May 3, 2024: BORN A PROBLEM Panel Discussion
May 3, 2024 | Friday | 5:30 - 7:30 PM
at GRAY AREA
2665 Mission St., San Francisco, CA 94110
*** Open to Public ***
Sliding scale admission | $15 suggested donation
Exhibition Hours: May 1-5, Wed to Sun 3:00 - 8:00 PM
[ RSVP: May 3, 2024 Panel Discussion ]
Join us for an evening of conversation with scholars specializing in Indonesian/South East Asian history and cultural studies that will explore the profound impact of global geo-political events in the 1960s (which serves as inspiration for BORN A PROBLEM: A Multimedia Exhibition), and their relevance to our present and future:
Dr. Jessica Elkind
Reuven Pinnata
Vincent Bevins (author of The Jakarta Method & If We Burn)
Dr. Viola Lasmana
ABOUT THE PANELISTS
DR. JESSICA ELKIND (Ph.D. UCLA, 2005) is an Associate Professor of History at San Francisco State University, where she teaches on the United States in the world, the Cold War, the Vietnam War, and Southeast Asian history.
Her publications include Aid Under Fire: Nation Building and the Vietnam War (University Press of Kentucky, 2016) and The History of American Foreign Policy from 1895, 5th edition (Taylor & Francis, 2024). She is currently working on a study of U.S. non-military involvement in Cambodia during the 1970s.
[ history.sfsu.edu/people/jessica-elkind ]
REUVEN PINNATA is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at the University of Washington, Seattle. His project reads colonial and postcolonial Indonesian literature as a critique of global capitalism. His research interests include Indonesian and Southeast Asian literatures, decolonial theory, and Marxist aesthetics.
[ english.washington.edu/people/reuven-pinnata ]
VINCENT BEVINS is a journalist and author of The Jakarta Method (2020) and If We Burn (2023). He covered Southeast Asia for the Washington Post, after serving as Brazil correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, and previously reported for the Financial Times in London. His work focuses on global development, the imperialist interventions that hold it back, and revolutionary attempts to re-shape the world system.
[ vincentbevins.com ]
Photo credit: Cassia Tabatini
DR. VIOLA LASMANA (she/her) is an Indonesian-born educator, scholar, mentor, and writer. She has lived in Indonesia, Singapore, the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, and New York City. Viola is currently an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Emerging Voices Fellow, a South & Southeast Asian Postdoctoral Associate at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, and a Visiting Scholar at the Asian/Pacific/American (A/P/A) Institute at New York University.
Viola teaches and writes about Asian American and Transpacific Studies, Indonesia and Southeast Asia, transnational feminisms, digital humanities, film, literature, and global media arts. 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. She is currently working on her book project, Shadow Imaginations: Transpacific Indonesian Feminist Archives in the Wake of Political Violence.
Before her current appointment at Rutgers University, Viola has previously taught in the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University, the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, and Media Arts and Culture Department 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’ Media Arts + Practice Division, and she was also an Andrew W. Mellon PhD Fellow in Digital Humanities. In August 2024, Viola will start her new position as Assistant Professor in the Comparative World Literature Program at California State University, Long Beach.
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
APICC, Gray Area & HOME MADE @ ARTogether
with Asian American Women Artists Associations , Clarion Alley Mural Project, Eastwind Books, Queerly Complex, San Francisco State University - Department of Creative Writing, and California Arts Council - Creative Corps Initiative Grant
presents
BORN A PROBLEM: A Multimedia Exhibition
by Paula Te and Edward Gunawan
Apr 28 - May 5 at GRAY AREA
(San Francisco, CA)
In 1965, a CIA-aided military coup marked the beginning of a tumultuous period in Indonesia. The new authoritarian government, perceiving a "Chinese Problem," initiated a series of anti-Chinese policies from 1967-2000: Chinese language names barred on official documents, Chinese language media and schools shuttered, while public celebrations of cultural festivals such as Chinese New Year were banned.
These exclusionist and forced assimilation laws, echoing the Indian Treaties & the Removal Act, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, and the Immigration Act of 1924 in the United States, fostered resentment and discrimination that led to massacres and sexual violence against the Indonesian Chinese community in 1965 and 1998.
This multimedia exhibition by artist Paula Te and writer Edward Gunawan (who are both of Chinese Indonesian descent) takes the form of erasure poems based on actual laws from this dark chapter of history. The large-scale interactive installation contains the context behind the redacted text, revealed through augmented reality (AR) to investigate the invisible historical forces that impact present-day culture, society, politics–and ultimately, our sense of personal flourishing and communal belonging.
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