For the love of the game
I have come to believe that the lessons from our teachers that stick to us the most do not come from the books they wrote or the lectures they gave. It comes instead from their asides—the casual, one-off, throwaway remark said on the spur of the moment, out of nowhere, never to be followed up. The one I got from Vince was from the first meeting of a seminar on Foucault’s Collège de France lectures that I took as a graduate student. ‘Think of it as le jeu, a game,’ I remember him telling us about how to approach history. ‘That’s how Foucault avoids metaphysics.’
Several years later, I was preparing to give a lecture at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at the university where I now teach. It was the first time I had to address the room as a faculty member, and I was nervous. I wanted to talk about my experience of conducting research at Cornell University over the summer, but I did not know how to explain that the most moving experience I had was not discovering some revelatory document in the archives or being invited for dinner at the late Benedict Anderson’s house (where he wrote Imagined Communities!). Instead, it was taking a walk in one of the neighbourhoods of Ithaca and hearing, floating on the cool evening air, a melody on the violin, one that I would never practice as a child, because my mother ran an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) course at our house, and her students would always be there, listening.
It was then, trying to persuade myself that such an occurrence was too trivial to be brought up in a lecture that I remembered one of Vince’s essays. Titled “The Accidents of Area Studies,” it is perhaps not the essay that immediately comes to one’s mind when thinking about Vince’s incalculably enormous contribution to the field of Southeast Asian studies. Ostensibly a tribute to Benedict Anderson and Arjun Appadurai, the essay tracks the accidental encounters that ended up lining the intellectual trajectories of these two giants in Asian studies. Of the humble accident, Vince wrote, ‘An accidental encounter brings with it a force of its own, sending one falling (for, after all, accident, like the word chance, is formed from the Latin cadere, “to fall”) into something unexpected and unknown that lies outside yet shapes the limits of what is known.’
Outside the one Foucault seminar, I only had a few personal interactions with Vince, primarily because I was a student in literature and not history. But looking back, I now realise that his works have always had a profound influence on me, an influence I used to think of as incidental but is perhaps better characterised—if we follow Vince’s understanding of the word—as accidental, in that they never fail to catch me by surprise, expanding the limits of what I thought I knew. For example, when I first started working on my master’s thesis, I wanted to base it on my relationship to my mother as both my caretaker and the first person to teach me English. But since according to standard accounts of language acquisition, the role that mothers play is often understood as that of transmitting a first language—a mother tongue—to their children, something like the labor of translation involved in my mother’s work would often become obscured.
It was not until I came across Vince’s book—titled, aptly, Motherless Tongues: The Insurgency of Language amid Wars of Translation—that I found the words to account for my experience. Writing about a survey commissioned by the colonial American government concerning the teaching of English in the public schools in the Philippines, Vince recounted how the classroom was converted into a battlefield between scholarly English and the vernacular. Although English was often victorious, the vernacular could never be totally repressed, making itself heard in the slippages of both students and teachers. This ‘insurgency’ of the vernacular became a new way of thinking about translation, one that did not try to eliminate its sonic contingencies: ‘To translate in this case requires not the suppression of the first for the second language but an alertness to the sound of the first retracing itself around the appearance of the second. In this way the classroom is no longer cut off from the home.’ Reading these words enabled me to see my private experience as a part of a bigger and longer history—and if that’s not the greatest lesson a historian can teach you, what is?
Later, even when my dissertation became exclusively focused on Indonesian literature, I continued turning to Vince’s works. When I was trying to tease out the formal peculiarities of Malay-language stories about concubines (nyai) that became popular in colonial Indonesia around the turn of the twentieth century, I consulted Vince’s first book, Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society Under Early Spanish Rule. I was trying to write about a popular nyai narrative where a native girl escaped her concubinage by infecting her European master with smallpox. Naturally, I was disappointed when I realised that Vince was not writing about anticolonial infectious diseases. But as I read on, I learned something no less powerful: how language, because of its openness to translation, renders its speakers in excess of themselves, gifts them with what is in them that is more than them. Translation, in this manner, is for Vince something like a secular faith, the infinite within the finite, what Jacques Derrida—another favorite thinker of Vince’s—called the messianic. Yet unlike faith that would divide believers from non-believers, translation keeps language open, porous, never at rest and always in transit (so perhaps like smallpox after all).
We turn to historians to explain to us why what happened happened. But we turn to someone like Vince to understand something more complex and therefore more rewarding to grasp: why what happened need not have happened. In this way, what the game is for Foucault, the accident is for Vince. It is no wonder that it was translation, in its emphasis on the contingency of language, that became Vince’s signature way of engaging with history. Like language, history is not inevitable: it is made up of accidents. Like history, neither is language: it falls from one word to another.
Let me end then with what, as far as I can remember, were Vince’s last words to me. They were, I must say, not special—just contingent.
We were standing outside a Thai restaurant at U-District, the neighborhood where the University of Washington, where Vince taught for 23 years until his passing, is located. One of his former students had just given a talk on a book they had recently published, and we were all waiting to be seated for our dinner reservation. Earlier he had thanked me for a review I had written on his book on Duterte, so when he started talking to me, I did not know what to expect.
He asked me if I knew how to make Scotch eggs. No, I said, I had never even had them. ‘You should. They’re actually pretty easy to make,’ Vince, ever the teacher, said. Then he followed up with a smile: ‘And they’re really delicious!’
Reuven Pinnata (rpinnata@niu.edu) is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Northern Illinois University. His research focuses on Indonesian literature and critical theory.
