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Adeline M Koh
Adeline Koh is Associate Professor of Postcolonial Literature at Stockton University. She works on the intersections of postcolonial studies, digital humanities, and literature. She is the Director of the Center for Digital Humanities at Stockton, and is the designer of Trading Races, a historical role-playing game designed to teach race consciousness.
She is also co-founder of Postcolonial Digital Humanities, a collaborative website producing a new orientation for postcolonial analysis in the digital age. She has held fellowships in the Duke University Humanities Writ Large program, the National University of Singapore and will be a Regional Faculty fellow under the Penn Humanities Fellowship Program in 2015-2016.
In addition to numerous journal articles, she is a core contributor to the ProfHacker column at the Chronicle for Higher Education. Her book Critical Histories of the Digital Humanities: Media, Science, Pedagogy is currently under contract with Northwestern University Press.
She is also co-founder of Postcolonial Digital Humanities, a collaborative website producing a new orientation for postcolonial analysis in the digital age. She has held fellowships in the Duke University Humanities Writ Large program, the National University of Singapore and will be a Regional Faculty fellow under the Penn Humanities Fellowship Program in 2015-2016.
In addition to numerous journal articles, she is a core contributor to the ProfHacker column at the Chronicle for Higher Education. Her book Critical Histories of the Digital Humanities: Media, Science, Pedagogy is currently under contract with Northwestern University Press.
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Women and the Politics of Representation in Southeast Asia: Engendering Discourse in Singapore and Malaysia seeks to give an overview of how gender and representation come together in various configurations in the history and contemporary culture of both nations. It examines the discursive construction of gender, sexuality and representation in a variety of areas, including the politics of everyday life, education, popular culture, literature, film, theatre and photography. Chapters examine a range of tropes such as the Orientalist "Sarong Party Girl," the iconic "Singapore Girl" of Singapore Airlines, and the figure of pious Muslim femininity celebrated by Malaysian NGO IMAN, all of which play important roles in delineating limitations for gender roles. The collection also draws attention to resistance to these gender boundaries in theatre, film, blogs and social media, and pedagogy.
Bringing together research from a variety of humanistic and social science fields, such as film, material culture, semiotics, literature and pedagogy, the book is a comprehensive feminist survey that will be of use for students and scholars of Women’s Studies and Asian Studies, as well as on courses on gender, media and popular culture in Asia
Spanning a wide geographical spread of cinemas ranging from Latin America, North and Sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean and Asia, this book addresses the following questions: how can we rethink the concept of "Third Cinema" for today? How do new national cinemas—and their accompanying media industries—reflect the concerns of societies that are struggling with the implications of accelerated modernization—and how are these concerns configured in new genres of aesthetics? Is there still a "Third Cinema" component in contemporary cinemas, and if so, how can it be understood?
This collection of essays thus explores issues such as modernism/modernity, colonialism and neo-colonialism through revisiting the concept of Third Cinema through film and media studies. It aims to be particularly important and useful to practitioners and theorists of cinema, the fields of comparative literature, history and cultural studies.
Grace Yeh’s Re/Collecting Project, conversely, brings the importance of recovery to the mid- and late twentieth century, focusing on the narratives of voiceless Filipino workers in San Luis Obispo, on California’s Central Coast. Yeh’s project focused on turning objects that were not considered “collectible” by traditional archives into valuable historical memory—
finding items in individuals’ garages, attics, and closets about a people’s forgotten agricultural labor and the impact of this labor. Though the project was originally conceived as a physical exhibition titled Routes and Roots, Yeh, realizing the importance of continued public access to these community stories and materials, launched the Re/Collecting Project to continue the project in virtual form. Re/Collecting is conceived of as an
“ethnic studies memory project of California’s Central Coast.”
Eric Dinmore’s digital archive of 3-11 brings us into the twenty-first
century with documentation of the Great East Japan Earthquake and the associated tsunami and nuclear catastrophes of March 11, 2011.
Dinmore notes that the type of collecting he encountered in creating a digital archive from 3-11 diverged greatly from the physical archives that he, as a historian, had been more used to encountering. While the historian’s usual archive generally means an often difficult-to-access, proprietary archive, the 3-11 archive was conceived of as “an open forum for the global online community to analyze, remember, and reflect on Japan’s
envirotechnical tragedy.” This open forum included massive amounts of digital data, including social media posts from Twitter and Facebook, blog entries, discussion group postings, nongovernmental organization communications, and government websites. The sheer volume and rapid production of this material, Dinmore argues, demand that the twenty-first-century digital historian deeply reconsider the methodologies and impact of the archival process.
While we had originally intended to study the ways women have been left out of Singapore and Malaysia studies, we have also paid heed to multiple theoretical shifts within the field of 'women's studies' that have shown that a narrow concentration on 'women' is limiting.[2] Thus we use the terms 'women' and 'gender' to denote interconnected yet distinct areas of study in our special issue of Intersections. Through our focus on 'gender,' our contributors also discuss men and masculinity in their essays, and through our use of 'sexuality,' we signal our intentions to include perspectives on queer, trans and intersex identities and analysis. Our focus on these three terms signifies our attention to the need to describe a variety of identities, and to provide analytical frameworks for studying a range of discursive, economic and geopolitical processes and social movements.
Well, the reality is this: what has until recently been commonly understood as real “Digital Humanities” is already belated and is not going to save humanities departments from ever bigger budget cuts and potential dissolution. If you want to save humanities departments, champion the new wave of digital humanities: one which has humanistic questions at its core."
Women and the Politics of Representation in Southeast Asia: Engendering Discourse in Singapore and Malaysia seeks to give an overview of how gender and representation come together in various configurations in the history and contemporary culture of both nations. It examines the discursive construction of gender, sexuality and representation in a variety of areas, including the politics of everyday life, education, popular culture, literature, film, theatre and photography. Chapters examine a range of tropes such as the Orientalist "Sarong Party Girl," the iconic "Singapore Girl" of Singapore Airlines, and the figure of pious Muslim femininity celebrated by Malaysian NGO IMAN, all of which play important roles in delineating limitations for gender roles. The collection also draws attention to resistance to these gender boundaries in theatre, film, blogs and social media, and pedagogy.
Bringing together research from a variety of humanistic and social science fields, such as film, material culture, semiotics, literature and pedagogy, the book is a comprehensive feminist survey that will be of use for students and scholars of Women’s Studies and Asian Studies, as well as on courses on gender, media and popular culture in Asia
Spanning a wide geographical spread of cinemas ranging from Latin America, North and Sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean and Asia, this book addresses the following questions: how can we rethink the concept of "Third Cinema" for today? How do new national cinemas—and their accompanying media industries—reflect the concerns of societies that are struggling with the implications of accelerated modernization—and how are these concerns configured in new genres of aesthetics? Is there still a "Third Cinema" component in contemporary cinemas, and if so, how can it be understood?
This collection of essays thus explores issues such as modernism/modernity, colonialism and neo-colonialism through revisiting the concept of Third Cinema through film and media studies. It aims to be particularly important and useful to practitioners and theorists of cinema, the fields of comparative literature, history and cultural studies.
Grace Yeh’s Re/Collecting Project, conversely, brings the importance of recovery to the mid- and late twentieth century, focusing on the narratives of voiceless Filipino workers in San Luis Obispo, on California’s Central Coast. Yeh’s project focused on turning objects that were not considered “collectible” by traditional archives into valuable historical memory—
finding items in individuals’ garages, attics, and closets about a people’s forgotten agricultural labor and the impact of this labor. Though the project was originally conceived as a physical exhibition titled Routes and Roots, Yeh, realizing the importance of continued public access to these community stories and materials, launched the Re/Collecting Project to continue the project in virtual form. Re/Collecting is conceived of as an
“ethnic studies memory project of California’s Central Coast.”
Eric Dinmore’s digital archive of 3-11 brings us into the twenty-first
century with documentation of the Great East Japan Earthquake and the associated tsunami and nuclear catastrophes of March 11, 2011.
Dinmore notes that the type of collecting he encountered in creating a digital archive from 3-11 diverged greatly from the physical archives that he, as a historian, had been more used to encountering. While the historian’s usual archive generally means an often difficult-to-access, proprietary archive, the 3-11 archive was conceived of as “an open forum for the global online community to analyze, remember, and reflect on Japan’s
envirotechnical tragedy.” This open forum included massive amounts of digital data, including social media posts from Twitter and Facebook, blog entries, discussion group postings, nongovernmental organization communications, and government websites. The sheer volume and rapid production of this material, Dinmore argues, demand that the twenty-first-century digital historian deeply reconsider the methodologies and impact of the archival process.
While we had originally intended to study the ways women have been left out of Singapore and Malaysia studies, we have also paid heed to multiple theoretical shifts within the field of 'women's studies' that have shown that a narrow concentration on 'women' is limiting.[2] Thus we use the terms 'women' and 'gender' to denote interconnected yet distinct areas of study in our special issue of Intersections. Through our focus on 'gender,' our contributors also discuss men and masculinity in their essays, and through our use of 'sexuality,' we signal our intentions to include perspectives on queer, trans and intersex identities and analysis. Our focus on these three terms signifies our attention to the need to describe a variety of identities, and to provide analytical frameworks for studying a range of discursive, economic and geopolitical processes and social movements.
Well, the reality is this: what has until recently been commonly understood as real “Digital Humanities” is already belated and is not going to save humanities departments from ever bigger budget cuts and potential dissolution. If you want to save humanities departments, champion the new wave of digital humanities: one which has humanistic questions at its core."
Our website addresses these opportunities by outlining the shape of the contemporary ‘postcolonial digital humanities’ through interrogating the ways postcolonial studies has evolved through different phases of internet culture. We study developments from the original Web 1.0 postcolonial websites, to what Lisa Nakamura and Peter Chow-White have identified as the “transmedia” shift beginning in the mid-2000s, to the later move to Web 2.0 and the rise of social media cultures. The mid-2000s transmedia shift began changing digital practices by eliding boundaries between media producers and consumers. Such shifts have raised questions of possible epistemological differences in the articulation of identities in digital spaces. However, scholars including Alan Liu, Anna Everett, Jessie Daniels, and Nakamura herself, have observed that problematic racial and ethnic categories persist within digital cultures. Similarly, as Afrofuturists Alondra Nelson and Kali Tal have proposed, digital spaces remain susceptible to racial oppression and white supremacy. Taking these assessments of digital space as its basis, postcolonial digital humanities brings critiques of colonialism, imperialism, and globalization and their relationship to race, class, gender, sexuality and disability to bear on the digital humanities.
Digitizing ‘Chinese Englishmen’ documents how British colonial culture created a group of “Asian Victorians” in Southeast Asia through the establishment of a colonial intermediary class within the diasporic Chinese group known as the “Straits Chinese.” While the Straits Chinese had established roots in Southeast Asia from the seventeenth century, under British rule they became an important comprador class serving as mediators between the British and the rest of the Empire. Digitizing ‘Chinese Englishmen’ is an attempt to give voice and representation to formerly colonized subjects, and to attempt to work against the “imperial meaning-making” of the archive by implementing new types of reading and commenting technologies that disrupt the idea of dominant and subjugated knowledges."
The game is is set two months before the Supreme Court landmark decisions on affirmative action in 2003. Players take on the roles of multi-ethnic and multi-national members of an imaginary Michigan Student Assembly, and present speeches on race related issues based upon their characters’ social and political orientation in gameplay. By asking players to assume the ideological worldview of people different from themselves, the game encourages players to “trade races” intellectually and emotionally.
Trading Races is designed to be used in both undergraduate courses on race and ethnicity, as well as in advanced high school curricula. It has been funded by the Duke Humanities Writ Large grant, a Mellon grant aimed at redesigning undergraduate education in the humanities, and by the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. Plans for an electronic version of the game are also in the works. Please contact the game designer, Adeline Koh to playtest.