Infrastructure as Method in Archipelagic Southeast Asia

Abstract

60 A & Q Infrastructure as Method in Archipelagic Southeast Asia Elmo Gonzaga If connectivity is indeed the key engine of the global economy (Khanna 2016), then infrastructure has become one of the primary mechanisms for governments, businesses, citizens, and migrants to negotiate flows, interchanges, and transplantations of images, knowledge, technologies, and money. International and intraregional organizations like the G20 (Oxford Economics 2017) and the Asian Development Bank (2017) now emphasize infrastructure building as a catalyst for economic growth and social progress. Cities in South and Southeast Asia with a growing middle class, such as Manila, Jakarta, Lahore, Dhaka, Hanoi, and Ho Chi Minh City, are constructing or expanding mass transit systems with technical and financial aid from Japan and the PRC. Meant to facilitate the mobility of workers, goods, and materials throughout these cities, such transportation infrastructures generate sources of employment for residents but, more importantly, make their built environments more attractive to foreign companies, professionals, and investors. The messianic advocacy of infrastructure building in East and South Asia has contrasted with austerity policies plaguing North America and Western Europe, which have led to worsening underemployment and precarity. The importance of infrastructure for global economic and geopolitical expansion is exemplified by the PRC’s Belt and Road Initiative, which is developing maritime ports and railway networks to extend its transnational supply chains to traditionally marginalized areas in the Global South in exchange for investments and loans as well as leaseholds and repossessions. The civil unrest that spread across East Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East in 2019 was, in large part, in response to the struggle of ordinary citizens for greater democratic access to vital urban, political, and social infrastructure. Protests on the streets of Santiago, Quito, Bogot á, Port-­ au-­ Prince, Tehran, and Beirut erupted after abrupt increases in the fares for public transit, prices of subsidized fuel, and taxes on social media, which curtailed access to the means of transportation and communication for most of the population. Just as in Jakarta, Bangkok, Algiers, Cairo, Baghdad, and Hong Kong, demonstrations have focused on good governance, particularly the lack of administrative competence and political will to address issues of state corruption, water and power shortages, inadequate health care and waste disposal, and police A & Q 61 brutality, which have prevented the benefits of economic development from encompassing a larger majority of people. Through an array of collective actions, including sit-­ins, strikes, and riots, protesters have responded to the imperiousness of the established order by blocking, vandalizing, or destroying physical infrastructures—­ which, to them, symbolize its elitism and injustice—­ including streets, bridges, tunnels, government offices, shopping malls, gas stations, train stations, airports, banks, and ATMs. Infrastructure is commonly understood to refer to large-­ scale physical structures that facilitate the mobility and efficiency of networks of transportation, energy, and communication. The term could also refer to architectural frameworks (Easterling 2014) and symbolic configurations (Larkin 2013) that similarly enhance the mobility and efficiency of local and transnational flows through an array of trade agreements, credit facilities , data interfaces, and free ports. Demanding the right to participate in determining the form, scope, and usage of these infrastructures, global protest movements have been concerned with how to enable emergent modes of agency and collectivity to flourish. In this way, infrastructure could be seen to provide the staging ground for alternate lifeworlds beyond established systems and protocols. My own interest in the infrastructural entanglements of capitalist modernity, media urbanism, and social activism in Asian metropolises emergesfromthebroadscopeofmyresearchacrossfilmandvisualculture, critical theory, and the urban humanities in Southeast Asia and the Global South. Part of my research examines how physical infrastructures and infrastructural imaginaries shape the interaction, mobility, and impact of cultural flows of discourses, narratives, and iconographies in archipelagic East Asia. Because of its intraregional scope, Southeast Asian Cultural Studies requires a comparativist lens, looking beyond the exceptionality of national sovereignty and culture toward the indeterminacy of border crossings and connections. Pivoting away from frameworks developed with reference to Western Europe or North America, this interdisciplinary method also means multiplying points of reference across disparate marginalized areas, such that the locus of struggle shifts from the Pacific Ocean to the South China Sea (Chen 2010). Its geographic scope cannot be defined...