonies, and empires, past and present. How can our present journeys help us grasp the experiences of past travellers, as well as our relationship with them, our nearness and our distance? How can old travelogues enrich our perception of present-day travel, shipping, and colonialisms? How do present, past and future overflow into each other, on the fluid borders between physical, economic and industrial reality and narrative/poetic imagination? How is containerisation, whose (pre)history this essay traces, part of our ‘knowledge production’? The essay performs these questions with a Czech accent that reflects a specific historical situation and the self-image of a variously colonised European people who navigate(d) in particular, often clownishly improper ways, in the world of colonies and empires, old and new.
The SVD ethnologist/ethnographer mostly known as Paul Schebesta (1887-1967) was often introduced ... more The SVD ethnologist/ethnographer mostly known as Paul Schebesta (1887-1967) was often introduced in Czechoslovakia as “our Czech” Pavel Šebesta. Querying origins, selves and homelands, his own and in his writings (ethnography/travelogues/fiction on “dwarfs” in the “primeval forest”), this essay traces the multiplicity/borderlands/nomadism of Schebesta/Šebesta, also in his relation to the “Other,” a concept/distinction/border that is thus destabilized or blurred. Interweaving apparently separate questions about his life and scholarship, the essay finds continuities and mirroring across distance and otherness. Following-mirroring Šebesta/Schebesta, we recognize the familiar in the strange, Silesia/Moravia in Malaya, the contemporary in the primeval, the “native” in the ethnologist, the head-hunter in the biological anthropologist. The essay’s motley style mirrors what has been described as his “jumbled” writing, “highly coloured … scarcely in consonance with the scientific material”; it reflects his nomadism, emphasis on “experiencing together,” and the conflict that he sensed between “theories” and “life, rhythm, poetry.” (Part 1 of a 2-part article.)
In English, terms such as “visual art” and “visual culture” reflect the privileging
of visuality... more In English, terms such as “visual art” and “visual culture” reflect the privileging
of visuality in the practices and discourses of western art. An overwhelming emphasis
on the visual sense, as well as the development of particular, historically specific
ways of seeing, displaying, and conceptualizing objects, are indivisibly part of
the history of European and American art.These seeing and thinking habits have also shaped Euro-American approaches to Asian art. This essay explores how things are seen and not seen in Southeast Asia (with focus on Java, Indonesia), how seeing is often part of experiences that go beyond seeing, and how what is (un)seen is itself often essentially different from the “art object” of western art history.
This essay reflects on the plays of masks and selves in the dances and the life of Didik Nini Tho... more This essay reflects on the plays of masks and selves in the dances and the life of Didik Nini Thowok, and the resonances between dance and life. An Indonesian of Chinese descent and a female impersonator whose comic dances combine different regional styles, Didik upsets notions of ethnic and gender stereotypes and identities, the notion of identity itself.
Not much is known about Pontjopangrawit's time in prison or about the construction of the ga... more Not much is known about Pontjopangrawit's time in prison or about the construction of the gamelan, but Kartomi provides a general account of the Boven Digul prison camps. The conditions were primitive the area was so isolated that (as with some of the Russian gulags) no ...
Page 1. AMELAN '/( J '* &a... more Page 1. AMELAN '/( J '* 'A Cufiuraflnteraction ancfMusicaf Development in CentrafJava Page 2. Page 3. 6AMELAN T~h±s One HTC4-7RF-HZJL Page 4. Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology A series edited by Philip V. Bohlman ...
Suwannabhumi: Multidisciplinary Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 2019
The essay reflects on the work of Adrian Lapian (1929-2011), an Indonesian scholar of archipelagi... more The essay reflects on the work of Adrian Lapian (1929-2011), an Indonesian scholar of archipelagic/maritime Southeast Asia and its “sea people—sea pirates—sea kings.” The essay suggests that Lapian’s writing mirrors navigation at sea, and the constant re-orientation and ever changing, multiple points of view that are part of it. This is contrasted to Foucault’s “panopticism” and academic desire for discipline. Taking cue from Lapian’s writing and from the present author’s experience of seafaring, the essay envisions Southeast Asian studies as a fluid, precarious, disorienting, even nauseating multiplicity of experiences, dialogues, and moving, unstable, and uncertain points of view; a style of learning that is less (neo)colonial, more humble, and closer to experiences in the region, than super-scholarship that imposes universalizing, panoptic standards, theories and methods (typically self-styled as “new”) that reduce the particular into a specimen of the general, a cell in the Panopticon. The essay concludes with reflections on certain learning initiatives/traditions at the National University of Singapore, including seafaring voyages—experiences, encounters and conversations that make students and scholars alike to move and see differently, to be touched, blown away, rocked, swayed, disoriented, swallowed, transformed, and feel anew their places, roots, bonds, distances, fears, blindness, powerlessness.
Although located at the centre of Europe, Bohemia was for much of its history dominated by a Euro... more Although located at the centre of Europe, Bohemia was for much of its history dominated by a European empire. This essay reflects on a constellation of anti-racist, anti-colonial sentiments in the writings (1877–1944) of a number of Czechs who travelled to the Dutch East Indies. These feelings include an alienation from the imperial nations of “the West”; a sense of kinship with colonised peoples of “the East”; the collapsing – through images of blending and mirroring – of certain distinctions essential to colonial racism; and, often, a feeling of the absurdity of the Czech traveller’s own presence, ideas and dreams. An exploration of Bohemian perspectives and imagination, and a reflection on insignificance and being out of place, can contribute to a more nuanced understanding of European representations than that afforded by dominant colonial and postcolonial narratives that generalise about Europe based on views limited to the imperial nations.
The whole book (PDF) is available for for free here: https://ceupress.com/book/escaping-kakania .... more The whole book (PDF) is available for for free here: https://ceupress.com/book/escaping-kakania .
From back cover: Escaping Kakania is about fascinating characters—soldiers, doctors, scientists, writers, painters—who traveled from their eastern European homelands to colonial Southeast Asia. Their stories are told by experts on different countries in the two regions, who bring diverse approaches into a conversation that crosses disciplinary and national borders. The chapters deal with the diverse encounters of eastern Europeans with the many faces of colonial southeast Asia.
“What do travelers from Europe’s east recognize or reject in southeast Asia? Escaping Kakania is a stimulating contribution to studies of travel writing and identity issues in eastern Europe, particularly for its productive linkage of two regions that have both been defined in terms of their in-betweenness and heterogeneity, and their relationships to powerful others, above all an imagined ‘Europe.’ As well as introducing a broad array of intriguing writers and perspectives, the emphasis here on varieties of difference, and a world that is interconnected in a multiplicity of ways, makes this book an important intervention in travel writing studies in general.” Wendy Bracewel, UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, London
“Reading Escaping Kakania is like walking into a disorienting web of intertextualities, a hall of convex mirrors: there is no escape from Kakania, that imaginary empire of Eastern Europe, that early 20th century state of unsettledness, heterogeneity, and desire. A fascinating collection of essays about early modern travelers venturing from Eastern Europe to Southeast Asia, both regions long defined in terms of colonialism and authoritarianism, these essays explore how these travelers—engineers, doctors, soldiers, teachers, Czechs, Hungarians, Poles, Galicians, Serbs—had great difficulties finding place and stance in a double world, in-between, off-center, seeing home mirrored in faraway lands. Written by 21st century Eastern European scholars, the essays sympathetically look back at the experiences and adventures of predecessors; they provide reading with yet another convex mirror by writing in English, the ultimate colonial and imperial language. Escaping Kakania makes an important contribution to the discussions around the relevance of postcolonial and decolonial studies, focused as it is on regions, topics and histories beyond conventional centers of interest.” Hendrik MJ Maier, University of California, Riverside
Much has been said about how Javanese puppet theatre, wayang kulit, richly reflects the Javanese ... more Much has been said about how Javanese puppet theatre, wayang kulit, richly reflects the Javanese world, and how changes and tensions in performance practice mirror those in culture and society. For decades, television has been as intensely part of the Javanese world as wayang. This book explores the ways two complex media and modes of being, seeing and fantasizing, with their different cultures, coexist and meet, and haunt or invade each other. It is what a Javanese commentator calls a “difficult marriage”: intimate on the one hand, deeply alienating on the other, institutionalized yet at the same time mercurial and shifting. This encounter is explored on many levels: from performance aesthetics and the technicalities of television production, to issues of time, space, light, place, and movement, to audience experience of live and televised performances, to the collaboration and struggle between performers and television producers. Central to the book are personal perspectives and experiences, as well as Javanese discussions surrounding the interaction between wayang and television and their cultures. They are brought into a conversation with reflections on media and technology by writers such as Karl Marx, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Derrida, Paul Virilio, and James Siegel. Wayang’s relationship with television is considered in the context of the theatre’s intercourse with older and newer media, including electricity, radio, audio- and video-recording, the internet and social media. (Introduction and Chapter 5 uploaded as sample. Published by NUS Press in 2019.)
The year 2020 proved in many ways to be an extraordinary one, particularly for the theatre. Theat... more The year 2020 proved in many ways to be an extraordinary one, particularly for the theatre. Theatres around the world have been closed for months or compelled to operate under new rules affecting viewers and creators. Rather than step into a real theatre space, a trip to the theatre is now, more often than not, a virtual journey into the internet. A new pandemic theatre sub-genre is being created at an accelerated pace. It is being realized in several forms: streaming of performances played live, but without the audience; interactive performances shown over Zoom, video calls and video conferences; performative readings conducted via probably every possible platform and communicator; and endless resources of archival performances to which theatres, artists or fans themselves provide access. Discussing the situation of theatre during the pandemic raises an increasing number of questions about how the internet influences theatre and how theatre influences the internet. Admittedly, 2020 is not the first meeting of these two worlds—the theatre has been flirting with radio, television and the internet since their inception.
Introductory chapter to the book _Escaping Kakania:
Eastern European Travels in Colonial Southeas... more Introductory chapter to the book _Escaping Kakania: Eastern European Travels in Colonial Southeast Asia_, which(the whole book) is available for download here: https://ceupress.com/book/escaping-kakania . Henk Maier wrote a sweet review of the book, which gives a good sense of what I talk about in the Introduction: "“Reading Escaping Kakania is like walking into a disorienting web of intertextualities, a hall of convex mirrors: there is no escape from Kakania, that imaginary empire of Eastern Europe, that early 20th century state of unsettledness, heterogeneity, and desire. A fascinating collection of essays about early modern travelers venturing from Eastern Europe to Southeast Asia, both regions long defined in terms of colonialism and authoritarianism, these essays explore how these travelers—engineers, doctors, soldiers, teachers, Czechs, Hungarians, Poles, Galicians, Serbs—had great difficulties finding place and stance in a double world, in-between, off-center, seeing home mirrored in faraway lands. Written by 21st century Eastern European scholars, the essays sympathetically look back at the experiences and adventures of predecessors; they provide reading with yet another convex mirror by writing in English, the ultimate colonial and imperial language. Escaping Kakania makes an important contribution to the discussions around the relevance of postcolonial and decolonial studies, focused as it is on regions, topics and histories beyond conventional centers of interest.” Hendrik MJ Maier University of California, Riverside
Pavel Durdík (1843-1903) grew up in a provincial Czech town, studied medicine in Prague, spent te... more Pavel Durdík (1843-1903) grew up in a provincial Czech town, studied medicine in Prague, spent ten years working as a physician in Russia, and, from 1878 to 1883, was employed as a military doctor in the Dutch colonial army. He took part in the Aceh War, the bloodiest (anti-)colonial conflict in the Dutch Indies, and later spent two years on the remote island of Nias. This chapter explores how he experienced the colonies through the prism of a particular clash-blend of experiences and concerns – medical, Czech, Russian, Slavic, human – and their various ironies and contrary motions. Serving as an army doctor in Aceh was the crux of such contraries: he was a doctor, eternally rushing to save human lives, and a Czech patriot admiring Acehnese “patriotism” and “defence of homeland” – while in the service of the colonial army, whose “massacres,” “cruelty,” “injustice,” “lyingness” and “hypocrisy” he documents. In the colonies, all kinds of physical, mental and social pathologies played out – including those chronically endemic in Bohemia and Europe. Farthest from home, Durdík writes about connection to native soil – Aceh/Bohemia – and imperial violence most incisively.
Published in _Escaping Kakania: Eastern European Travels in Colonial Southeast Asia_, ed. Jan Mrazek, CEU Press 2024. The whole volume is Open Access and can be downloaded here: https://ceupress.com/book/escaping-kakania
What's the Use of Art?: Asian Visual and Material Culture in Context, edited by Morgan Pitelka and Jan Mrazek, 2008
A thing, such as an art work, is perceived and experienced differently by different people and in... more A thing, such as an art work, is perceived and experienced differently by different people and in different situations. This obvious fact, and the fact that art history makes people experience things in specific ways, is often concealed by the pretension of the discipline that its way is the most informed and objective way of seeing art. This chapter shows the limits and prejudices of art historical vision by reflecting on a particular Javanese artistic and cultural phenomenon, wayang, which can be preliminarily glossed as shadow puppet theater. Delicately carved and painted wayang puppets are presented as "art objects" in some art history books, museums, and art history classes. One of the points of this chapter is that the "wayang" of mainstream art history, or wayang as "art object," is a different kind of animal than the wayang that people most commonly encounter in Java, even though art history pretends that its "wayang" is the Javanese wayang. In the later part of the chapter, I will look more broadly at the encounter of art history with Southeast Asian art, and finally I will briefly relate my ideas to other chapters in this volume. (This text was published as the introductory essay in _What's the Use of Art?: Asian Visual and Material Culture in Context_, edited by Morgan Pitelka and Jan Mrazek, University of Hawai'i Press 2008).
The SVD ethnologist/ethnographer mostly known as Paul Schebesta (1887-1967) was often introduced ... more The SVD ethnologist/ethnographer mostly known as Paul Schebesta (1887-1967) was often introduced in Czechoslovakia as “our Czech” Pavel Šebesta. Querying origins, selves and homelands, his own and in his writings (ethnography/travelogues/fiction on “dwarfs” in the “primeval forest”), this essay traces the multiplicity/borderlands/nomadism of Schebesta/Šebesta, also in his relation to the “Other,” a concept/distinction/border that is thus destabilized or blurred. Interweaving apparently separate questions about his life and scholarship, the essay finds continuities and mirroring across distance and otherness. Following-mirroring Šebesta/Schebesta, we recognize the familiar in the strange, Silesia/Moravia in Malaya, the contemporary in the primeval, the “native” in the ethnologist, the head-hunter in the biological anthropologist. The essay’s motley style mirrors what has been described as his “jumbled” writing, “highly coloured … scarcely in consonance with the scientific material”; it reflects his nomadism, emphasis on “experiencing together,” and the conflict that he sensed between “theories” and “life, rhythm, poetry.” (Part 1 of a 2-Part article)
The essay juxtaposes, as in a poetic metaphor, Czech sea voyages to Southeast Asia in the late co... more The essay juxtaposes, as in a poetic metaphor, Czech sea voyages to Southeast Asia in the late colonial era, as described in the travellers’ writings, and the author’s recent voyage on a container ship from Rotterdam to Singapore. A reflection on sea travel and an experiment in historical research, it is an account of accessing the past through the experience of a voyage. The essay reflects on size, speed, time, and modernity; on containers, classes, nations, colonies, and empires, past and present. How can our present journeys help us grasp the experiences of past travellers, as well as our relationship with them, our nearness and our distance? How can old travelogues enrich our perception of present-day travel, shipping, and colonialisms? How do present, past and future overflow into each other, on the fluid borders between physical, economic and industrial reality and narrative/poetic imagination? How is containerisation, whose (pre)history this essay traces, part of our ‘knowledge production’? The essay performs these questions with a Czech accent that reflects a specific historical situation and the self-image of a variously colonised European people who navigate(d) in particular, often clownishly improper ways, in the world of colonies and empires, old and new.
The SVD ethnologist/ethnographer mostly known as Paul Schebesta (1887-1967) was often introduced ... more The SVD ethnologist/ethnographer mostly known as Paul Schebesta (1887-1967) was often introduced in Czechoslovakia as “our Czech” Pavel Šebesta. Querying origins, selves and homelands, his own and in his writings (ethnography/travelogues/fiction on “dwarfs” in the “primeval forest”), this essay traces the multiplicity/borderlands/nomadism of Schebesta/Šebesta, also in his relation to the “Other,” a concept/distinction/border that is thus destabilized or blurred. Interweaving apparently separate questions about his life and scholarship, the essay finds continuities and mirroring across distance and otherness. Following-mirroring Šebesta/Schebesta, we recognize the familiar in the strange, Silesia/Moravia in Malaya, the contemporary in the primeval, the “native” in the ethnologist, the head-hunter in the biological anthropologist. The essay’s motley style mirrors what has been described as his “jumbled” writing, “highly coloured … scarcely in consonance with the scientific material”; it reflects his nomadism, emphasis on “experiencing together,” and the conflict that he sensed between “theories” and “life, rhythm, poetry.” (Part 1 of a 2-part article.)
In English, terms such as “visual art” and “visual culture” reflect the privileging
of visuality... more In English, terms such as “visual art” and “visual culture” reflect the privileging
of visuality in the practices and discourses of western art. An overwhelming emphasis
on the visual sense, as well as the development of particular, historically specific
ways of seeing, displaying, and conceptualizing objects, are indivisibly part of
the history of European and American art.These seeing and thinking habits have also shaped Euro-American approaches to Asian art. This essay explores how things are seen and not seen in Southeast Asia (with focus on Java, Indonesia), how seeing is often part of experiences that go beyond seeing, and how what is (un)seen is itself often essentially different from the “art object” of western art history.
This essay reflects on the plays of masks and selves in the dances and the life of Didik Nini Tho... more This essay reflects on the plays of masks and selves in the dances and the life of Didik Nini Thowok, and the resonances between dance and life. An Indonesian of Chinese descent and a female impersonator whose comic dances combine different regional styles, Didik upsets notions of ethnic and gender stereotypes and identities, the notion of identity itself.
Not much is known about Pontjopangrawit's time in prison or about the construction of the ga... more Not much is known about Pontjopangrawit's time in prison or about the construction of the gamelan, but Kartomi provides a general account of the Boven Digul prison camps. The conditions were primitive the area was so isolated that (as with some of the Russian gulags) no ...
Page 1. AMELAN '/( J '* &a... more Page 1. AMELAN '/( J '* 'A Cufiuraflnteraction ancfMusicaf Development in CentrafJava Page 2. Page 3. 6AMELAN T~h±s One HTC4-7RF-HZJL Page 4. Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology A series edited by Philip V. Bohlman ...
Suwannabhumi: Multidisciplinary Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 2019
The essay reflects on the work of Adrian Lapian (1929-2011), an Indonesian scholar of archipelagi... more The essay reflects on the work of Adrian Lapian (1929-2011), an Indonesian scholar of archipelagic/maritime Southeast Asia and its “sea people—sea pirates—sea kings.” The essay suggests that Lapian’s writing mirrors navigation at sea, and the constant re-orientation and ever changing, multiple points of view that are part of it. This is contrasted to Foucault’s “panopticism” and academic desire for discipline. Taking cue from Lapian’s writing and from the present author’s experience of seafaring, the essay envisions Southeast Asian studies as a fluid, precarious, disorienting, even nauseating multiplicity of experiences, dialogues, and moving, unstable, and uncertain points of view; a style of learning that is less (neo)colonial, more humble, and closer to experiences in the region, than super-scholarship that imposes universalizing, panoptic standards, theories and methods (typically self-styled as “new”) that reduce the particular into a specimen of the general, a cell in the Panopticon. The essay concludes with reflections on certain learning initiatives/traditions at the National University of Singapore, including seafaring voyages—experiences, encounters and conversations that make students and scholars alike to move and see differently, to be touched, blown away, rocked, swayed, disoriented, swallowed, transformed, and feel anew their places, roots, bonds, distances, fears, blindness, powerlessness.
Although located at the centre of Europe, Bohemia was for much of its history dominated by a Euro... more Although located at the centre of Europe, Bohemia was for much of its history dominated by a European empire. This essay reflects on a constellation of anti-racist, anti-colonial sentiments in the writings (1877–1944) of a number of Czechs who travelled to the Dutch East Indies. These feelings include an alienation from the imperial nations of “the West”; a sense of kinship with colonised peoples of “the East”; the collapsing – through images of blending and mirroring – of certain distinctions essential to colonial racism; and, often, a feeling of the absurdity of the Czech traveller’s own presence, ideas and dreams. An exploration of Bohemian perspectives and imagination, and a reflection on insignificance and being out of place, can contribute to a more nuanced understanding of European representations than that afforded by dominant colonial and postcolonial narratives that generalise about Europe based on views limited to the imperial nations.
The whole book (PDF) is available for for free here: https://ceupress.com/book/escaping-kakania .... more The whole book (PDF) is available for for free here: https://ceupress.com/book/escaping-kakania .
From back cover: Escaping Kakania is about fascinating characters—soldiers, doctors, scientists, writers, painters—who traveled from their eastern European homelands to colonial Southeast Asia. Their stories are told by experts on different countries in the two regions, who bring diverse approaches into a conversation that crosses disciplinary and national borders. The chapters deal with the diverse encounters of eastern Europeans with the many faces of colonial southeast Asia.
“What do travelers from Europe’s east recognize or reject in southeast Asia? Escaping Kakania is a stimulating contribution to studies of travel writing and identity issues in eastern Europe, particularly for its productive linkage of two regions that have both been defined in terms of their in-betweenness and heterogeneity, and their relationships to powerful others, above all an imagined ‘Europe.’ As well as introducing a broad array of intriguing writers and perspectives, the emphasis here on varieties of difference, and a world that is interconnected in a multiplicity of ways, makes this book an important intervention in travel writing studies in general.” Wendy Bracewel, UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, London
“Reading Escaping Kakania is like walking into a disorienting web of intertextualities, a hall of convex mirrors: there is no escape from Kakania, that imaginary empire of Eastern Europe, that early 20th century state of unsettledness, heterogeneity, and desire. A fascinating collection of essays about early modern travelers venturing from Eastern Europe to Southeast Asia, both regions long defined in terms of colonialism and authoritarianism, these essays explore how these travelers—engineers, doctors, soldiers, teachers, Czechs, Hungarians, Poles, Galicians, Serbs—had great difficulties finding place and stance in a double world, in-between, off-center, seeing home mirrored in faraway lands. Written by 21st century Eastern European scholars, the essays sympathetically look back at the experiences and adventures of predecessors; they provide reading with yet another convex mirror by writing in English, the ultimate colonial and imperial language. Escaping Kakania makes an important contribution to the discussions around the relevance of postcolonial and decolonial studies, focused as it is on regions, topics and histories beyond conventional centers of interest.” Hendrik MJ Maier, University of California, Riverside
Much has been said about how Javanese puppet theatre, wayang kulit, richly reflects the Javanese ... more Much has been said about how Javanese puppet theatre, wayang kulit, richly reflects the Javanese world, and how changes and tensions in performance practice mirror those in culture and society. For decades, television has been as intensely part of the Javanese world as wayang. This book explores the ways two complex media and modes of being, seeing and fantasizing, with their different cultures, coexist and meet, and haunt or invade each other. It is what a Javanese commentator calls a “difficult marriage”: intimate on the one hand, deeply alienating on the other, institutionalized yet at the same time mercurial and shifting. This encounter is explored on many levels: from performance aesthetics and the technicalities of television production, to issues of time, space, light, place, and movement, to audience experience of live and televised performances, to the collaboration and struggle between performers and television producers. Central to the book are personal perspectives and experiences, as well as Javanese discussions surrounding the interaction between wayang and television and their cultures. They are brought into a conversation with reflections on media and technology by writers such as Karl Marx, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Derrida, Paul Virilio, and James Siegel. Wayang’s relationship with television is considered in the context of the theatre’s intercourse with older and newer media, including electricity, radio, audio- and video-recording, the internet and social media. (Introduction and Chapter 5 uploaded as sample. Published by NUS Press in 2019.)
The book focuses on the power of the theatrical medium, the actuality of the performance as a phy... more The book focuses on the power of the theatrical medium, the actuality of the performance as a physical, emotional, and social experience and event, and the sensations and feelings involved in performing and watching an all-night wayang performance. A single puppeteer moves puppets, delicately carved and painted according to a complex iconography, in dance-like patterns integrated with continuous music, which he also directs; he speaks the voices of all characters; and he represents beings and a mythological world that reflect (on) the human world, including the specific occasion and the people present. Paying attention to the wholeness of the 'multimedia' performance as an event, as well as to the sensations, subtle movements, and particular intonations of the performance, the author of this book bases his 'thick description' on years of learning to perform wayang, attending and participating in performances, interviews and discussions with people involved with wayang, supplemented by study of texts, from old manuscripts and performance manuals to newspaper articles and reports on performances. He shows the need not to be limited to any single discipline: in wayang, the relationships and interaction, for example, between visual movements and music, or between actions on the screen and actions among the audience-participants, are no less significant than, for example, the relationships within music. The book includes the most extensive discussion of recent changes in wayang theatre, its interaction with various traditional and modern entertainments, and the ways it is affected by politics and economy. A postscript focuses on the post-Soeharto era. The book is a contribution to the study of Indonesian performing arts and culture, but it is also intended for anyone interested in theatre and performing arts generally. (Published in 2008; for a more recent work, see my _Wayang and its Doubles: Javanese Puppet Theatre, Television and the Internet_, NUS Press, 2019 )
“I love Christmas, that Muslim holiday.” (K. Biebl)
In 1926, the communist avant-garde poet Ko... more “I love Christmas, that Muslim holiday.” (K. Biebl)
In 1926, the communist avant-garde poet Konstantin Biebl (1898–1951) travelled from Czechoslovakia to the Dutch East Indies. In his texts, poetic and often comic, both landlocked Bohemia and the colonized tropical islands are seen disorientingly anew, like “mirrors looking at themselves in each other.” _On This Modern Highway, Lost in the Jungle_ takes the reader on a journey crisscrossing the poet’s life and work, with particular attention to his travel writing and his dreams and memories of travel, as they mirror the book author’s own life experience as a Czech scholar of Indonesia living in island Southeast Asia. Biebl’s poetry and travels are also the book’s point of departure for a broader exploration of the intersections of travel and poetry, the attitudes to colonial/social injustice, and the representation of otherness in Czech literary and visual imagination, beyond Biebl’s times. In its attention to how poetic travel reflects the Czech historical experience in the shadow of imperial nations, the book moves scholarly reflection on literary travel, modernity, and colonialism to a new ground. [Table of Contents and a brief sample can be downloaded; the book, in electronic and printed format, is available from https://karolinum.cz/en/books/mrazek-on-this-modern-highway-lost-in-the-jungle-25880 ]
Uploads
Papers by Jan Mrazek
Eastern European Travels in Colonial Southeast Asia_, which(the whole book) is available for download here: https://ceupress.com/book/escaping-kakania . Henk Maier wrote a sweet review of the book, which gives a good sense of what I talk about in the Introduction: "“Reading Escaping Kakania is like walking into a disorienting web of intertextualities, a hall of convex mirrors: there is no escape from Kakania, that imaginary empire of Eastern Europe, that early 20th century state of unsettledness, heterogeneity, and desire. A fascinating collection of essays about early modern travelers venturing from Eastern Europe to Southeast Asia, both regions long defined in terms of colonialism and authoritarianism, these essays explore how these travelers—engineers, doctors, soldiers, teachers, Czechs, Hungarians, Poles, Galicians, Serbs—had great difficulties finding place and stance in a double world, in-between, off-center, seeing home mirrored in faraway lands. Written by 21st century Eastern European scholars, the essays
sympathetically look back at the experiences and adventures of predecessors; they provide reading with yet another convex mirror by writing in English, the ultimate colonial and imperial language. Escaping Kakania makes an important contribution to the discussions around the relevance of postcolonial and decolonial studies, focused as it is on regions, topics and histories beyond conventional centers of interest.”
Hendrik MJ Maier
University of California, Riverside
Published in _Escaping Kakania: Eastern European Travels in Colonial Southeast Asia_, ed. Jan Mrazek, CEU Press 2024. The whole volume is Open Access and can be downloaded here: https://ceupress.com/book/escaping-kakania
of visuality in the practices and discourses of western art. An overwhelming emphasis
on the visual sense, as well as the development of particular, historically specific
ways of seeing, displaying, and conceptualizing objects, are indivisibly part of
the history of European and American art.These seeing and thinking habits have also shaped Euro-American approaches to Asian art. This essay explores how things are seen and not seen in Southeast Asia (with focus on Java, Indonesia), how seeing is often part of experiences that go beyond seeing, and how what is (un)seen is itself often essentially different from the “art object” of western art history.
Books by Jan Mrazek
From back cover: Escaping Kakania is about fascinating characters—soldiers, doctors, scientists, writers, painters—who traveled from their eastern European homelands to colonial Southeast Asia. Their stories are told by experts on different countries in the two regions, who bring diverse approaches into a conversation that crosses disciplinary and national borders. The chapters deal with the diverse encounters of eastern Europeans with the many faces of colonial southeast Asia.
“What do travelers from Europe’s east recognize or reject in southeast Asia? Escaping Kakania is a stimulating contribution to studies of travel writing and identity issues in eastern Europe, particularly for its productive linkage of two regions that have both been defined in terms of their in-betweenness and heterogeneity, and their relationships to powerful others, above all an imagined ‘Europe.’ As well as introducing a broad array of intriguing writers and perspectives, the emphasis here on varieties of difference, and a world that is interconnected in a multiplicity of ways, makes this book an important intervention in travel writing studies in general.” Wendy Bracewel, UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, London
“Reading Escaping Kakania is like walking into a disorienting web of intertextualities, a hall of convex mirrors: there is no escape from Kakania, that imaginary empire of Eastern Europe, that early 20th century state of unsettledness, heterogeneity, and desire. A fascinating collection of essays about early modern travelers venturing from Eastern Europe to Southeast Asia, both regions long defined in terms of colonialism and authoritarianism, these essays explore how these travelers—engineers, doctors, soldiers, teachers, Czechs, Hungarians, Poles, Galicians, Serbs—had great difficulties finding place and stance in a double world, in-between, off-center, seeing home mirrored in faraway lands. Written by 21st century Eastern European scholars, the essays sympathetically look back at the experiences and adventures of predecessors; they provide reading with yet another convex mirror by writing in English, the ultimate colonial and imperial language. Escaping Kakania makes an important contribution to the discussions around the relevance of postcolonial and decolonial studies, focused as it is on regions, topics and histories beyond conventional centers of interest.” Hendrik MJ Maier, University of California, Riverside
Eastern European Travels in Colonial Southeast Asia_, which(the whole book) is available for download here: https://ceupress.com/book/escaping-kakania . Henk Maier wrote a sweet review of the book, which gives a good sense of what I talk about in the Introduction: "“Reading Escaping Kakania is like walking into a disorienting web of intertextualities, a hall of convex mirrors: there is no escape from Kakania, that imaginary empire of Eastern Europe, that early 20th century state of unsettledness, heterogeneity, and desire. A fascinating collection of essays about early modern travelers venturing from Eastern Europe to Southeast Asia, both regions long defined in terms of colonialism and authoritarianism, these essays explore how these travelers—engineers, doctors, soldiers, teachers, Czechs, Hungarians, Poles, Galicians, Serbs—had great difficulties finding place and stance in a double world, in-between, off-center, seeing home mirrored in faraway lands. Written by 21st century Eastern European scholars, the essays
sympathetically look back at the experiences and adventures of predecessors; they provide reading with yet another convex mirror by writing in English, the ultimate colonial and imperial language. Escaping Kakania makes an important contribution to the discussions around the relevance of postcolonial and decolonial studies, focused as it is on regions, topics and histories beyond conventional centers of interest.”
Hendrik MJ Maier
University of California, Riverside
Published in _Escaping Kakania: Eastern European Travels in Colonial Southeast Asia_, ed. Jan Mrazek, CEU Press 2024. The whole volume is Open Access and can be downloaded here: https://ceupress.com/book/escaping-kakania
of visuality in the practices and discourses of western art. An overwhelming emphasis
on the visual sense, as well as the development of particular, historically specific
ways of seeing, displaying, and conceptualizing objects, are indivisibly part of
the history of European and American art.These seeing and thinking habits have also shaped Euro-American approaches to Asian art. This essay explores how things are seen and not seen in Southeast Asia (with focus on Java, Indonesia), how seeing is often part of experiences that go beyond seeing, and how what is (un)seen is itself often essentially different from the “art object” of western art history.
From back cover: Escaping Kakania is about fascinating characters—soldiers, doctors, scientists, writers, painters—who traveled from their eastern European homelands to colonial Southeast Asia. Their stories are told by experts on different countries in the two regions, who bring diverse approaches into a conversation that crosses disciplinary and national borders. The chapters deal with the diverse encounters of eastern Europeans with the many faces of colonial southeast Asia.
“What do travelers from Europe’s east recognize or reject in southeast Asia? Escaping Kakania is a stimulating contribution to studies of travel writing and identity issues in eastern Europe, particularly for its productive linkage of two regions that have both been defined in terms of their in-betweenness and heterogeneity, and their relationships to powerful others, above all an imagined ‘Europe.’ As well as introducing a broad array of intriguing writers and perspectives, the emphasis here on varieties of difference, and a world that is interconnected in a multiplicity of ways, makes this book an important intervention in travel writing studies in general.” Wendy Bracewel, UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, London
“Reading Escaping Kakania is like walking into a disorienting web of intertextualities, a hall of convex mirrors: there is no escape from Kakania, that imaginary empire of Eastern Europe, that early 20th century state of unsettledness, heterogeneity, and desire. A fascinating collection of essays about early modern travelers venturing from Eastern Europe to Southeast Asia, both regions long defined in terms of colonialism and authoritarianism, these essays explore how these travelers—engineers, doctors, soldiers, teachers, Czechs, Hungarians, Poles, Galicians, Serbs—had great difficulties finding place and stance in a double world, in-between, off-center, seeing home mirrored in faraway lands. Written by 21st century Eastern European scholars, the essays sympathetically look back at the experiences and adventures of predecessors; they provide reading with yet another convex mirror by writing in English, the ultimate colonial and imperial language. Escaping Kakania makes an important contribution to the discussions around the relevance of postcolonial and decolonial studies, focused as it is on regions, topics and histories beyond conventional centers of interest.” Hendrik MJ Maier, University of California, Riverside
In 1926, the communist avant-garde poet Konstantin Biebl (1898–1951) travelled from Czechoslovakia to the Dutch East Indies. In his texts, poetic and often comic, both landlocked Bohemia and the colonized tropical islands are seen disorientingly anew, like “mirrors looking at themselves in each other.” _On This Modern Highway, Lost in the Jungle_ takes the reader on a journey crisscrossing the poet’s life and work, with particular attention to his travel writing and his dreams and memories of travel, as they mirror the book author’s own life experience as a Czech scholar of Indonesia living in island Southeast Asia. Biebl’s poetry and travels are also the book’s point of departure for a broader exploration of the intersections of travel and poetry, the attitudes to colonial/social injustice, and the representation of otherness in Czech literary and visual imagination, beyond Biebl’s times. In its attention to how poetic travel reflects the Czech historical experience in the shadow of imperial nations, the book moves scholarly reflection on literary travel, modernity, and colonialism to a new ground. [Table of Contents and a brief sample can be downloaded; the book, in electronic and printed format, is available from https://karolinum.cz/en/books/mrazek-on-this-modern-highway-lost-in-the-jungle-25880 ]