GLASS Lecture - ‘Pirate’ is what I’m Not: The role of the ‘Southeast Asian Pirate’ in the Discourse of Legitimation for European Colonial Adventurism, Farish Noor (Nanyang Technical University)
| Datum | donderdag 13 juni 2013 |
|---|---|
| Tijd | 16:30 – 18:00 uur |
| Locatie | Academy Building, Small Auditorium |
Today the term ‘pirate’ has obvious negative connotations and is widely used in the security discourses of Southeast Asia. Yet it can be shown that this term has evolved over the past two centuries, where it was initially introduced as a means to draw an internal boundary between the order of colonial knowledge and power, and the real lives of the colonised natives. This presentation is part of a collaborative work between Dr Farish A Noor and Yan I-Lann, a Malaysian artist, which looks at the plural meanings of ‘pirate’ and ‘piracy’ today. It will argue that the use of the term ‘pirate’ was political in nature from the beginning, and was part of a wider effort of epistemically classify and arrest the meaning of the colonised native subject in a fluid region where movement and diasporas were a reality. By labeling the native Other as pirate, the colonisers were also drawing a distinction between themselves, and identifying themselves in terms of what they were and what they did not wish to be. The semantic and epistemic arrest of the term ‘pirate’ was thus a symptom of a broader arrest of the Southeast Asian archipelago as a whole.