Papers (Part 1)

• Emblem of Sovereignty: The Riau Cogan and Histories of the Malay World Mulaika Hijjas School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London

  This paper will discuss the so-called Riau cogan, or emblem, in terms of what it reveals about national history, material heritage, and historiography, in a polity that was dismembered by colonial rule into what became the modern nation-states of Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore. The cogan is an unusual and probably novel item of Johor-Riau regalia, inscribed with the Sultan’s claim of authority over “all the Malay lands.” The Riau royal regalia collectively was believed to be an embodiment of the Sultan’s right to rule, and thus its seizure by the Dutch in 1812, its return to their chosen protégé, and eventual abandonment a century later when the royal family moved en masse to Singapore, tracks the fate of the sultanate. The paper will assess the art historical and textual evidence for assigning a date of production for the cogan not to a mythic past, as popular accounts assume, but more likely to the late nineteenth or even early twentieth century—precisely when the Johor-Riau Sultanate was under greatest threat of dissolution. It will also consider the uses of the Riau cogan in present-day discourse, where it serves as a symbol of transnational Malay identity and of ambitions towards regional autonomy in post-authoritarian Indonesia.

• Marks, Smears, and Printed Mistakes: Inscription and Printing Technologies, and the Production of Muslim-Malay Literature in the Late 19th Century Wei Jin Darryl Lim University of Reading

  Nineteenth-century Malay texts – religious, educational, literary, or quotidian – are often encountered and consumed in a variety of material formats: as loose leaves, occasionally a scroll, or more commonly, a codex. Late nineteenth-century Singapore was the locus for the production and distribution of Malay texts in the Malay Archipelago. The Singapore-based lithographic printing trade for Malay printing pivoted around the print and publishing networks of Muslim-Malay printers, many of Javanese extraction. At its peak in 1890, book production soared, with up to six million pages printed annually – most, were lithographed (Proudfoot, 1993). Distributed, sold, or loaned through commercial, religious, or social networks, all were produced from technologies which inscribed or imprinted textual content: ink from a reed pen, printed from handset metal types, or in the case of lithography, written with a pen, then printed from a lithographic stone. While the book is the embodiment of textual content, the physical and dimensional qualities of a printed codex are but minor subjects of investigation by historians. Yet, the materiality of a book itself can be ‘read’ to distill details relating to composition, production, and distribution.

  This paper focuses on lithographed books published in Singapore during this period of intense print activity, and will specifically discuss the materiality seen in printed codices of syair, a form of popular four-line verse poetry. Bibliographical and material evidence of localised, perhaps unique, adaptations and practices of printing will be triangulated from printed marks and smears, defects or ‘mistakes’. This in turn, will be a prism through which we can assess the far-reaching products of a printing trade; and the careful – or careless – scribe and printer’s hand in the material production of literary and intellectual culture. By examining what is perhaps considered a minor historical trajectory, this paper will broadly attempt to situate late nineteenth-century Singapore within broader histories of the book; and consider Singapore as a site of significance within a regional ‘constellation of printing’.

• Photographing the Sultans: Networks of Authority in the Southern Philippines, 1880–1910 Elsa Clavé University of Hamburg

  The practice of photography spread in Southeast Asia in the last decades of the 19th century, boosted by the colonial growing economy and the need to record, study and advertise its commercial products and exotic cultures. At that period, professional photographers installed in their studio or hosted at the court, produced images of powerful rulers and aristocrats. In the Philippines, pictures were taken between 1880 and 1910, and circulated under the format of carte de visite or as illustration in European journals and travelogues. These photographs resulted from the encounter of different ideas and representations of authority – the one imposed by the photographer and the one performed by the subject – which materialized using this recent technology.

  Based on an analysis of about sixty photographs from Sulu and Mindanao – put into perspective and compared with others from Java, the Malay peninsula, Siam and India – the paper studies the result of these encounters. It weights each side’s role in the composition of the photographs and traces the circulation of motifs, models and symbols of authority in the mentioned Southeast Asian kingdoms. The result is an understanding of the formation, and the meaning, of the visual language used by the Sulu sultans and Mindanao rulers in their representation of the self.

• The Historical Notes as Literary Artifact: An Appreciation of Julio Nakpil’s “Notes on Teodoro M. Kalaw’s The Philippine Revolution” Joyce Arriola University of Santo Tomas

  In 1896, the Philippine revolutionary society called the Katipunan led an uprising against the Spanish colonial administration. The Katipunan leader, Andres Bonifacio, was able to summon the support of native intellectuals and artists who subsequently wrote about the secret society and expressed their patriotism in various modes such as literary works, historical essays, visual art pieces and musical compositions. One of the Katipunan’s most prominent members was the musician Julio Nakpil, whose body of works embody 19th century cultural nationalism (Chua, 2019). Yet Nakpil did not only leave behind his notable musical compositions but also historical notes written in his own handwriting and presented in the form of annotations, footnotes, glossary of terms, miscellanies and occasionally, personal essays that meander into the confessional mode.

  In current discourse, the historical annotations and the confessional essay have assumed greater significance in the light of the value being assigned to alternative historiographies that may appear in the form of artefactual creative works, poetics, biographies, memoires and other archival documents. Nakpil’s marginal historical notes offer a response to the widely-read and cited The Philippine Revolution by Teodoro M. Kalaw. Moreover, Nakpil’s notes on Kalaw’s work provide contemporary historians and students alternative interpretations of some of the most controversial events that occurred during the 1896 Philippine revolution against Spain and the Philippine-American War (1899-1903). More importantly, the Nakpil notes indeed proved how the “historical text” can, by way of Hayden White (2001), be a “literary artifact.”

Papers (Part 2)

• Epigraphic Sources from Brunei in Comparative Perspective: Inscriptions on Metal Annabel Gallop British Library

  Epigraphic sources to be considered in this paper include weaponry, primarily cannons; coins and seals; and brass utensils for public and domestic usage. A comparative perspective will be employed to evaluate these sources in the context of other inscribed metalwares from the Malay world. Particular attention will be paid to a specific genre of Malay brassware dating from the 19th to the early 20th century, bearing inscriptions in Malay in Jawi script raised in relief, and seemingly unique to Brunei. These inscriptions – nearly all of which are dated – usually record the name of the owner of the utensil and his place of abode. Categories of the types of brassware which bear such inscriptions include gantang (rice measures), lanjang (large communal cooking pots), paspan (smaller cooking pots), kitil (water kettles) and periok (pots).

• Parade of the Kasaysayan ng Lahing Pilipino: Cultural Spectacle as State Discourse Mary Jane Rodriguez University of the Philippines

  The staging of “Kasaysayan ng Lahi” (History of the Race) in Manila in 1974 was more than just a grand parade highlighting the inauguration of the newly-built Folk Arts Theater (FAT); it was also a revelation of a deeper ideology of the “New Society” ushered in by the Marcos regime. Integral to this was the concept of “nation-building” through historical-cultural reconstruction. Coinciding with the first-ever hosting of the Philippines of the Miss Universe Contest, the parade was a spectacle and pageantry, with 20,000 schoolchildren deployed for the occasion, marching platoons of participants representing various ethnolinguistic groups and decorated floats showcased in full view of a sea of spectators. It was not just an exercise in historical commemoration, but a demonstration of State power. With historical narration as a tool, the State sought to legitimize its existence as it promised to chart a vision of a better future for the people.

  With the film “Kasaysayan ng Lahi” as text, this paper attempts to examine how power is embedded in historical reconstruction through a public display of the past. Framed by politics of representation, it will draw discursive themes upon which state discourse was predicated. At this juncture, the following questions may be posed to tease out the nuances and complexities of Marcos’ nation-building project. How was the “ethnic” woven in the grand narrative of the nation? How did the narrative exemplify the colonial view of Filipino identity as a mixture of races and influences? How did it frame New Society in representing the aspirations of Filipinos as they emerged from the “breakdown of social order”?

• Re-Assessing Ancient Gold Jewellery from Indonesia and Singapore Mai Lin Tjoa-Bonatz Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main

  Jewellery has been a most common form of gold ware found in archaeological contexts of Southeast Asia since the late 1st Millennium BCE. During the 7th to early 16th centuries, conventionally referred to as the Classical Period, various regions in the gold-bearing archipelago have produced personal adornment of copious variety and intricate workmanship indebted to a Hindu-Buddhist iconography.

  Since the 19th century Dutch scholars have started documenting gold jewellery found at archaeological sites on Java. Catalogues of pre-War II collections and excavation reports were published on gold finds from Indonesia and Singapore. The work of Dutch, British and German scholars during the colonial-period is still most important. However, some of their assumptions have to be revised due to new finds e.g. from maritime sites, translated written sources or chemical analyses of the gold alloy.

  Re-assessing the work of early scholars addresses chrono-typological markers, the origin of certain motifs and the function of jewellery made of precious material in ancient Southeast Asia.

Abstract

Keywords

• Heritage
• History