Who and what is East and South East Asian Heritage Month for?
by Scott Wark and Jonathan Gray
This article builds on a collaboration on East and Southeast Asians: Documenting a Category in the Making with the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies at the University of Warwick, City, University of London, the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London, ESEA Hub and the Public Data Lab. To further explore these themes there will be a series of workshops with ESEA Hub over the summer, as well as a Wikipedia Editathon on "East and South East Asians in the UK” for ESEAHM 2022 in September:
Over the past several months, we’ve been looking at the inaugural 2021 East and South East Asian Heritage Month, to try and generate some insights into how #ESEAHM2021 developed, as part of a broader research collaboration.
We've been working with besea.n and other groups for over a year examining the emergence and spread of the term ‘ESEA.’ We’re both media and science and technology studies scholars, which means that we study what media are, how they’re used, and what impacts they have on culture and society. Our approach is to look at what online activity tells us about ‘ESEA’, ESEAHM 2021, and the communities that gather around them.
ESEAHM 2021 is interesting to us because it provides a snapshot of who the ESEA community/communities is/are, how they express their identities, and how the term gets used to foster solidarity across – and in spite of – nation-based ethnic identifiers. To quote an anonymous respondent to a survey besea.n put out after ESEAHM 2021, this month represented a “triumphant and joyous celebration of how the ESEA community [had] come together” during the COVID-19 pandemic, with its lockdowns and its increase in anti-ESEA racism.
“But the research we’re doing isn’t abstract or impersonal: we also both have ESEA backgrounds. We care about what this term means, where it’s come from, and how it’s been taken up by people in the UK. ”
So for us, ESEAHM 2021 isn’t just the subject of a research project that may or may not generate insights about media, culture, and society. It’s a chance to spend some time thinking about what ‘ESEA heritage’ actually means – to ESEA communities and to us.
It's hard to sum up a month of celebration. We could start with numbers of events and activities: 72 events over the month of September (with a couple in August), including 17 online panels, 9 supper clubs or meals, 6 performing arts events, 5 literary events, 4 meetups, 4 exhibitions (online and off), 2 podcasts, and 1 radio show; collaborations with a whole bunch of organisations, networks, performing arts companies, creatives, makers, writers, and thinkers involved in the ESEA space – as well as a few big companies, three universities, and several venues.
Or we could list all of the different kinds of events featured as part of ESEAHM 2021, driven by all sorts of people from the ESEA community in the UK: live podcasts, book launches, concerts, club nights, exhibitions exploring different identities and their historical legacies, panels on writing and publishing; networking events for designers and creatives, storytelling nights, explorations of the contributions ESEA people have made to nursing in the UK – and, of course, lots of different food (a Congee night!)
Image grid showing the usage of the hashtag #ESEAHM2021
The overriding theme emphasised by besea.n is, of course, joy. The point of staging a heritage month is to celebrate the many different things that make us a community and to do so visibly. Just as importantly, ESEAHM 2021 also provided a space for the broader ESEA community to actively explore what it means to be ESEA in the UK in the current moment, given all of the events and changes that the past few years have brought – from Brexit to the COVID-19 pandemic, from #BlackLivesMatter to #StopAsianHate.
It’s also worth asking, What is heritage? The word ‘heritage’ might put you in mind of stately homes and musty mansions, landscaped gardens, sweeping vistas, old pictures, expensive ceramics, rich fabrics. Bridgerton and Downton Abbey – or the National Trust and overpriced, over-brewed tea. Heritage means tradition, and tradition means all the stuff that makes up the culture and history of people and place. This includes statues and old buildings, which the UK obviously has in abundance (including many with connections to slavery, racism and colonialism)– but it’s so much more than that.
Rather than thinking of heritage mainly in terms of what has passed, one can also think of it as what we do with who we are – of what we pass to each other, of what we share in the present. Heritage is history, but it’s also culture, art, music, stories, food, religion, community and being there for each other. Heritage is how we live and express ourselves, now, embracing who we are, what we do, and – yes – where we came from. It’s about using all of this to make something new – including new affinities, associations, mobilisations and solidarities.
Heritage isn’t just something we inherit, but something that is also constantly made and remade. This process needs to be given time and space, so people can not only make their heritage visible, but work out what it means. To care for the making of heritage is not to downplay the past, but also to reconsider how histories operate and take on different meanings in the present - and what kinds of future possibilities we may be able to pass along.
Heritage is remade with the tools of the time. Over the past couple of years, a lot of ESEA gatherings have happened with and through digital media, including online platforms, algorithms, hashtags, links, video clips, and other kinds of digital objects and infrastructures. But this kind of work also changes these tools themselves.'
Social media platforms have been described as ‘post-demographic.’ They are supposed to be places that shape themselves to our behaviour, personalising the content that we see based on the kinds of things we’ve done on them before – rather than who we are. ESEA is a post-demographic category, too; only, it’s one that is being built by the communities it refers to, using these same algorithmic tools to change the terms by which ‘we’ are referred.
This is why ‘ESEA’ is so interesting to us, as both scholars and members of that community. It’s heritage in the making, and societal classifications that would usually be institutionalised through censuses and surveys being redrawn through digitally mediated gatherings.
So what does all of this mean for ESEAHM 2022 – and, indeed, for the (hopefully many more) ESEA Heritage Months to come?
ESEAHM 2021 will be a hard act to follow. It involved a huge number of events and a herculean amount of organisation and hard work done by a small team of volunteers. In the coming months and years, ESEAHM could take a number of different forms and go in countless directions. Based on the work we’ve done looking at the online activity around it – and ESEA more generally – here are four questions that surfaced which might help its organisers, its contributors, and its participants think more about what they – what you – want ESEAHM to become.
How might ESEAHM stage more activities – and engage more communities – beyond London?
How can ESEAHM broaden its representation of ESEA communities and their stories? What people, networks, organisations, or events might help with this? Where could events be staged, with and for whom?
What is the role of the internet and online spaces in gathering ESEA communities? Who can be reached through different channels? How might one engage those who were not involved last year?
What does it mean to achieve broader societal and institutional recognition?
This last question requires a bit more contextualisation. ESEAHM hasn’t yet achieved the same kind of institutional recognition as some of the other major month-long celebrations of heritage in the UK. Before it does, it’s worth asking how that kind of recognition might benefit ESEA communities. Achieving recognition is a worthy goal. It has a value in itself: it could be part of a strategy aimed at recognising the contributions that ESEA people have made, and will continue to make, to society and culture in the UK.
Or, it could be part of a broader strategy aimed at securing support, resources, and institutional backing to tackle the inequalities that ESEA communities face.
Or, one might also see the value in simply being together as a community, and giving people the time and the space to be who they are. To quote another respondent to besea.n’s surveys: “[i]t’s been such an amazing and affirming month… I feel truly seen.” There’s a value in providing a platform for communities to do what they do and to see each other doing it. To, that is, be seen by one another.
These goals aren’t mutually exclusive, but it’s nevertheless worth reflecting on who and what ESEAHM is for – and working out what shape it might take from there.
ESEA heritage is already thriving here in the UK. It already exists in the many, varied communities of ESEA people that live here. This word, community, is key. If you’re wondering what an event ought to do to contribute to this year’s ESEAHM, it is worth keeping this in mind.
Scott Wark was a Research Fellow for the ‘People Like You: Contemporary Figures of Personalisation’ project at the University of Warwick’s Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies until July of this year. In September, he’ll be starting a new role as a Lecturer in Media at the University of Kent. He is (Tamil) Malay Indian and Australian (but lives in London). He researches online culture, amongst other things.
Jonathan Gray is Senior Lecturer in Critical Infrastructure Studies at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London and cofounder of the Public Data Lab. He is Hakka and Scottish and contributes to several ESEA groups, including End Violence and Racism Against ESEA Communities and besea.n. More about his work can be found at jonathangray.org and @jwyg.
