NICTC Working Paper

Abstract: This paper is a partial examination of Igorot domestic workers, Indigenous peoples from the Cordillera region of the Philippines, and their activism staged in social media’s networked (and refracted) publics. Through participant observation of the online launch of #DefendCordilleraPH and its concurrent activities, I tentatively describe the contrasting qualities of the networked and refracted publics as potentially “expanding” the limited public spaces of domestic workers and the restrictive conditions of their labor in Hong Kong. Migrating online has demonstrated this transgressive “flexibility” of presence and participation that expanded the spatial and temporal limitations of their labor while at the same time allowing them to subvert their colonially abjected bodies as Indigenous peoples. Further, their online campaigns and activities that were brought about by several COVID19 pandemic and labor restrictions in place have also allowed the “relocation” and “expansion” of ancestral land rights advocacy into the digital topography that could potentially expand the reach of the discourses of “ancestral land” and its value to Indigenous migrants. Finally, while the state of Indigenous peoples and their activism remain increasingly “virulent” as their advocacies hope to get “viralized,” these qualities of Igorot activism in the digital diaspora reflect the distinct “pliancy” of the Igorot-domestic and how they could continue to overcome different forms of restrictions “away” from home.

Abstract: Created, written, co-directed, and executively produced by British creator Michaela Coel, I May Destroy You (2020) is an autobiographical television series released in the midst of Covid-19, and centered around Arabella and her journey of rebuilding herself after a rape trauma. This article will examine Coel’s television series as a contemporary, Black feminist autobiographical text that explores the Black and female self in crisis through self-writing. Using her personal experience, Coel creates a story of destruction where the woman in crisis must deconstruct her past to build herself back up using writing as a self-help tool. In the process of doing so, Arabella learns to use anger as a tool, as many Black feminist writers have done so in writing before, to make her wounds transparent so she may begin to heal and transform. Self-writing stands as both a destructive and creative process that eventually helps the artist to confront her own darkness and self in crisis, reinstating her power through reclaiming her agency to speak. I May Destroy You as the end-product of such a process demonstrates how anger, when deliberately harnessed, can be transformed into a power for self-renewal and one that inspires reflections and change in its surrounding.

Abstract: My paper investigates how the identity of the self pitted against the violence of war may enable an individual to represent a community via a sort of creative deployment of transitional justice made possible in the liminal space of literature. Such restorative measures by means of literary acknowledgement may prove effective in regard to bringing to notice the suppression of wrongdoing. In the prominent nationalistic narratives of Bangladesh, the Urdu-speaking migrant Muslims known as muhajirs are predominantly shown as collaborators of the Pakistan army. These narratives portray them as traitors and denominate them as Biharis, although many came from various places outside Bihar. The perpetration of Biharis by Bengalis in the wake of the war and after independence is a highly controversial and sensitive issue in today’s Bangladesh. This paper critically appreciates the saddening tale of Biharis (the stranded Pakistanis in Bangladesh) as mirrored in the novels Of Martyrs and Marigolds (2012) by Aquila Ismail and Invisible Lines by Ruby Zaman (2011).

Abstract:
Apocalypticism has become the new normal of Australian life with climate change accelerated disasters like bushfires and droughts rampant across the country. These disasters inevitably draw attention to the inextricability of Australia’s island-continent space, unique ecology and the postapocalyptic scenario of “settler realism”. The Yield by Wiradjuri writer Tara June Winch, winner of Miles Franklin Award 2020, features a perilous occasion where the female protagonist August endeavors to save the Gondiwindi people from extinction against land dispossession at the hands of a mining company. Drawn on the interrelation of narrative and the environment informed by the scholarship of ecological narratology, this material-ecocritical reading treats food as a major narrative agency in The Yield, including the modes of food production, distribution, and consumption circulating among manifold entities and various forms of eating disorders of human and non-human bodies across time and space. This paper takes The Yield as an example to test the Indigenous novels’ capability to display the postapocalyptic present where quotidian crises inhabit the heart of Aboriginal realism and to investigate how the conflation of apocalyptic realism and Aboriginal realism contributes to the ambivalent but no less affirmative rhetoric of crisis in the Anthropocene.

Abstract:
In this article, I discuss the possibility of applying the practice of urban exploration and archaeology in reconstructing the socio-cultural landscapes and people’s everyday life in the old industrial towns of southwest China during the socialist past, and investigate how these material and visual legacies impact the urban transformation of these old socialist-industrial towns as well as local residents’ perceptions of the resurgence of a (new) cold war mentality. To do this, I use the approach outlined by Alice Mah and John Weily, in which they treat landscape as a lively entity (Mah 11-12, Weily 51). Instead of being a fixed space, landscape contains different socio-cultural activities and lived experiences. Therefore, in my exploration and investigation of China’s old industrial landscapes, I do not only use my eyes, but try to perceive the vibe of the landscape through touching, hearing, tasting and smelling.