Books by Adeline M Koh
edited collection under contract with Punctum Books
under contract with Northwestern University Press
Singapore and Malaysia are rapidly modernising, globalising Asian states which, although being di... more Singapore and Malaysia are rapidly modernising, globalising Asian states which, although being distinct nations since 1965, share common elements in the on-going struggle over the meaning of gender and sexuality in their societies. This is the first book to discuss a range of discourses around gender in these two countries.
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
In 1968, Argentinean Filmmakers Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino first articulated the theory ... more In 1968, Argentinean Filmmakers Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino first articulated the theory of a "Third Cinema"—a revolutionary genre of cinema that would counter oppression on a global scale. Intended to be a "guerilla cinema" geared at contesting the overwhelming dominance of Western cinema, Solana and Getino distinguished Third Cinema from other forms of cinema, classifying these other types as First Cinema (commercial cinema epitomized by Hollywood) and Second Cinema. "Third Cinema" was supposed to be a liberationary tool—particularly for the bulk of the world that was subject to European imperialism, such as Latin America, Africa and 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.
Books In Progress by Adeline M Koh
This book explores the phenomenon of “cosmopolitan whiteness”: the employment of metaphor... more This book explores the phenomenon of “cosmopolitan whiteness”: the employment of metaphorical and material white elements in postcolonial literature from Southeast Asia, West and Southern Africa, and the Caribbean. “Cosmopolitan whiteness” denotes the use of whiteness as a type of cultural property, and a locus of invisible privilege. This form of whitnenes is manifest in practices of cultural sophistication, beauty rituals and femininity. This book draws on both historical methodologies and literary modes of close reading.
Journal Special Issues by Adeline M Koh
The three projects that are showcased in this issue—Digitizing Chinese Englishmen, the Re/Collect... more The three projects that are showcased in this issue—Digitizing Chinese Englishmen, the Re/Collecting Project, and 3-11—are part of a growing attempt to address these gaps by digitally recovering, collecting, and archiving the histories and presents of Asian and Asian American communities. The notion of recovery is of primary importance to both my own Digitizing Chinese Englishmen and Grace Yeh’s Re/Collecting Project. Digitizing Chinese Englishmen is a digital archival project that focuses on the digitization and dissemination of an Anglophone magazine, the Straits Chinese Magazine, produced by Malayan Chinese writers in the late nineteenth century. The hybrid identities of many of the publication’s authors—negotiating being pulled between the Chinese and British empires, while on Malayan colonial soil—provide a complex yet clear picture of the construction of later postcolonial Anglophone identity. In conceiving of the structure of the project, I also consider what makes up a “postcolonial” digital archive.
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.
Verge: Studies in Global Asias, 2015
Edited section on Asian/American digital humanities featuring "Asian/American and the Digital|Tec... more Edited section on Asian/American digital humanities featuring "Asian/American and the Digital|Technological So Far" by Anne Cong Huyen and Konrad Ng, "What Race Does Online: 'Gangnam Style' and Asian/American Identity in the Digital Age'" for Verge: Studies in Global Asias
Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific, Oct 2014
And thus the title was born for what became this project: 'Troubling Gender, Vexing Sexualities.'... more And thus the title was born for what became this project: 'Troubling Gender, Vexing Sexualities.' There are two connotations to the term 'troubling' that we want to evoke. On one level, the term 'troubling' connotes its counterpart 'troublesome', meaning something annoying, irritating and vexing. Difficult children are often referred to as 'troublesome': trying, exasperating, badly behaved. On another level, the term conjures up something deeper and spiritual: disturbing, problematic, taxing—a perspective mirrored in our second adjective, 'vexing'. We argue that gender and sexuality are simultaneously irksome, maddening and disquieting in the writing of Singapore and Malaysia studies.
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.
Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles by Adeline M Koh
Hybrid Pedagogy, Aug 1, 2015
In this essay, simultaneously given as a keynote address for ILIADS.org 2015, I ask: why do we us... more In this essay, simultaneously given as a keynote address for ILIADS.org 2015, I ask: why do we use more active types of pedagogy to teach our students, and more traditional forms (lectures) to teach each other? I argue that the new digital landscape along with increasing the accessibility of our classrooms demands that we restructure the way that we teach, and give some examples of this type of restructuring. I also asked my audience to participate in redesigning a traditional literary classroom exercise with the Internet in mind. Live links to all the resources can be found in the original article here: http://www.hybridpedagogy.com/journal/teaching-with-the-internet-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-google-in-my-classroom/
Hybrid Pedagogy, Apr 19, 2015
"I am often asked about the digital humanities and how it can update, make relevant, and provide ... more "I am often asked about the digital humanities and how it can update, make relevant, and provide funding for many a beleaguered humanities department. Some faculty at underfunded institutions imagine DH is going to revitalize their discipline — it’s going to magically interest undergraduates, give faculty research funding, and exponentially increase enrollment.
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."
Journal of Victorian Culture, Sep 19, 2014
This paper probes the politics of digitizing the literary nineteenth century. It focuses on three... more This paper probes the politics of digitizing the literary nineteenth century. It focuses on three issues: (1) how the politics of the literary nineteenth century archive interact with and reflect issues within Victorian studies; (2) existing issues with interfaces of existing literary digital projects that limit their correlations with colonialism or the literary productions by the colonized; (3) the contrast between digital literary projects and broader historical digital archives, and the urgency of dealing with this gap.
Hybrid Pedagogy, Aug 14, 2014
This article provides a brief overview of an assortment of digital humanities projects that can b... more This article provides a brief overview of an assortment of digital humanities projects that can be implemented in primarily undergraduate-focused institutions. Readers should be able to decide on what level they would like to start at, and build some possible ideas to “scaffold” the project, or stages of development and release for the project. At the end of the overview I offer an activity that can be easily applied by instructors interested in conducting digital humanities workshops at their institutions and an annotated list of additional resources. My goal is to provide an easy introduction for instructors to think through possibilities for incorporating the digital humanities within an undergraduate curriculum with either free or inexpensive digital tools.
French Forum, 2013
While Claire de Duras’ 1823 novel Ourika is commonly considered one of the most penetrating portr... more While Claire de Duras’ 1823 novel Ourika is commonly considered one of the most penetrating portrayals of racism in the nineteenth century, this essay argues that a deeper examination of the novel’s marriage plot bears revisiting. Specifically, it claims that a close reading of marriage, race and citizenship in the novel reveals an unexplored degree of colonial anxiety towards the potential equality of black and white women. The politically charged elements of race and citizenship in the main character’s potential marriage has been mostly neglected by the majority of critics, who mostly consider it a benign aspect of the form and function of the Romantic novel. The article contends that Duras breaks narrative coherence in her construction of the main character to prevent the possible representation of a black woman who could possess the rights, responsibilities and citizenship of adult white French women. It constructs its argument through an examination of the legal changes made to marriage after the French Revolution and its effects, a survey of the history of prohibitions against mixed-race marriage in the French Empire, and close readings of the marriage trope in Ourika. By rehistoricizing marriage, race and métissage in the novel, this essay contributes to a growing ambiguity on race relations within existing Duras criticism.
differences: a Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 2014
This essay explores the “social contract” of the digital humanities community. I argue that the s... more This essay explores the “social contract” of the digital humanities community. I argue that the social contract of the digital humanities is composed of two rules: 1) the notion of niceness or civility; and 2) the possession of technical knowledge, defined as knowledge of coding or computer programming. These rules are repeatedly raised within the public sphere of the digital humanities and are simultaneously contested and criticized. I claim that these rules and the social contract come from humanities computing, a field commonly described as the digital humanities’ sole predecessor. Humanities computing has historically differentiated itself from media and cultural studies, defining itself as a field that uses computational methods to address humanities research questions rather than exploring the impact of computation on culture and the humanities. I call for a movement that would go beyond this social contract by creating multiple genealogies for the digital humanities; by arguing that current conceptualizations of the digital humanities have not only developed from humanities computing but also include additional fields such as new media studies, postcolonial science and technology studies, and digital research on race, gender, class, and disability and their impact on cultures around the world.
Ada: A Journal of Gender, new Media & Technology, 2013
Koh describes the launch and reactions to the DHThis experiment (DHThis.org), a platform that sou... more Koh describes the launch and reactions to the DHThis experiment (DHThis.org), a platform that sources from users, rather than from a select group of editors.
Hybrid Pedagogy, Apr 3, 2014
This article investigates racial melancholia as a comparative literary device in Claire de Duras’... more This article investigates racial melancholia as a comparative literary device in Claire de Duras’s Ourika (1823) and Hugh Clifford’s Saleh (1904). Racial melancholia refers to the process whereby racial self-knowledge becomes a site of psychological trauma for colonized subjects. In both novels, the European educations of Ourika, a West African girl, and Saleh, a Malay prince, lead to their development of racial melancholia and their eventual deaths. European education is blamed as the cause of this deadly melancholia. Yet both stories have different moral centres: one uses racial melancholia to argue for a universal humanism, while the other asserts that cultural difference is fixed and unchangeable. This article draws on psychoanalysis, race theory and postcolonial theory to analyse the charged symbols of racial melancholia and European education across the Francophone and Anglophone colonial empires.
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Books by Adeline M Koh
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.
Books In Progress by Adeline M Koh
Journal Special Issues by Adeline M Koh
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.
Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles by Adeline M Koh
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.