Papers (Part 1)

• Félix Resurrección Hidalgo’s “The Church Against the State”: Conspiracy, Controversy, and Censorship in Colonial and Contemporary Philippines Pearlie Rose Baluyut State University of New York at Oneonta

  A 19th-century Propaganda Movement member, Filipino painter Félix Resurrección Hidalgo painted Governor-General Manuel de Bustillo Bustamante’s 1719 assassination inside the Palacio Real in Manila. Sent by Spain to investigate the colony’s royal treasury usurped by the friars, the governor charged Archbishop de la Cuesta, as well as the civilians who sought sanctuary inside the Church, with conspiracy. The Augustinians, Dominicans, Franciscans, and Recollects retaliated by rallying the conspirators to kill Bustamante. Bustamante, however, was not the first of the gubernatorial casualties in an epoch of monastic supremacy. Visualizing the imminent self-destruction of the Spanish empire through its representatives, Hidalgo titled the painting The Church Against the State. Fearing controversy due to his personal ties with and professional sanctions by the Church, Hidalgo hid the painting in his atelier in Paris after its exhibition at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, and it would remain in obscurity in the hands of his heir. Since the painting’s rediscovery and change of ownership, individuals and institutions changed the title to The Assassination of Governor Bustamante or The Tragedy of Governor Bustamante in an effort to disassociate the Church from its nefarious crime. From a painterly critique of sacred and secular power gone awry to a national treasure inside a museum, the aesthetic object transformed from an irreverent representation of the longstanding conflict between two colonial powers into a negotiated relationship of subversion, sacrifice, and surrender. This paper explores censorship through the lens of agency and authority in Félix Resurrección Hidalgo’s monumental canvas.

• Heboh Sastra 1968: Censorship of Short Story “Langit Makin Mendung” by Kipandjikusmin (The First Court Case in Literary Works and Changing Literature Trends in Post-1965 Indonesia) Indra Sarathan Universitas Padjadjaran

  This paper discusses an event in Indonesian literary history known as Heboh Sastra 1968, the first court case in literary works and triger of changing literature trends in post-1965 in Indonesia. This event began with the controversy over the short story Langit Makin Mendung (1968) by Kipandjikusmin which was published in the August 1968 edition of Sastra magazine. At the insistence of people who were angry about the story Langit Makin Mendung (LMM) The North Sumatra High Prosecutor Office has banned the publication and withdrawal of the magazine circulation because it is considered insulting to Islam.

• The Securitisation of Fake News in Singapore Ric Neo University of Hong Kong

  Employing the securitisation theory advanced by the Copenhagen School, this article seeks to critically evaluate the security discourses in Singapore regarding the issue of deliberate online falsehoods, or ‘fake news’. It seeks to address two key questions: first, can the theory provide empirical insights illuminating the heightened political salience of the issue of fake news in the country? Second, how can this study contribute to the development and advance our understanding of the securitisation framework?

  The securitisation of a political issue gives credence to the urgent need for emergency measures and the mobilisation of resources – and often by suspending due political process – to resolve a purported existential threat. In this article, I show that the securitisation of fake news by the Singapore government has allowed it to consolidate political power, increase regulatory oversight on social media and censor criticisms against the state ahead of the conduct of national elections. In addition, this study contributes to the discussion on the applicability of securitisation theory beyond a Western or Euro-centric political context. It shows that a successful securitisation move requires the acquiescence of the audience in an authoritarian regime just as much as it would in a democracy.

Papers (Part 2)

• A Case Study from Indonesian Film Communities: Conceptualizing Film Censorship as a Relational Socio-Technical Process Rosalia Engchuan Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology

  In the case of film censorship one might first think of the state as an actor from outside, acting upon the film and film practitioners. However, looking at film as the fruit stemming from a successful actor-network of film production, external state censorship is only the very last step in a long and highly complex entanglement of processes. Taking on a broader scope, scholars have looked at funding and market structures, as well as internalized mechanisms of “self-censorship”. Overcoming binaries between censors and the censored, I propose a processual relational perspective, shifting the unit of analysis to a relational process of interaction entangled in multiple networks (state bureaucracy, international film festival politics, values and norms etc.). Rather than making a distinction between repressive censorship by the state and structural censorship omnipresent in society, I conceptualize state censorship internal to - in fact part of - socio-technical networks of film production. Drawing on a relational ontology and Simondon’s notion of technics, I will conceptualize censorship as a relationally constituted configuration that is always circumstantial. Based on a relational ethnography, “an ethnographic method that works with the relational and processual nature of social reality” (Desmond 2014:1) my paper will think through the multitude of actors - human, technical and more-than-human - involved in the actor-network of film production and derive conceptual implications for thinking about the characteristics, mechanisms and processes of film censorship.

• Allah! What Do You See in Our Society? Niti Pawakapan Chulalongkorn University Sorayut Aiem-Ueayut Freie Universität Berlin

  After independence from Britain in 1957, Malaysia has been faced with racial tensions, in particular between the Malay, Chinese, Indian (Tamil) and Others. Islam has played a crucial role in the political justification for elevating the Malays and their socio-cultural form and economic interests to the level of a patriotic majority high above other ethnic and non-Islamic groups. Politicized Islam is a critical concept that has received scholarly attention and helps articulates the unrealized promise of equitable racial and religious interrelationship in Malaysia.

  This paper presents some ideas on how Islam is used to justify privileging the Malay or the Islamic group. More importantly, it examines the political use of aesthetics by Islam to justify control over the social-life of non-Malays. The topic discussed is based on a visual anthropological enquiry and argues that the reconstruction of the pavement around the Brickfields/Little India in Kuala Lumpur is an attempt to curb or reduce the space for polytheism, which is on display through artistic roadside shrines and deity figures.

  The paper highlight three sub-topics, firstly, the Islamic monotheistic system is the central but invisible code underlying urban development discourse that claims to unify society through censorship of other faith. Secondly, the roadside shrines in Brickfield represent the affirmative space for the other gods that co-exist as one, specifically Hindu gods and Chinese Taoism. Hence the shrines are considered an eyesore under modern Islamic culture, which view them as dirty and as symbols of uncivilized society. Lastly, the roadside shrines are the sensual objects extending human finitude of non-Islamic groups with alternatively embedded narration within an Islamic majority society. In this sense, the paper argues, the pavement in little India can be conceptualized as a battlefield, a zone of contestation (and attempt at reconstruction) of different modes of visual bonds, display site for polytheistic eyes and Islam’s desire for their purification. Finally, this study develops the idea of politicized Islam within the area of art and politics to contribute to a more vivid understanding of Malaysia’s racial tension.

• Censorship Mechanism Under the New Order Indonesia, 1970–1980 Taufiq Hanafi Leiden University

  Much has been said about censorship and its important role in defining New Order orthodoxy—a colonial inheritance that stemmed from anxiety and fear of the political consequences that could undermine the authoritarian regime. The mechanism of censorship, however, was overlooked and remains underexplored. My research finds that the Attorney General, to which the state delegated solely the authority of censorship, possessed a wide range of abilities in managing and utilizing its overwhelming control to supervise, censor, and ban. It involved an interlaced system of editors, publishers, and bureaucrats, and worked with authors as much as against them and helped to improve literary works to conform to the state views or standards. Similar to Darnton’s finding about censorship in France during the years before the revolution of 1789, censorship under the New Order Indonesia also drove authors/editors/publishers and censors together rather than apart. In this regard, this paper aims to investigate the censorship machinery that the state operated, including its form and agencies, in order to identify the institutional framework undergirding the mechanism of surveillance and control utilized by the state in relation to book banning.

Abstract

Keywords

• Art
• Censorship