Humane Literacy and Southeast Asian Art

Humane literacy? An essay on undergraduate education? Isn't it a solecism to broach such concerns in this special issue of The Journal of Southeast Asian Studies where contributors are invited to take stock of the current state of scholarship in various fields of study? My response is simply if not now, then when? I am writing from North America where Southeast Asian studies has gained only a precarious beach-head in the academy and nowhere is this more evident than in the very limited undergraduate investment in our field. Despite the fact that any expansion of academic appointments for specialists on the region will be spurred by evidence of general student interest, a concern with that issue, on our occasions of collective self scrutiny, has been subordinated to questions of research direction, funding strategies, and the prevailing degree of accord between the various disciplines and area studies.(1) But, however ancillary the general education mission of the undergraduate college may seem to professional scholars eager to get on both with their research and the training of graduate students, it is nevertheless a principal responsibility of those deans who control academic appointments. We differ from our colleagues within Southeast Asia where an interest in the region can be either assumed, or expected eventually to develop. While American universities place globalization high on their agendas today, it is not at all evident that their students will wish to study about Southeast Asia rather than, say, Africa or Latin America. So we do need to focus on how we may demonstrate the centrality of what we do to the process of self-discovery and the integration of learning that is at the heart of general education.(2) We are clearly at a moment when the hegemony of the scholarly disciplines is under assault. Not only are genres blurring, they are dissolving and recombining. The way we teach and what we teach is determined by what we take knowledge to be. If the discipline of art history is undergoing a process of redefinition, how will this affect what we do in the class room? What do we have to unlearn? What do we put in its place? In apprehending the present moment, try to imagine an art historian who fell asleep fifteen years ago and reawakened at a recent professional forum. He or she would be in for a rude shock: the panels would feature unfamiliar topics, some of them formerly unthinkable, argued about in styles of discourse imported from a hodgepodge of other fields of study, employing standards of demonstration and predication disturbingly at variance from the norms of scientific rationality and objectivity inculcated in his or her graduate training; even the creative artist as a prime, an autonomous agent, and the fixed, bounded art work or "objects", as they were formerly called, would seem to have melted into a fluid, porous, network of mutual implication with their enframing psycho-social context. Perhaps most unsettling would be the dawning realization that what had formerly seemed to be a unified field of inquiry aiming at a discoverable reality was now rather a patch work of independent academic contractors working with a variety of practices and tools and no master plan as, in the view of many of these scholars, there is no knowable reality of which such a plan could be made independent of the shifting practices, historically conditioned interests and perspectives of the independent contractors themselves. Our acute self-consciousness today about what we do as art historians is a belated, but unmistakable, response to the broad reconfiguration of aims, methods and theories that swept through literary studies and other humanities disciplines at least a decade earlier.(3) If we look at the market place in ideas we see that art historians now have on offer much the same wares as their colleagues elsewhere: feminist and psycho-analytical queries; semiotic readings (almost invariably revealing concealments of interest); revision of the "canon" to include the excluded; a general uneasiness about what is and is not art and thus a blurring of distinction between popular and high art, crafts and fine arts; a new sensitivity to the Eurocentric assumptions that frame both accounts of the development of art in history and the very terms in which this is discussed. …