I was at the AAS conference in Vancouver over the weekend, to be part of a panel on Colonial Archives and Digital Humanities in South Asia.
I also took the opportunity to listen in on some conversations I might normally get to hear at literature conferences.
I was just there for Friday and Saturday, and I was able to attend the following panels:
- Why Do We Care? Smart City, Artificial Intelligence, and Care in Urbanizing Asia
- The Cultural Revolution After Sixty Years: Mao's Strategic Vision or Improvised Disorder?
- Beyond the Visual: Gender, Queerness, and Media Margins in Japanese Popular Culture
- Film, Media, and Gender (interesting paper on Adivasi filmmakers)
- Sitting in the Tension: Caste in the South Asian diaspora (standout session for me, focusing on caste, especially in the Sikh diaspora)
- AI in Action: Best Practices for Research, Publishing, and Teaching in Asian Studies - Sponsored by AAS Editorial Board (surprisingly upbeat and non-apocalyptic!)
And my own panel: - New Approaches to Colonial Archives in South Asian Digital Humanities
I'll do brief summaries of some takeaways from the various sessions below.
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1. The Asian Smart Cities panel was something I went to on a lark, mainly out of curiosity. Here's a bit from the panel description:
The concept of smart city is linked to futuristic scenarios made of images, symbols and concepts that became part of collective imagination and memory: cities should not only be efficient, productive and accessible; they also need to be beautiful, sustainable and socially inclusive.
At present, the smart city designation means things like: real-time traffic monitoring, with cameras and censors; CCTV cameras everywhere, observed either by humans or (increasingly) by AIs; weather and threat warnings (i.e., flood sensors).
By and large, I was not surprised to hear Singapore discussed on the panel as embracing the smart city approach. But I was interested in the presentation on the panel dealing with the Smart City approach in Jakarta. There, it has been only partially successful since there are so many people in the city who are in informal settlements... it's hard to use high-tech cameras and monitors when people are living in shacks and improvised settlements... There was also an interesting paper here on the rise and fall of the cycle rickshaw (Bejak, in Jakarta) as a mode of transportation and as a symbol of the Indonesian working-class "everyman" that continues to be invoked by politicians even as the city modernizes.
(Side comment: I do wonder whether before planners invest billions of dollars making smart cities in the Global South, they should make cities where everyone has access to affordable housing, power grids and sewage systems that work, and roads and public transportation.)
Some of the papers alluded to other dissents from the Smart City model, especially the growing emphasis on using AI instead of human monitoring. AI-powered smart city technology is expensive; it's often strongly promoted by companies selling monitoring systems and other tech companies; and it can lead to a sense of being constantly policed that might be good for preventing street crime, but that's not good for overall social well-being or urban discovery or spontaneity.
Along those lines I came across this Op-Ed by Richard Sennett in the Guardian that spoke to those dissents: "No One Likes a Smart City That's Too Smart":
Uniform architecture need not inevitably produce a dead environment, if there is some flexibility on the ground; in New York, for instance, along parts of Third Avenue monotonous residential towers are subdivided on street level into small, irregular shops and cafes; they give a good sense of neighbourhood. But in Songdo, lacking that principle of diversity within the block, there is nothing to be learned from walking the streets. [...]
A great deal of research during the last decade, in cities as different as Mumbai and Chicago, suggests that once basic services are in place people don't value efficiency above all; they want quality of life. A hand-held GPS device won't, for instance, provide a sense of community. More, the prospect of an orderly city has not been a lure for voluntary migration, neither to European cities in the past nor today to the sprawling cities of South America and Asia. If they have a choice, people want a more open, indeterminate city in which to make their way; this is how they can come to take ownership over their lives.
(This wasn't mentioned on the panel; just something I read and thought was on point.)
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2. The Cultural Revolution panel I attended was really well-attended -- standing room only, with a number of people turned away at the door due to the overflow crowd. The speakers were all very senior academics, some with several books on the history of post-revolution China. Here's a bit from the program copy.
Yiching Wu will argue that in May of 1966, Mao’s intention was to initiate a targeted purge within education institutions, but the campaign soon escalated into a generalized attack on “capitalist roaders” inside the party. Andrew Walder will examine how the unintended consequences of Mao’s moves shaped the course of factional conflicts, particularly in the context of failed truce negotiations among rival rebel groups. Patricia Thornton will focus on the dynamics of the mass movement and the question of representation, raising critical questions about Mao’s ability to direct or contain the grassroots movement he had unleashed. Daniel Leese will assess the quality and structure of information that reached Mao, drawing on the party’s internal reporting systems to interrogate the limits of central knowledge and decision-making during the Cultural Revolution. Felix Wemheuer will chair the discussion.
Essentially, what I took away from the discussion was the sense that the opening of the Cultural Revolution was a lot less organized than one might think. Mao himself initiated some of the new policies, but the extremity of what followed was not really his intent, nor were the actions of party officials in towns and villages outside of Beijing fully under his control. The panelists discussed a number of key events in 1966-1967 in pretty granular detail (see the Wikipedia page for the Cultural Revolution, and scroll down to 1966: Outbreak)
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3. The "Beyond the Visual: Gender, Queerness, and Media Margins" panel I attended had some really interesting papers thinking about sound and voice in Japanese popular culture.
The paper I found most interesting was Haruki Segicuchi's paper a 1988 Japanese film called Summer Vacation 1999, about a homoerotic relationship between teen boys where the actors were actually all cis-gendered women!
I also really enjoyed Minori Ishida's paper on "Gender Deviance in the Bodies of Anime Characters." The panelist mentioned anime series I mostly hadn't seen, like Fena: Pirate Princess and The Land of the Lustrous. There's some really interesting stuff going on here with representations of gender identity (including non-binary and gender non-conforming characters) in both art design and in voicing in these series. While traditional anime featured a highly stylized and binarized approach to gender (soft / feminine women and girls; tough/masculine boys & men), some newer series are exploring queer and nonbinary aesthetics both in visual character design and voicing.
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4. The Film, Media, and Gender panel I attended was a bit of a hodge-podge. I especially enjoyed the two papers dealing with South Asian film studies.
Rebecca Peters of Florida State University gave a paper on Kiran Rao's film Laapata Ladies, focused on how the film uses costume design and clothing to mount a critique of conservative gender norms and expectations. It's part of a dissertation she's writing on women film directors in Bollywood, which sounds like it will be pretty impactful.
Arpit Gaind of UCLA gave a rich talk summarizing his research based on his field experience in Jharkhand working with Adivasi filmmakers.
Here's a bit from his abstract:
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and film analysis, this study demonstrates how Indigenous collectives such as Akhra Ranchi have pioneered what Raheja (2007) theorizes as "visual sovereignty"—the space wherein Indigenous filmmakers critique and reconfigure dominant media conventions while operating within their constraints. By repurposing technologies from analog VHS to digital drones, Adivasi filmmakers parallel global Indigenous movements in asserting what Barry Barclay conceptualized as "Fourth Cinema"—media controlled by Indigenous communities rather than cultural colonizers.
Links for further exploration:
Akhra Ranchi main page
Scholarly chapter on Adivasi Dance in Jharkhand that alludes to Akhra Ranchi
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5. As I suggested above, the panel "Sitting in the Tension: Caste in the South Asian Diaspora" was a highlight for me.
Speakers were Sharanjit Kaur Sandhra (University of Fraser Valley), Neha Gupta (UBC), Sasha Sabherwal (Northeastern University), Anita Lal (Poetic Justice Foundation), and Manmit Singh (grad student at UBC).
I was especially interested in the stories told about a recent exhibit that has appeared at various universities in British Columbia called Overcaste, which has been controversial in the Sikh community. (See coverage in the Vancouver Sun).
Anita Lal is a Dalit (Chamaar) Sikh whose family has been in British Columbia for four generations. Her great-grandfather Maya Ram Mahmi was the first Dalit migrant to arrive in Canada. The community was small, but over time they established their own institutions; today, there are several Ravidasia Gurdwaras that have been founded by Dalit Sikhs.
The Overcaste exhibit has a nice digital version that can be accessed here.
More relevant links: Punjabi Sikh and Dalit (article at SAADA)
Account of the Exhibit at Community Wire, with a quote from Anita Lal that contains a mention of Maya Ram Mahmi:
“In 1906, my great-grandfather Maya Ram Mahmi became the first recorded Dalit immigrant to Canada, seeking a brighter future and escape from the social and economic oppressions he faced in India. Yet, he and his descendants, including myself, have faced ongoing caste discrimination, an issue that persists over a century later. Through the OVERCASTE exhibit, we aim to highlight the often-ignored problem of caste bias in Canada. This initiative seeks to amplify the Dalit Canadian narrative, which has been historically sidelined and ignored,” says Anita Lal, Co-Curator of the exhibit and Co-Founder of the Poetic Justice Foundation.
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6. I was surprised by the generally optimistic tone of the next panel I attended, "AI in Action: Best Practices for Research, Publishing, and Teaching in Asian Studies." Two of the speakers here, Joseph Alter and Elise Huerta, were journal editors.
Alter described how the submission rate for the Journal of Asian Studies has increased by 150% in the past five years. The reason is not so much AI-assisted writing as AI-assisted translation, as many potential contributors who are not native speakers of English are writing up their research in their own languages and then using Gen-AI translation to render their work in smooth, idiomatic English.
The editor was not especially bothered by this, and I can see why -- it has the potential to democratize scholarship in Asian Studies. (However, it does mean that reviewers have to be found to handle all those new submissions, and policies have to be developed to handle the use of AI...)
The editors also mentioned the growing problem of peer reviewers being tempted to use generative AI to create overviews or summaries of submitted articles, or even to write assigned reviews.
Along those lines, in the Q&A I asked the following question:
[Me] This question is first for the editors on the panel but others might also have things to say about it. I’m a little surprised that the overall tone of this panel is a lot less apocalyptic than I would have expected. In literature and writing, the mood is a lot darker – I taught first-year writing recently, and it was really tough to get through to students about the importance of the process we’re asking them to engage in. Some students are having trouble resisting the temptation to cheat with AI, while others wish it would just go away.
Perceived audience and reward matter a lot. People tend to work hard when they know there’s a reward for their effort. People tend to write more thoughtfully and carefully when they know there is a reader who will care what they say. I'm worried about academics also being tempted to cheat using gen-AI for peer-review.
We should mention that peer-review is by and large unpaid labor. It’s also work that doesn’t really have the same level of professional reward as our primary research. Most likely our reviews will be read by an editor who knows our name but will go back to the author who doesn’t know who we are. And while we can claim the review on our CVs it doesn’t count for much in university professional activities reports, so our department chairs and Deans don’t really pay much attention either. So our audience of human readers is tiny; it seems hard to imagine people will not start to cheat when they write anonymous peer-reviews.
So it's a structural problem. Can there be structural solutions?
Perhaps open-peer review? So if we do a review of an essay, it is and can be known by others...?
In their responses, the editors of the two journals and others on the panel were not terribly concerned with this problem. Their sense is that peer-reviewing is voluntary writing, so people who don't want to do the work will turn down the request to review. And they feel that most if not all of what they currently get in terms of peer-review evaluations are written by humans even if the readership is largely anonymized. And they feel that people are by and large sticking to the honor system & often writing really compelling, constructive reviews that help other scholars and that help the field overall.
Overall, a lot less apocalyptic than one would expect!
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7. Finally, my own panel.
Margaret Schotte and Christina Welsch have collaborated on an impressive DH project called Sailing With the French, which aims to "visualize and analyze more than 1300 voyages of the French East India Company during the 18th century, uncovering patterns and stories from archival records of the era." They're finding some really fascinating stuff about the demographic backgrounds of the sailors who sailed for the French Indies Company in the 18th century. Alongside Frenchmen, there were also Lascars and enslaved people, some of them from Africa, who were on these ships.
I would also recommend people interested in these topics check out Christina Welsch's book, The Company's Sword: The East India Company and the Politics of Militarism, 1644–1858.
For my part, I posted the text of my own talk and slides here.
Dhanashree Thorat's talk on telegraph and internet infrastructures overlapped with her 2019 article in South Asian Review, which you can see here.
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After my panel I chatted with Nicole Ranganath of UC-Davis. She mentioned the Pioneering Punjabis Digital Archive (1300 items) and the Punjabi and Sikh Diaspora Archive. The latter has some impressive material related specifically to early Punjabi women settlers in California (see Women's Gallery).