Instead, talks daily, I'm Elise Hu. There's a William Faulkner quote that I think about a lot. It goes, The past isn't dead, it's not even past. That notion that we carry history in us is the central idea in today's talk from political scientist and historian Farish Akhmad. Nor in his TED talk at NTEU in Singapore, Farish asks us to question our viewpoints, especially when it comes to the stereotypes. Asians are often unfairly targeted with this one really stuck with me.

It'll make you think. I promise you that I will not sing. I will spare you that, at least, but I am a historian. With a background in philosophy and my main area of research is basically the history of Southeast Asia with a focus on 19th century colonial South East Asia. And over the last few years, what I'm been doing, what I've been doing is really tracing the history of certain ideas that shape our viewpoint, the way we in Asia, in Southeast Asia look at ourselves and understand ourselves.

Now, this one thing that I cannot explain as a historian, and this has been puzzling me for for a long time, and this is how and why certain ideas, certain viewpoints do not seem to ever go away. And I don't know why, and in particular, I'm interested to understand why some people, not all by no means, but some people in post-colonial Asia, still hold on to a somewhat romanticized view of the colonial past, see through a kind of rose tinted lenses as perhaps a time that was benevolent or nice for them, even though historians know the realities of the violence and the oppression and the darker side of that entire colonial experience.

So let's imagine I build a time machine for myself. I build a time machine. I send myself back to the 1860 100 years before I was born. Or do you have just read it myself? I go back 100 years before I was born. Now, if I were to find myself in the context of colonial South East Asia and the 19th century. I would not be a professor. Historians know this, and yet despite that. There are still some quarters that somehow want to hold onto this idea that that pass was not as murky, that there were a romanticise side to it.

Now, here is where I as a historian, I encountered the limits of history because I can trace ideas. I can find out the origins of certain cliches, certain stereotypes. I can tell you who came up with it, where and when and in which book. That's one thing I cannot do. I can not get. Into the internal subjective mental universe of someone and change their mind. And I think this is where and why over the last few years, I'm increasingly drawn to things like psychology and cognitive behavioral therapy, because in these fields, scholars look at the persistence of ideas.

Why do some people have certain prejudices? Why are there certain biases, certain phobias? You know, we live unfortunately, sadly, in a world where still misogyny persists, racism persists, all kinds of phobia. Islamophobia, for instance, is now a term. Why do these ideas persist and. Many scholars agree that it's partly because when looking at the world, we fall back, we fall back, we fall back on a finite pool, a small pool of basic ideas that don't get challenged.

Look at how we, particularly us in Southeast Asia, present ourselves to ourselves into the world. Look at how often when we talk about ourselves or my viewpoint, my identity, our identity. Invariably we fall back. We fall back. We fall back. We fall back on the same set of ideas, all of which have histories of their own. Very simple example, we live in Southeast Asia, which is very popular with tourists from all over the world, and I don't think that's a bad thing, by the way.

You know, I think it's good that the tourists come to South Asia because it's part and parcel of broadening your world view and meeting cultures, et cetera, et cetera. But look at how we represent ourselves through the tourist campaigns, the tourism ads that we produce. There will be the obligatory coconut tree, banana tree orangutan, and the orangutan doesn't even get beat. Right. Look at how we represent ourselves. Look at how we represent nature. Look at how we represent the countryside.

Look at how we represent agricultural life. Watch our sitcoms, watch our dramas, watch our movies. It's very common, particularly in Southeast Asia. When you watch these sitcoms, if there's someone from the countryside, invariably. They are ugly, they're funny, they're silly, they're without knowledge. It's as if the countryside has nothing to offer our view of nature, despite all our talk, despite all our talk about Asian philosophy, Asian values, despite all our talk about how we have an organic relationship to nature, how do we actually treat nature in Southeast Asia today?

We regard nature as something to be defeated and exploit. And that's the reality. So the way in which we live in our part of the world, postcolonial South Asia, in so many ways for me. Bears residual traces to ideas, tropes, cliches, stereotypes that have a history. This idea of the countryside as a place to be exploited, the idea of countryfolk as being without knowledge is ideas that historians like me can go back. We can trace how these stereotypes emerged and they emerged at a time.

When Southeast Asia. Was being governed according to the logic of colonial capitalism. And in so many ways, we. Take these ideas with us if part of us now, but we are not critical in interrogating ourselves and asking ourselves how did I have this view of the world? How did I come to have this view of nature? How did I come to have this view of the countryside? How do I have this idea of Asia as exotic? And we saw these Asians in particular love to sell exotic ourselves, and we've turned Southeast Asian identity into a kind of cosplay, you know, where you can literally go to the supermarket to go to the mall and and buy your do it yourself exotic South Asian costume kit.

And we parade this identity, not asking ourselves how in when did this particular image of ourselves emerge? They all have a history to it. And that's why increasingly. As a historian, I find that as I encounter the limits of history, I see that I can work alone any more. I can't work alone anymore because there's absolutely no point in me doing my archival work. There's no point in me seeking the roots of these ideas, tracing the genesis of eight years and then putting it in some journal to be read by maybe three other historians.

There's absolutely no point. The reason why I think this is important is because our region, South East Asia, will, I believe, in the years to come and go through enormous changes, unprecedented changes in our history, probably because of globalization, world politics, geopolitical contestations, the impact of technology, the fourth industrial revolution, our world as we know it is going to change. But for us to adapt to this change, for us to be ready for that change, we need to think out of the box.

And we can't fall back. We can't fall back. We can't fall back on the same set of cliched, tired state. All stereotypes we need to think about. And that's why historians, we can't work alone. Now, I. I need to engage with people in psychology, people in behavioral therapy. I need to engage with sociologists, anthropologists, political economists. I need, above all, to engage with people in the arts and the media because it's there in that forum outside the confines of the university that these debates really need to take place and they need to take place now.

Because we need to understand that things the way things are today are not determined by some fixed. I am historical RealtyTrac, but rather than they are many of the histories, many of the ideas that were forgotten, marginalized, erased along the line, historians like me. Our job is to uncover all this, discover all this. But we do need to engage. We need to engage with society as a whole. So to go back to that time machine example I gave earlier, let's see, this is a 19th century colonial subject then.

And the person's wondering, will empire ever come to an end? Will there be an end to all this? Will we one day be free? So the person invents a time machine, boop, boop, boop, boop. Goes into the future and arrives here in postcolonial South East Asia today. The person looks around and the person will say, well, yes, indeed. The Imperial's like Zygon. The imperial gunboats are gone. The colonial armies are gone.

Are new flags, new nation states? There is independence after all. But has the. The person then. Watches the tourist ads. And she is again, the banana tree, the coconut tree and the orangutan. Person watches some TV. And watches is how. Images of an exotic South East Asia are being reproduced again and again by Southeast Asians, and the person might then come to the conclusion that, well. Notwithstanding. The fact that. Colonialism is over.

We are still in so, so many ways. Living in the long shadow of the 19th century. And this, I think, has has become my personal mission. The reason why I think history is so important and the reason why I think it's so important for history to go beyond history, because we need to reignite this debate about who and what we are, all of us we talk about or not. I have my viewpoint. You have your viewpoint.

Well, that's partly true. Our viewpoints are never entirely our own. Individually, we are all social beings. We are historical beings. You meet all of us. We carry history in us. It's in the language we use. It's in the fiction we write. It's in the movies we choose to watch. It's in the images that we conjure when we think of when what we are. We are historical beings. We carry history with us and history carries us along.

But while we are determined by history, it is my personal belief that we need not be trapped by history and we need not be the victims of history. PR ex.