Roundtable on alternative modernities and alternative methodologies in Southeast Asia

Following a symposium on “Alternative Modernities, Alternative Methodologies: Literary and Cultural Southeast Asia post-WWII to the 1960s” held in February 2025 in Singapore, a group of scholars met to discuss approaches to Southeast Asian literary and cultural studies with a comparative and regional focus. Throughout the symposium, papers and speakers in conversation discussed how literary and cultural artifacts generate discrepant modernities and regional modulations of broader concepts. This roundtable records a lively exchange over alternative sites of knowledge production, while querying how alternative cultural or literary artefacts themselves dialogically re-theorise the frames of analysis brought to their study. Theorizing at the level of interpretative framework, object of analysis and conceptual categories, we sought to reflexively understand how we could approach literary and cultural study with contextual granularity and an exploratory stance towards theory.