Part 1

• Photographing Saigon: Individual practices of visual mapping to negotiate urban identities in times of social media Mirjam Le Universität Passau

  Urban photography as a collective and individual practice has a long, often contentious history, particularly in the context of the colonial history of Vietnam. The rise of social media provides new platforms to share and engage with visual artifacts and to create new visual narratives. From travel photography to urban street photography, urban space is a common trope on these platforms, thus giving a glimpse of how different people engage with the space as they aim to capture their understanding in photos. Due to the affinity of a younger generation of Vietnamese urbanites toward social media, this paper uses social media, here Instagram, to examine how the realities of urban space in Vietnam are framed and represented by local urban Vietnamese youth on these platforms in contrast with the idealized modernization narrative of the Vietnamese state. Taking the example of Ho Chi Minh City, which underwent rapid material transformation over the last two decades, this paper investigates how Vietnamese social media users relate and engage with this changing urban materiality and thus engage in visual world-making regarding space, time, and aspirations in their urban everyday life. The emerging digital infrastructure can be understood as a collective and individual visual archive. This archive maps the material space as well as the connected memories, interpretations, and identities of content creators and consumers.
  This paper looks at the interface between practice, spatiality, and temporality which emerges in the photos. It raises the question of how the practices of taking and sharing urban photography on social media can conceived as a practice of mapping individual and collective urban memories and creating or maintaining urban narratives about Ho Chi Minh City independent from a government discourse on modernity. As content creators share photos on social media, above all on Instagram, photography provides a means to participate in world-making rooted in shared meaning and community. The creation and exchange of narratives, symbols, and storylines rooted in a shared audiovisual language on social media platforms supports the engagement with the transforming landscape and environment of our everyday lives at a global scale. Social media users engage in a practice of retelling their perspective on the world by sharing photos and thus mapping their material everyday life.
  In Vietnam, however, this rich tapestry of visual urban narratives is embedded in an authoritarian form of urban planning. Furthermore, due to the capitalist and technological logic by which social media operates, the perpetuated narratives are not unique but emerge in a broader social and economic framework that leads to homogenization. Thereby, individual maps of urban memories become part of a larger collective map with overlapping narratives and identities. Consequently, it can be understood as part of the negotiation of urban citizenship, at the interface between individual, community, and state.

Part 2

• Mapping Malay manuscripts in geographical and social space. Mulaika Hijjas SOAS

  The Malay manuscript tradition has rather memorably if deflatingly been characterised as “thin and sticky,” which is to say that any particular text is represented by only a small number of surviving exemplars which “did not circulate very rapidly or widely, and were likely to be concentrated in limited geographical and social milieux” (Proudfoot 2003: 26). Understanding the geographical and social distribution of texts has long been a challenge for philologists, due to the sparsity of precisely this kind of information. Using the data emerging from the ongoing Naskah Sumatra project, as well as older bibliographic sources, this paper will attempt to map—to situate in place—Malay manuscripts in two different ways: geographically and genealogically. The former approach will take examples of Malay-language texts from key genres and locate them in geographical space, in order to discern how patterns of circulation differ according to genre. The latter approach uses genealogical charts—a kind of cartographic representation of the relationships between people—to establish the links between manuscript owners. The picture that is likely to emerge is of small but vibrant, deeply localised but also intensely interconnected centres of manuscript production.

• Mapping manuscripts: Philippine colonial texts in British collections Leif Andrew Garinto SOAS, University of London

  This study investigates the British acquisition of Philippine books during the Spanish colonial era. It maps their journey from the Philippines to European collections and analyses their impact on contemporary historical perspectives of Filipino linguistics and literature under Spanish rule. Focusing on Philippine books held in the British Library, King’s College London, and SOAS, University of London, the study reveals how their removal as war spoils and later installation in British academic institutions has created significant gaps in understanding the Philippine print and publishing landscape during the Spanish colonial period. The study also highlights current efforts to bridge these gaps by digitising these books and their incorporation into a virtual library, aiming to repatriate the knowledge contained within these texts in a virtual space, if not the physical items themselves. By tracing the route these manuscripts took and examining initiatives to digitally reunite them with their country of origin, the study highlights the complex entanglements between conquest, acquisition, and knowledge production through books. It underscores the importance of these digitisation projects in not only preserving but also making accessible the linguistic and literary history of the Philippines to a wider audience. The study not only sheds light on the historical movements of these valuable manuscripts but also reinforces the transformative potential of digital repatriation in reshaping contemporary understandings of Philippine history, linguistics, and literature during the Spanish colonial era.

• Cabinet of Curiosities: Mapping A Port Town’s Lost History through Collection of Domestic Objects Feysa Poetry University College London

  In the ancient port town of Lasem where complex historical layers were extensively influenced by East Asian maritime networks, Hindu-Buddhist Indian empires, Javanese kingdoms, Dutch colonialism, and nation-building policies since Indonesian independence in 1945, multicultural identities are consistently challenged and contested. The coexistence and interaction of diverse cultural and ethnic groups in Lasem, particularly ethnic Chinese and Chinese-Indonesian community as the most prominent group of ‘foreign orientals’ in Java and later the largest minority group in Indonesia, have created such hybridity that has long struggled to fit within postcolonial Indonesia. Due to perpetual effort of erasure of ethnic Chinese and Chinese-Indonesian’s cultural identity from civic spaces since colonial era to the end of New Order, narration of urban evolution seems to be collectively lost, however, intimate traditions were kept along the familial lineage inside the protected spaces of homes. Lasem serves an intriguing opportunity of regaining this lost history; since it became a refuge for those who flew from anti-Chinese riots all over Java, locals’ gated courtyard houses, which used to accommodate three to four families of the same kinship, managed to store an abundance of artefacts portraying an everyday life that often is closely tied to transnational trade.
  Today, a collective of young activists embark on a journey of gathering domestic objects presented by the last remaining inhabitants of these houses through continuous visitations that cultivate into friendships. This act of collecting is widely driven by curiosities from both the inhabitants and activists to map the lost history, patching up what was repressed into the confined ethnic enclaves into the public urban fabric of the town. This project offers insights into how colonialism, nationhood, capital distribution, power dynamics, along with ethnic segregation intersect in creating a port town’s legitimised urban identity and how, using postcolonial lense, to contest this, one needs to search for heritage lie in domesticity no further than the comfort of their homes.

Abstract