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ABSTRACT
This article explores how photographs selected from an archive represent the Cham ethnic group. It argues that portrait photographs provide a useful analytical focus for critiquing ethnonational categories and their visual representations. Cham live across Southeast Asia, speak a Malayo-Polynesian language and exemplify the global and protracted nature of forced displacement. Little unites them beyond their self-identification as such, and their minority status in every country they call home. The article examines the extent to which selected photographs engage with and challenge dominant depictions of Cham ethnicity as a basis for considering an alternative approach to belonging that is not bound to the dichotomy of self and other. It concludes that the materiality of the sea holds greater potential to capture the emotional and atemporal elements of living as a migrant or an ethnic minority than analyses trapped within the linear and bounded spatiotemporal frames that create those conceptual categories.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to James Sebright for permission to reproduce his photographs.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Anderson, Imagined Communities.
2. Nakamura, “Becoming Malay,” 289–306.
3. Stock, “Two Rituals, a Bit of Dualism and Possibly Some Inseparability,” 788.
4. Ibid., 786.
5. Nakamura and Sutherland, “Shifting the Nationalist Narrative,” 66–79.
6. Clifford, Routes.
7. Morton and Edwards, Photography, Anthropology and History.
8. Benjamin, On Photography, 83.
9. Krauss, “Tracing Nadar,” 30.
10. Clarke, The Portrait in Photography, 1–2.
11. Barabantseva and Lawrence, “Encountering vulnerabilities through ‘filmmaking for Fieldwork,”’ 911–30.
12. Hansen, “How images make world politics,” 263–288.
13. Hall, “Foreword,” xv.
14. See note 7 above.
15. Campbell et al., “Writing with Light: Photo-essays”, www.culanth.org/photo_essays, accessed 12 July 2017.
16. Hansen, “How images make world politics,” 267.
17. Nakamura and Sutherland, “Shifting the Nationalist Narrative?”
18. Taylor, “Minorities at Large,” 3–43, 16.
19. Sutherland, “Leaving and Longing,” 118–131.
20. Taylor, Cham Muslims of the Mekong Delta, 17.
21. Sigona, “How can a “nomad” be a “refugee”?, 69–79.
22. Castles, “Towards a Sociology of Forced Migration and Social Transformation,” 13–34, 27.
23. Sutherland, “A post-modern Mandala?”
24. Castles, “Towards a Sociology of Forced Migration and Social Transformation,” 26.
25. Scott, The art of not being governed.
26. Tran, “Weaving Across Borders.”
27. Weber, “The Cham Diaspora in Southeast Asia.”
28. Taylor, Cham Muslims of the Mekong Delta.
29. Ni Mhurchu, Ambiguous Citizenship in an Age of Global Migration, 153.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid., 165.
32. Miller, Strangers in our midst, 8.
33. Hansen, “How images make world politics,” 271.
34. Taylor, “Minorities at Large,”16–17.
35. Nakamura, “Personal communication.”
36. Taylor, “Minorities at Large,” 14.
37. Rahman, Cham Centuries Website Engagement Report. Unpublished research report, 2019.
38. See note 1 above.
39. Belmore, cited in Merson, “International Art World and Transnational Artwork,” 41–65, 52.
40. Merson, “International Art World and Transnational Artwork,” 61, 65.
41. Peters and Steinberg, “The Ocean in Excess,” 293–307.
42. Evers, “The Point,” 893–908, 894.
43. Ibid., 903.
44. Ibid.
45. Kuusisto-Arponen, “The mobilities of forced displacement, 545–563, 547.
46. Ibid., 547.
47. Ibid.,550.
48. Sutherland, Reimagining the Nation.
49. Weber, “Moving in an Endless Single Line,” 76–109, 80.
50. Ibid., 82.
51. Ibid., 80.
52. Ibid.
53. See note 26 above.
54. Hardy, “Eaglewood and the Economic History of Champa and Central Vietnam,” 118.
55. Trankell, “Songs of our Spirits: Possession and Historical Imagination among the Cham in Cambodia,” 31–46, 34.
56. See note 27 above.
57. Weber, “The Vietnamese Annexation of Panduranga (Champa) and the End of a Maritime Kingdom.”
58. See note 28 above.
59. Kuusisto-Arponen, “The mobilities of forced displacement.”
60. Weber,”Moving in an Endless Single Line,” 81.
61. Taylor, Cham Muslims of the Mekong Delta, 6.
62. Livonen, cited in Kuusisto-Arponen, “The mobilities of forced displacement,” 554.
63. Sutherland, “Invitssing Essential Outsiders in,” 880–896.
64. Kelly “Time and the Global,” 839–71.
65. Shakespeare, cited in Kelly, “Time and the Global,” 853.
66. Steinberg and Peters, “Wet ontologies, fluid spaces,” 247–64, 253.
67. Kelly, “Time and the Global,” 853.
68. Taylor, “Minorities at Large,” 4.
69. Stock, “Two Rituals, a Bit of Dualism and Possibly Some Inseparability,” 796.
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Claire Sutherland
Claire Sutherland is Professor of Politics and Head of Teaching Excellence at Northumbria University, Newcastle, United Kingdom