How does one imagine or reinvent a city? Today the panelists spoke about recovering histories,transitions, new researches, forms of storytelling, and  epistemologies about the distant and ancient past of the 19th and 20th century in different regions of the Asia Pacific .

Lawrence Chua uncovers the beautiful history of a model utopian city in Siam, used as  a pedagogical instrument that has nationalism, household, modeled on the Victorian dollhouse. An instrument derived from a repressive and constrained prim culture of the British 19th century becomes transformed and reimagined into homosocial queer and social spatial relations that are speculative and provoke passionate national sentiments and worldly models of political community

Pan LU investigates monuments through the lens of critical moments of changes and the  rise of modernity, particularly in telling, remembering and forgetting WWII. But her paper has magical moments as well- through the art of storytelling, playfully reimagined in China as historical consumption, and in Hong Kong, the intentional forgetting of the colonial past.

Teren Sevea explores magicians acting as historical agents. The unspoken interplay between magic and materiality, between Feudalism and mystification. Sevea looks in particular at Islamic miracle workers that were central to late 19th century instructions on smelting gold  How does one move against a systemic way of thinking about history?  Why is magic and miracles  assumed to be irrational from historical inquiry?

Magic and Narrative is also present in Tan Zi Hao in the investigative history into the Makara- part elephant, crocodile, goat, wild boar and fish acting as an ambivalent historical force (both birth, consumption, and creation and devouring of life, history). Using Makara as a means to trace unknown historical trajectories  between Indonesia, malaysia and singapore, trespassing nation state boundaries.

Ema Tavola’s beautiful talk on the urgency of the familial, how one must  privilege forms of storytelling,  historical lineage, reconnecting with ancestral forms of feminine power to teach new generations of communities, daughters and by privileging these stories and forms of pedagogical learning,  we learn to rely less on  colonial forms of academic structure and the systemic inequalities, social exclusion that result.

I want to talk about what constitutes citizenship- community, and the fabrication of a community into civility or creates civility in a community. relating to ordinary citizens and their concerns. What holds a community together? What sort of Incantations bring a city into being?  : (who garners a place in the King’s favored city (Lawrence Chua) - what commemorates (Pan Lu) (who is marginalized and forgotten (Teren Sevea),) how does myth and makara create invisible civil ties of community (Tan Zi Hao), (ema) I’d like to discuss how each one of your presentations challenge sway against inherent neocolonial power structures.