The body of work was created by the professional photographer James Sebright in 2017, during an ESRC/AHRC-funded research project entitled ‘Cham Centuries' on Cham resident in Malaysia, Vietnam and the island of Hainan in the People’s Republic of China. As well as supporting academics’ anthropological research on the project, the photographs are a research object in their own right. In representing the photographer’s artistic vision, they reflect the sensibility of a white, British, male photographer born in 1970, and the language of othering that pervades the social sciences. Therefore, they offer a useful basis for critically analysing ethnonational categories and exploring alternative interpretive approaches that seek to transcend the stark dichotomy of ‘us’ and ‘them’. Rather than being under a researcher’s direction, the photographer James Sebright pursued his own artistic vision. This resulted in two co-curated exhibitions, held in Durham and Kuala Lumpur, and also Sebright’s solo photographic exhibition entitled Homelands, which ran from 1st February – 16th September 2019 at Durham University’s Oriental Museum.This project will investigate Cham Muslims who live across Southeast Asia, speak a Malayo-Polynesian language and exemplify the global and protracted nature of forced displacement. Between the 7th and 15th centuries the Cham occupied coastal plains and mountain zones in today's central and southern Vietnam. They never formed a unified kingdom but rather "a cultural-political space"; built around fishermen, shipbuilders, pirates, traders and transregional trade (Taylor 1992: 153). From the 17th century the Cham became part of the Viet polity through gradual and often violent southward expansion and colonization that forced them to take refuge in the neighbouring polities with which they had long interacted. The painful memory of their ancestors' flight to Hainan from Vietnam is still alive among the Cham, who in China are classified as Muslim (Hui). In the 1970s, Cham from the Mekong Delta were among the many persecuted groups during Cambodia's murderous Khmer Rouge regime; thousands fled as refugees to Malaysia and as far as the United States, France, Australia and Canada. Today, both in Vietnam and China the Cham are officially recognized as ethnic groups, but remain economically and culturally marginalized compared to the dominant Kinh (ethnic Vietnamese) or Han (dominant Chinese). Although in Malaysia they could not fully escape poverty, the state constitution recognizes Cham rights to Malaysian citizenship and their Bumiputera status. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and museum representations across three countries on the ODA list-China, Vietnam and Malaysia-the proposed project will offer first hand insights into the multiple social and economic inequalities arising from the lasting repercussions of repeated historical displacements that continue to mark the Cham out as marginal, even centuries on. Focusing on the historically fluid cultural and political identities of those engaged in the South China Sea (SCS) region, we seek to illuminate how perceived ethnic and religious commonalities and differences are interwoven with legislation and domestic discourses in 'host countries' and how they might facilitate or constrain the integration of vulnerable and displaced groups like the Cham. The Cham have been inscribed into the present day nation-state order premised on homogeneous, bounded space that replaced pre-modern, unbounded understandings of space and territory. The proposed research is innovative in focusing on sea/land and translocal, transregional connections beyond the administrative boundaries and histories that are usually framed in nation-state terms, both politically and in scholarly analysis (methodological nationalism). The project's first objective is to critically examine how official discourse and ethnic categorization essentialise the ethnic minorities within the nation-state. The second objective is to trace how they sustain their centuries-old mobility, including political, religious and trade activities that straddle and transgress nation-state borders. The third objective explores how the connection to the global Islamic community spurs the Cham on to (re)define their ethnic, religious and national belongings. Finally, the fourth objective is to chart how the Cham history and mobile way of life is represented and/or silenced in Malaysian, Vietnamese and Chinese museums. At the intersection of anthropology, history, political science and museum studies, this project will play a vital role in building dialogue and knowledge exchange with museum curators and educators around the issue of ethnic and national representation. It will offer a fresh perspective on other displaced groups, such as Muslim Rohingya persecuted in Myanmar who - contrary to Cham - do not enjoy the same rights to Malay citizenship, thereby deepening and diversifying our understanding of different representations of vulnerable groups who do not easily fit into the nation-state frame and whose group identities are not fixed.
The photographer worked independently in Hainan and alongside the project researcher Dr Rie Nakamura in Vietnam and Malaysia, who introduced him to Cham villages and villagers. He also travelled on independently to Cambodia to photograph Cham resident there, though that was outside the scope of the research project. The photographer was thus pursuing an independent artistic project alongside but independently of the research. This was conceived as a means of bridging the gap between the researchers and their research questions, and the project's museum partners, which included art museums. This was successful in that three exhibitions resulted, one in Kuala Lumpur and the others under the aegis of Durham University's Oriental Museum, which was central in brokering the relationship with the other key museum partner, the National Museum of Art in Hanoi, Vietnam, and in delivering training both there and in Kuala Lumpur. Thus, the photographs were created by the photographer as an artistic output. The first two paragraphs of the artist’s statement for his solo exhibition in Durham are cited below: Whilst creating the work, it was very important to me to understand how people lived, where they came from, what they were doing and why, rather than just recording the surface or veneer of an existence. With no formal training in anthropology, the process was one of questioning, observing, learning, with inevitably more questions than answers. I often arrived at the local mosque before prayer-time, hanging around, hopeful that there might be someone who spoke English to create an entry for me. “Muslim?” I was often asked. “No,” I would honestly reply. “I’m here to meet Cham people.” I was never turned away, but invariably was asked to sit, drink tea, engage in sign language, laugh, share in the jokes. Yes, of course you can take photos, no problem. They looked on with delight as I showed them photographs on my Instagram feed of other Cham communities in other countries. “Cham?” they asked, surprised, almost in disbelief. “Yes, Cham!” I replied. We quickly became friends. As an outsider, the warmth I experienced from these people is something that I will never forget. Yet looking back, perhaps this is not so strange, for they too are outsiders. We were more alike than I realised, travellers a long way from home. Beyond telling the stories of some of the people that I encountered, central to these images is the broader theme of representation. In this work, I seek to challenge how ethnic minorities are portrayed photographically, often through a “western - and invariably male - gaze”. In the west we are familiar with a picture-postcard view of ethnic minorities, popularised by publications such as National Geographic. Whilst these images are not pure fabrications, they are inevitably just one facet of a broader, more interesting truth. As such, I was keen to photograph young people, students, entrepreneurs, professors, people wearing their ubiquitous Barcelona football shirts, people glued to their mobile phones, checking what’s happening on their social media feeds. In short, people like ‘me and you’, rather than some exotic ‘other’. For whilst all of the people in these images are united by their ethnicity, they are also united by something larger still.
