Interview with Professor Viola Lasmana: Connecting Southeast Asian Studies with Southeast Asian American Studies

I had a conversation with Professor Viola Lasmana, a South and Southeast Asian American Studies Postdoctoral Fellow at Rutgers University. She is currently gearing up for a new job at California State University.

Her bio reads:

“Viola Lasmana is an ACLS Emerging Voices Fellow / South and Southeast Asian American Studies Postdoctoral Fellow. At Rutgers, she is also affiliated with Global Asias and the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures. Viola is a scholar and teacher working at the intersections of transpacific studies, Asian American studies, gender and sexuality studies, and global digital humanities, with an emphasis on literature, film, and media arts. She is currently completing a book, Shadow Imaginations: Transpacific Approaches to Post-1965 Indonesian Archives, on the reconstitution of Indonesia’s decimated cultural archive. Her work has appeared in Alternative Historiographies of the Digital Humanities, Film Quarterly, make/shift: feminisms in motion, The Cine-Files, Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities, Visual Anthropology, Computers and Composition, and Interdisciplinary Humanities. Viola has previously taught in the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University, American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, and Media Arts and Culture at Occidental College. She received her PhD in English from the University of Southern California, with a certificate in Digital Media and Culture from the USC School of Cinematic Arts, and the Andrew W. Mellon PhD Fellowship in Digital Humanities.” (bio and photo from Rutgers University Directory)

Could you talk about how you personally got involved in the fields of Southeast Asian American Studies as well as gender and sexuality studies? What interests you about these topics and/or their intersectionalities?

All throughout my academic career, I was an English major. So, I’ve always been in the humanities through my undergrad, graduate career, my master’s, and my PhD. Initially, I wasn’t focused on Southeast Asia as a region. I was actually interested more in American literature. Specifically, I was very interested in writers of color in the United States and just writing about different experiences in the United States.

Then, when I got to the University of Southern California, where I did my Ph.D., I worked with mentors and advisors, who are scholars in the fields of transnational and Trans-Pacific American Studies. Their work took me on a kind of transnational turn, causing me to think more expansively about the United States and about American Studies. I was thinking about cultural studies of American history but in a more transnational and global way.

From there, I started thinking about my own experiences. I’ve always wanted to write about my own personal history as an Indonesian and Indonesian American person now in the United States. That’s really how I got into it: I’ve always wanted to connect my own experience growing up in Southeast Asia (in Indonesia) to my experience in the United States. United States imperialism and presence in Southeast Asia has a lot to do with how Indonesia was shaped in the years that I grew up. So, I really came into Southeast Asian American studies professionally but also from a personal angle.

I also really wanted to highlight Indonesia as a region; even though it’s one of the largest countries in the world, it is not one of the major nations that scholars have written about. I feel like it’s really a region that has so much potential to be written about and to be discussed in the scholarly world. I am indebted to writers of color, especially feminists of color, for thinking about intersectionalities between race, gender, sexuality, and class. As Audrey Lorde says, we don’t live single-issue lives.

Thinking about wars in the Pacific and around the world, gender is always such an inflection point. Violence against women is often used as a tool for war, for instance. So, being a woman myself and a feminist scholar, I believe that it’s really important to talk about these historical experiences, not just in terms of race but in terms of how gender impacts the experiences of those who are impacted by war and also those who continue to live with the aftermath.

Can you please talk more about your book-in-progress “Shadow Imaginations: Transpacific Approaches to Post-1965 Indonesian Archives”? What were your motivations for beginning this research?

This book project is based on my PhD dissertation. Usually, when academics finish their PhD, their first book project is typically a revision or expansion of their dissertation.

Let me tell you more about the title itself. “Shadow Imaginations” actually comes from the Indonesian word “Bayangan,” which contains two meanings. The word for “shadow” in Indonesian is “Bayangan,” but this word also means “imagination.” I was already very interested in the politics of this and in the double meaning. There’s just so much power in thinking about shadow as a metaphor, as a figure, something hidden, and something that comes out of the dark. To think about how shadows are also connected to the word imagination was something really engaging for me. My project also talks a little bit about shadow play or shadow puppet theater, which is quite an indigenous and very popular art form in Indonesia. The very ideas of shadow and shadow play are already themes that run throughout the work itself. It’s also a form of art that has been appropriated by the state. So, the politics of that is also very important to the work.

In this book, I really want to look at different kinds of feminist cultural productions that follow major events or catastrophes. For example, in 1965, there was an anti-communist genocide in Indonesia that was supported by the United States. That was part of wider Cold War histories. If you think about the Vietnam War, the 90s, or genocide, Indonesia is also connected to those. Indonesia is connected to attempts to really shut down communism throughout the world.

There was another incident in 1998, where there was student dominance, demonstrations, and lots of violence that led to the fall of the dictator in Indonesia. All of these events that happened in Indonesia are all connected and also are connected to the United States as well as a supporter of Western imperialism in the region.

I’m looking specifically at feminist cultural production. I’m looking at literature and poetry films made by women authors. I’m also examining works made by queer women from communities in Indonesia that really talk back to the past. This is especially important when it’s a past that involves so much violence against women involved.

It’s really important for me to try to reclaim some of that history and some of that narrative by centering women’s perspectives as well as those of queer communities in Indonesia.

The project is really about reclaiming the silenced narratives about that past and seeing how artists have tried to recover some of the loss and silenced past, in creative ways.

How do your studies of feminist media and pedagogy function in conjunction with your other work?

It is very much a part of it; the two are inseparable. The feminist media and research are both parts of theories and involve the practice of doing, as well. They both include looking at a lot of different kinds of feminist scholars and are both very important to me.

For example, I am doing research on a film that was created by a group of women and it’s considered the first queer women’s film in Indonesia. But, it’s also very important for me to spend time and talk to the filmmakers themselves, and not just write about their work and experiences without getting to hear about it from them. There’s a phrase in Southeast Asia that’s very popular, which basically communicates the message that you have to hang out with people and just spend time to really get to know people as people. This is a part of the feminist research process.

This practice also helps make sure that I’m not disconnected, even though it of course comes with challenges, given that I’m doing international and transnational research and so I’m not in the same location, or at the same time as some of the subjects IN research. So, it’s very hard to maintain a connection. But, as I said, I am indebted to different kinds of feminists of color, and queer scholars and thinkers. It’s important to think and go beyond white feminists and white feminism. That forms a lot of the ways in which I’m thinking through a lot of my media work.

How does your work on the American Council of Learned Societies work together with/relate to your research at Rutgers University?

The American Council of Learned Societies is the organization that is sponsoring my postdoctoral position at Rutgers University. They’ve actually been very generous in giving me this fellowship at Rutgers (which I’ve been at for the past 2 years), and before that, I was at Columbia. It was also sponsored by ACLS. I’ve just recently sent them an email thanking them for their support over the past 3 years because after this I am actually moving to Southern California for a new job. It’s actually all part of the same work. ACLS is a sponsoring organization that funds me and gives me my salary. Rutgers University is the host institution, and so that’s where I teach. That’s where I work and have gotten to know a lot of amazing faculty, staff, and students.

What are your goals for how you hope to see your intersectional research develop, specifically within the next few months or during the summer?

At the moment, I’m gearing up to begin my new job and am wrapping up my time at Rutgers. This is my last three months at Rutgers. I am hosting an event actually. On April 11, this Thursday. It’s called “After Wars: South & Southeast Asian Diasporic Arts and Performance.”

I invited three speakers/artists for this event. It’s also part of the larger intersectional work and community building. To me, hosting and organizing events is a really great way to not just build my own network of people who I want to be in conversation with, but also bring students into the picture. So, for this event, it was actually a priority for me to work with students. In fact, we are partnering with a Southeast Asian student organization on campus.

The event will involve many student performances, such as a poetry reading, and a singing performance from a Filipino group. Then, the main spectacle of the event is the three artists.

The first speaker is a South Asian scholar, Kareem Khubchandani, who writes and also does drag. The second speaker is Zavé Marthohardjono, who is a non-binary Indonesian American and multidisciplinary artist. The last speaker is Sokunthary Svay, who is a Cambodian American poet, scholar, artist, and singer as well.

Beyond just teaching, writing, and researching, I think it is also very critical to find ways to bring communities together. In this case, we are bringing together the students as well as people from outside the Rutgers University community. The event will be fun, dynamic, and just hopefully a transformative and meaningful experience.

Also, this is one of the last major things I’m doing at Rutgers. Through the summer, I’m just gearing up to prepare for my new job at California State University in Long Beach. In this new position, I’ll be teaching a lot of the same things I currently do. One of the things I really want to do or rather, that I am going to do is to start building community with the students there. For example, I’ll be part of the comparative World Literature program. One of the things that I am going to do this fall immediately is work with a group of students to restart the departmental journal, which will be student-run. The editorial board is student-run, and I’m going to be there to help lead and facilitate the running of this journal, so that will already be a community.

I’m looking forward to community building because that will allow me to put into practice the things that I believe in, such as when we talk about the intersectionality between race, gender, sexuality, class, and other different kinds of backgrounds or abilities. I’m also looking forward to putting this into action because this will be a more permanent, stable, and long-term job.

What advice do you have for those interested in fields similar to your areas of interest? Do you have blogs, podcasts, or summer opportunities that you recommend students explore?

One thing I would recommend is to do what you did: do a Google search and find people in the fields you are interested in and find out what people have written about. The first thing is to just start reading and find out more about the histories, and the different historical contacts. Read different kinds of books about women’s studies that aren’t restricted to one kind of region or one community. Read across many different worlds.

I would recommend reading Audrey Lorde’s work. “The Uses of Anger” is wonderful. Bell Hooks also has a lot of really great pieces. Hooks’ writing has helped me a lot in my pedagogy and teaching as well. Gloria Anzaldúa is also a great writer to look at.

In terms of podcasts, I don’t have too many recommendations, but there’s one that I was on just recently. It is really good it comes out of Cornell University. It’s called the Gatty Rewind podcast. It’s a podcast that’s based on a lecture series called “The Gatty Lecture Series” in their Southeast Asia program. Keeping with the Southeast Asia theme, they have a podcast where they interview the speakers who have come to Cornell to talk about their work in Southeast Asia. I was interviewed for this late last year, on November 30th. They’re really great, and it’s a really good podcast. They have some really amazing speakers on it. Also, the podcast is run by a PhD student. She’s amazing.

Is there anything that you want to bring up that we didn’t already discuss?

I think it’s important to continue just being open to possibilities and thinking expansively, because things may take time. I feel like the most meaningful work takes time. It’s so important to think across different regions across different communities because everything is connected. I always try to teach my students to think about how things that happened in Southeast Asia are so connected to what’s happening in the United States, and I hope others can too.