The Acoustics of the Archipelagic Imagination in Southeast Asian Artists’ Film

How do we conceptualize films in relation? As we seek to trace the connections and affinities we see, hear, and feel across a regional cinema, what kinds of alternative cartographies (affective, aesthetic, cultural, or industrial) emerge? How do we think through and with the aesthetic practices of artists and filmmakers in a way that enables us to avoid both reinscribing arbitrary lines across territories and disavowing the specific historic and lived conditions of the nation?¹

Recent scholarship by Gayatri Gopinath and Brian Bernards has proposed a reconceptualization of region as a spatial imaginary that is not “territorial” but rather shaped by questions of relationality and flow.² As a scholar of film sound, what strikes me about these associations is how powerfully they resonate with the political and material qualities of sound.³ In this essay, I build on my previous writing on sound, history, and memory in Asian cinema, and the important work of scholars such as Hsu Fang-Tze, meLê yamomo, and Tao Leigh Goffe⁴, on “transcolonial” soundscapes and the affective resonances of audio technologies, both within and outside of the region, to suggest listening as a useful theory and method for tracing the vicissitudes of the regional, “archipelagic imagination.”⁵ In what follows, I suggest that attending to the auditory reveals how under-the-radar frequencies disrupt regimes of listening associated with empire and the nation-state. I assert that the depiction of and engagement with auditory experience thus invites a consideration of acoustic spatiality that is informed by historical studies of colonial media technologies and practices as well as writing on the acoustic experience of diaspora.⁶ Several film and media works from or about Southeast Asia exemplify these dynamics in different ways, such as Droga! (Drug!, Miko Revereza, 2014), No Gods, No Masters (Sung Tieu, 2017), Nhà Cây (The Tree House, Trương Minh Quý, 2019), and Expedition Content (Ernst Karel and Veronika Kusumaryati, 2020).

Focusing on two artists’ films from Southeast Asia, Nguyễn Trinh Thi’s Everyday’s the Seventies (2018) and Shireen Seno’s Nervous Translation (2017), I conceptualize regionality through the acoustic, affective, and emotional cartographies depicted in these works, both of which explore experiences of migration in and out of the region during the 1970s and 1980s.⁷ During this era, across many parts of Asia, vinyl and particularly the cassette tape could travel across borders with relative ease by both legitimate and illegitimate means. The motility of these formats enabled the formation of listening communities that flourished across and above the official borders of the state.⁸ In Nguyễn’s and Seno’s works, lo-fi analogue practices of sound production and reception work to evoke small-scale haptic and sonic intimacies that seem to lessen the protagonists’ perceived distance from home.

I propose that due to the itinerant and diffuse nature of sound, the acoustics of the archipelagic imagination allow for a consideration of Southeast Asia not as a fixed category or static entity but as a spatial imaginary shaped affectively through relationality. Listening out for “transcolonial” resonances across the region, I draw from the work of Édouard Glissant and the scholars mentioned above in order to attend to the processes of contact, heterogeneity, and lateral exchange that operate at sub-and supranational levels.⁹ Against the background of larger-scale aural histories of the region, the sound design in both Nguyễn’s and Seno’s works attunes the listener to a vernacular experience of sound that is juxtaposed against larger-scale dominant and colonial modes of broadcasting.¹⁰ These dynamics are mapped out in both Everyday’s the Seventies and Nervous Translation as they foreground economic and affective labor, including the transnational flows of people and capital, alongside the networks enabled through the circulation of audio media and sonic artifacts.

Everyday’s the Seventies is an installation composed of three video and four audio channels each depicting a different form of regionalized, acoustic affect through the layering of colonial, cinematic, and personal narratives.¹¹ Through this sometimes dissonant layering of audio channels...