Kazuto Nakano

I am a student at Yale-National University of Singapore College, specializing in anthropology of climate change, multispecies ethnography, materiality and care studies, and heritage work. My extensive experience as a research assistant for historians and political economists in East and Southeast Asia supports an interdisciplinary approach to these fields. Outside of my studies, I love making tea for my friends and reading Japanese novels, blending cultural appreciation with personal enjoyment.

Boats are indicators of movement, journeying across oceans with humans, fish, and trade goods. They also appear in museums as models, telling stories of life around water. This research focuses on boats to investigate life in maritime Southeast Asia through ethnography and museum research. Ethnographic studies are conducted in coastal communities on Bantayan Island in the Philippines, engaging with fisherfolk to understand social-material relations. Additionally, the social history of the Nusantara Boats collection at the NUS Museum is examined, featuring models crafted by boat-makers in the region. The research aims to show that boats, both in their physical form and as models, exercise agency in coastal lives and museums. It highlights the migration of boats and peoples and the resulting changes in coastal environments, beliefs, and practices. The final products will include a capstone paper and an exhibition, exploring the socio-material relations between humans and non-humans amid growing environmental precarity.

Ryan-Ashleigh Boey is a fourth-year English major. His current research interests lie in cultural memory studies, children’s literature, and (fictional inscriptions of) the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.

“Breaking and Remaking” approaches the exhibitionary potential of the NUS Museum’s Charles Dyce Collection through the lens of performance studies. It attempts an exposition of the Collection’s colonialist articles as text and the exhibition of said articles as performance in order to tease out the different (mutually constitutive and inflective) modalities of meaning-making afforded by exhibitionary practice. Specifically, it attends to the contention that colonialist art/efacts can be “br[oken] and rema[de]” in the hands of “trickster figures” (Conquergood 138) so as to vitiate, deconstruct, and, thereby, denaturalise the very epistemic latitudes within whose remit they had initially been conceived. In line with these parameters and with broader recourse to the critical lexicons of Homi Bhabha and Bertolt Brecht amongst others working betwixt and between the fields of performance and cultural studies, I ask under what circumstances Dyce’s oeuvre might productively rehearse the memory of colonialism in a distinctly postcolonial Singapore.

Xin Chen is a 3rd year student in the History and Political Science double degree programme. Her interests lie in the intersections of material culture, Asian history and international relations. She writes for MAJU as a policy explainer, and has other works featured in ‘Voices from Asians and Europeans on “The Future of Asia-Europe Cooperation”. Xin Chen is also a national shooter and enjoys reading and film photography for leisure.

The Peranakan community is often associated with their extensive trade links between China and the Straits Settlements, as well as its amalgamation of Chinese, European, and local culture. As both utilitarian objects and artistic expressions, ceramics encapsulate the material manifestations of these influences. With the Straits Chinese Collection at the fore, much can be revealed about the economic ties between China and the Straits Settlements through further investigation of the histories behind the ceramics in the Alice and Peter Tan Collection. Hence, through the study of the Alice and Peter Tan Collection, a better understanding of the economic networks of the Peranakan community during the late 19th to early 20th century can be forged.