Leslie Wong, King’s College London
Growing up in Singapore, my conception of ‘the classics’ was confined to golden oldies on the radio, the composers haunting the ABRSM piano syllabus, and Great Illustrated Classics such as Ivanhoe, Great Expectations and The Secret Garden. Graeco-Roman antiquity featured prominently in my childhood too (thanks to Xena: Warrior Princess), but its connection with ‘the classical’ would not be established in my mind until more than a decade later. It would be another decade before I stumbled upon classical reception.
That sense of belated “induction” sparked off the theme for this year’s CRSN/ICS Summer Series: was my experience unique, or were others in Singapore and the wider region of Southeast Asia also simultaneously exposed to the Graeco-Roman and estranged from the discipline of Classics? The next step, finding speakers willing and able to address some aspect of this intellectual problem, proved trickier. Only three scholars had previously published on classical reception in Southeast Asia and, as it turned out, two of them could not participate in the seminar series due to prior commitments. That a series with such an undercooked and overlooked theme eventually ran with a full line-up of speakers is nothing short of a minor miracle, and I am extremely grateful to everyone who had a knowing (or unknowing) hand in making it happen.
Seminar 1 featured the Indonesian comics artist Ariela Kristantina discussing her collaboration with writer Marguerite Bennett on the graphic novel InSEXts, where a misidentified Javanese goddess turns into an avenging “Medusa” after her statue is misappropriated from her shrine by European robbers. I learned of Ariela’s work via Natalie Swain’s article in Classical Receptions Journal, so I was overjoyed when Natalie agreed to chair the session. Ariela’s revelation that her “Medusa” was actually an amalgamation of the folkloric figures Nyi Roro Kidul and Nyi Blorong was, moreover, a striking reminder that the simultaneously revered and reviled snake-woman is not unique to Greek and Roman mythology. We misidentify her at our peril.
If not for an anonymised abstract submitted to the ‘Antiquity in Media Studies’ (AIMS) conference, Seminar 2 would not have happened. I still do not know who wrote that abstract, but they had the unwitting pleasure of introducing me to Reimena Yee’s webcomic Alexander, the Servant and the Water of Life. Fragments of Reimena’s upbringing in Malaysia seeped into the comic, but even more remarkable was the amount of research she had conducted on the Alexander Romance’s diffusion across time and space, aided by the late classicist Richard Stoneman. During the session, Reimena argued that the time for epic narratives about universal conquerors has passed. The time for exploring intersections between Southeast Asian creators and Graeco-Roman antiquity, however, is just beginning.
Dr Daniel Jew is living proof that classicists exist in Singapore, and at the very university where I completed my undergraduate degree, too. Not that I knew it at the time, for it was Chrysanthi Gallou’s ‘Sparta Lives’ series that first alerted me to Daniel’s existence. Building on his Sparta Lives presentation, Seminar 3 dealt with the unique challenge of teaching Greek and Roman history in a country where Classics does not exist. Daniel gave a concise account of the historical circumstances under which Graeco-Roman antiquity vanished from Singapore’s educational landscape, before demonstrating how he uses reenactment and media receptions to bring his students closer to the ancient Mediterranean. Not surprisingly, many of those students cite the Percy Jackson franchise as their earliest point of reference.
Professor Sven Günther’s involvement with Seminar 4 was the result of even more happenstance. While Sven has been based in northeastern China for years, he unexpectedly found himself with a visiting lectureship in Ho Chi Minh City after accepting an invitation from an old friend. Once there, he was struck by the elaborate classical imagery adorning the city’s French colonial edifices, so brought the Vietnamese undergraduates he was teaching on a field trip to rediscover a lesser-known facet of their country’s colonial past. By a stroke of luck, one of Sven’s former students attended his session and assented to reflect briefly on her experience for the audience. Perhaps most serendipitously of all, it was only through a chance conversation with my cousin that I found out about Sven’s time in Vietnam!
In contrast, the speakers for seminars 5 and 6 might be described as the nuclei around which the entire seminar series was assembled. Tom Zanker’s book onFilipino national hero José Rizal’s formidable classical erudition came out barely a month before I started searching for potential speakers and, in fact, convinced me that my proposed theme might be feasible after all. His talk focused on the painter Juan Luna, a contemporary of Rizal’s, rather than Rizal himself, conjuring up a rich snapshot of a time in the Philippines’ history when an elite class of ilustrados conceived of their relationship to the Spanish crown via the Graeco-Roman classics. Tom was also the series’ biggest supporter, attending every session and enlivening discussions with thoughtful and apposite questions.
Last but not least was Nuraliah Norasid, whose novel The Gatekeeper eponymises the ancient Greek Medusa into a species of medusas just as malignant and maligned as Ariela’s creation in InSEXts. Fittingly, we were ending right where we had begun. (This had another layer of significance for me, because The Gatekeeper had been the keystone of my PhD thesis and my personal gateway to Southeast Asian classical reception.) Nuraliah spoke about the socio-political commentary in her novel, which unflinchingly exposes the ubiquitous and institutionalised racism directed at Singapore’s minority Malay community. She also made time to discuss at length the formative influence video game receptions of Medusa and the wider Graeco-Roman tradition had on her creative process, from early teenage scribblings to her final polished draft.
A final note on the unusual composition of this seminar series’ speaker lineup, which featured an equal number of creative practitioners and academics. I am, of course, delighted that Ariela, Reimena and Nuraliah could personally showcase the range and breadth of contemporary Southeast Asian receptions and strengthen the case for more frequent academia-industry crossovers. My hope for anyone interested in organising a second iteration, however, is that they are no longer compelled, like I was, to invite creative practitioners simply because there are too few academics to make up the numbers. Classical reception in Southeast Asia will no longer be undercooked or overlooked if more like-minded scholars join Tom, Sven and a few others in expanding the discipline’s remit.