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The Misery Index: Sites of Resistance and Revitalization in Southeast Asia

Sat, October 10, 4:00 to 5:45pm, Sheraton Centre, Willow East

Session Submission Type: Paper Session: Traditional Format

Abstract

Tasking itself with determining the “most miserable” countries in the world, the CATO Research Institute defines misery as the sum of a country’s unemployment and inflation rates. Some economists insist that crime also adds to a country’s misery. United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has explained that transnational organized crime markets bring “disease, violence and misery to exposed regions and vulnerable populations.” Against such generalized and quantitative approaches to calculating the psychosocial conditions of life around the globe, this panel, instead, employs “misery” as an analytic with which to examine and interrogate the racialized histories of U.S. empire, global capitalism, and legacies of resistance and resilience in Southeast Asia and the Asia/Pacific. In contrast to the imposition of misery as a pathological determinant, this panel considers misery as it gives rise to unlikely psychic and material connections between “vulnerable” people and places. In this regard, misery here is both a regulatory framework produced by state and global governing institutions and human rights regimes to justify the imposition of various modernizing tactics and systems of inequality and a discourse with which to reveal “alternative” practices of living in misery.

The papers in this panel engage with questions of misery and resistance: what is misery that remains after war and empire, and what forms does misery take? What insight does misery offer as a repository of vulnerabilities, resistance, and human potential? Davorn Sisavath turns to the “objects of utility and pleasure” made out of military waste in Laos that were left behind during the U.S. bombing campaign (1964-1973). She suggests that Laotians’ resistance to the catastrophe and misery of war points to their imagination and innovative ways of imbuing value to the disruptive qualities of military waste. Josen Masangkay Diaz examines the ways that a collective misery yielded by the violences of labor, displacement, and migration onto “Filipinos overseas” might be appropriated into liberal institutional reform. In particular, Diaz locates Ferdinand Marcos’s 1973 balikbayan/homecoming operation at the intersections of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society and Marcos’s New Society global endeavors to reevaluate the contours of Filipino American subject formation. Emily Hue examines the contemporary discourse of “cultural workers in distress” that circulates at the intersection of transnational advocacy networks and the Burmese diasporic art scene in New York. She asks how and why contemporary artists and activists enlist tactics of complicity, submission, and pleasure in their protests of incarceration, immigration detainment and military violence. In forwarding an alternative politics that relies on the language and reproduction of “misery” for their audiences, they also re-appropriate the terms of “miserable existence” in relation to humanitiarian crises and international human rights regimes in order to share their experiences of martial law and detainment. Joo Ok Kim proposes a different method of indexing misery by considering the dynamic confluences of empire, geographical relocation, and racialization through interviews with Southeast and East Asian farmers who inhabit pockets of rural Florida. Together, the papers wrestle with misery as way to read history and to envision alternative lifeworlds.

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