"Train and its fugitive rhythms: rewriting empire, violence, and the politics of sound" with Dr. Rachmi Diyah Larasati

Biography: Dr. Rachmi Diyah Larasati of the Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies Is a passionate dance practitioner, innovative choreographer, and author of works such as The Dance that Makes You Vanish, she has explored aesthetics and narrative through numerous writings. As Professor of Transnationalism and Aesthetics at the University of Minnesota, she is also affiliated with American Studies, Asian & Middle Eastern Studies, and advises the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change.  She serves as editor for the upcoming special edition of Lembaran Anthropology (Indonesia, spring 2026), co-editor for Bodies that Haunt (Culture Studies), and sits on the editorial board of the Asia Journal of Women Studies.Show Notes: Today’s episode is an expansive conversation with Dr. Diyah Larasati—scholar, artist, choreographer, and professor of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota. We discuss her recently published “Train and its fugitive rhythms: rewriting empire, violence, and the politics of sound.”We begin by situating her work within the political aftermath of the 1965 Indonesian genocide—an event that remains under-discussed globally despite its scale and its deep entanglement with Cold War geopolitics. But rather than approaching history through a strictly linear or archival lens, Dr. Larasati reframes time itself. She describes her work not as history, but as narration—as something lived, fragmented, embodied, and constantly in motion. From there, our conversation opens into questions of memory and form. What does it mean to write about violence without reproducing it? How do we resist turning trauma into something consumable? Larasati pushes back against what she calls the overproduction of violent narrative, suggesting instead that we must ask why violence happens—and how it continues to live within bodies, spaces, and sounds.One of the most striking threads throughout this her article is the figure of the train. What begins as a symbol of colonial infrastructure—of extraction, surveillance, and control—quickly becomes something more complex. The train is rhythm. It’s memory. It’s childhood. It’s fear. It’s also, paradoxically, a space of possibility—where noise creates cover, where secrecy becomes survival, and where fleeting moments of freedom and communication emerge. We also spend time thinking through feminist methodology—not as an abstract framework, but as something grounded in lived practice. Dia traces this back to her own upbringing, where women negotiated land, labor, and survival within militarized environments. In this context, feminism isn’t just theory—it’s knowledge of seasons, of crops, of bodies, of how to speak and when to remain silent. It’s a way of navigating power on the most intimate and material levels.Throughout the episode, we return to questions of fugitivity, sound, and theory itself. What does it mean to speak as someone whose experience has historically been spoken for? What role does theory play—not as abstraction, but as a language that allows different histories and bodies to enter the same conversation?Links: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/09502386.2025.2527031