Allan Edward Lumba

VISITOR’S VOICE
Interview with Allan Edward Lumba ❯❯
History ❘ Concordia University
CSEAS Visiting Research Scholar: September to November 2024
Meet the Researcher
WHAT ARE YOUR…?
FAVORITE THINGS
I like checking out different non-western supermarkets, especially west Asian and Asian food. I have really enjoyed Japanese supermarkets because there are a many ready-made components available, for example to quickly make curry or udon and add some pickled dishes.
I like listening and trying to speak new languages. It has been interesting to listen to people here in Kyoto, because you can hear a lot about people’s relationships, the kinds of hierarchies being navigated, and the different generational intonations. Although my conversational Japanese is very basic, I am much better at understanding Japanese than when I started (I only studied Japanese in high school, so many lifetimes ago).
My absolute favorite thing is hanging out with my daughter, especially outdoors, in parks, playgrounds, paths, or going for longer walks. It’s so much fun. I really appreciate walking along the Kamo River, or winding our way through the narrow streets around our dorm. One thing I’ve noticed is that there are barely any cars parked on the streets, which compels me to explore more on foot and stare at the horizon contoured by mountains.
DO YOU HAVE…?
MUST HAVE GEAR for FIELD RESEARCH and WRITING
Cloud based storage
During my almost two decades of conducting research, I have accumulated a half dozen external hard drives where I store all my photographs from archives. But these are difficult to access whenever I’m trying to track down something. Cloud-based storage makes life much easier as I can search for things more quickly and wherever I am.
Smartphone
In the past when traveling to new countries or unfamiliar cities, I would have to buy a city atlas to navigate my way to archives, buy a new phone to get a local number, and bring my camera to take photos of the archives. Now, I can use the smartphone as a gps, to take photos, and with eSIMs, I don’t have to buy another phone to work in another country. Libraries also used to charge quite a bit for photocopying, but now I can usually take a photo without paying for copies as long as it is allowed by the collections.
A B5 campus notebook and a Muji 0.38 pen
I like the haptics of writing by hand—it’s a tactile form of thinking. On a physical notebook, I feel like I can map out ideas quicker and messier. I can look back and make unanticipated connections more than through the linearity of a computer document.
Interview
Sinking Feeling, Feeling Sinking
01
Please tell us about your research.
My research approach is based on analyzing things that are seen as ubiquitous and ordinary, but slowly peeling away their “naturalness” to reveal the history of power and struggle that is regularly obscured. I did this with my first book, Monetary Authorities, which, through the optic of the monetary and banking system under US colonial rule, explored the relations and tensions within racial and colonial capitalism in the Philippines. Relatedly, my current research, tentatively titled “Subsidence: Surfacing Life in a Sinking City,” is an infrastructural and infrapoltical history of the megapolis of Manila in the neocolonial era. I am interested in the ways the state, corporations, and communities grapple with the ongoing climate disaster. It is, in the end, a critique of capitalist growth and the violence it inflicts on human and other-than-human worlds.
02
How do you overcome the difficulties in putting together the results of your research into a research paper or book?
Sitting down and having a set schedule for scholarship is extremely important. It is a form of concrete labor, and setting time to write, reading to read, and thinking to think is crucial. There is no big “a-ha moment” when inspiration strikes, rather, it is the process of reading and writing that produces fruitful thoughts.
03
Do you have any essential reads (books) that you recommend to younger people?
The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman, Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney, and the essays of June Jordan.
These works, to me, are so very convincing and, I think, stylistically inspiring. They are all very different kinds of writers, but all, I believe, are passionately materialist. These writers have helped me ask questions about micro and macro relations of power differently, but also provide blueprints in articulating the exploration of these questions in compelling ways.
04
What are your future ambitions as a scholar?
First and foremost is to believe in people power, and to engage with people to collectively bring about greater liberation and collective decision-making. As a younger scholar, circumstances forced me to think about the job market and securing a tenure track position. These are valid concerns. But I also think that other things—like understanding the meaning and matter of what you write and teach beyond the narrow confines of academia—are perhaps more important, especially if one wants to stay committed to good scholarship. Now I want to be able to teach what I research and write for a broader audience. I also want to stylistically expand to reach different non-scholar communities.
05
What was the most difficult moment or challenge in your life, and how did you overcome it?
When I learned of my friend Chris J. Grorud’s passing in 2016. Chris was one of my closest friends during graduate school at the University of Washington. He was a brilliant and singular thinker who, despite having a prickly personality, could get along with many. He was an Indonesianist who loved Indonesia and its people and truly believed in merdeka (its pasts and its futures). Every time we hung out and talked, I would learn something new about Indonesia and Southeast Asia more generally. When he passed away, he left a yawning gap in my relation to Southeast Asian studies, and it is because of his memory and impact on me that I continue to keep repairing my relation to the scholarly field of Southeast Asian studies.
06
Why did you choose CSEAS, or what is your expectation here?
I chose to apply to CSEAS because of Caroline Hau. Since graduate school, I have had a deep respect for her and her intellectual work. Hau is a singular scholar. She is a nimble thinker and an elegant writer. Hau-sensei’s writing on nationalism, radicalism, ethnicity, class, and especially her unflinching critique of who deploys violence, no matter the source, has been extremely helpful for my own way of thinking about Philippine history. She is also a very supportive and generous mentor and is very quick to suggest others’ works that may be of interest or resonant with one’s own. In addition, the collection in the CSEAS library is fantastic. In addition to the special collections, I have loved just wandering the stacks and picking up random books on Singapore or Aotearoa—it is such a fun place to geek out!
(November 2024)
* The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University.
Allan E. S. Lumba is an assistant professor in the department of history at Concordia University (Tiohtiá:ke/Montreál). His book, Monetary Authorities: Capitalism and Decolonization in the American Colonial Philippines (Duke University Press, 2022), charts the historical intersections between racial capitalism, entangled colonialisms, and imperial money in the United States and the Philippines. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Washington and previously served as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Charles Warren Center and the University of Michigan’s Society of Fellows. His current work on subsidence in Manila and elsewhere in the Indo-Pacific, has recently been awarded the multi-year Insight Development Grant (2024–2026) by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Visitor’s Voiceは、CSEASに滞在しているフェローを紹介するインタビューシリーズです。彼らの研究活動にスポットを当てながら、研究の背景にある人々やさまざまなエピソードを含めて、一問一答形式で紹介しています。