Intra-Asian Connections: Interactions, flows, landscapes

Panels and areas of interest:

1. Travel along the Silk Roads
    
2. Maritime Territorial Disputes: China and its Neighbours
    
3. Governing Landscapes across Asia
    
4. Centering Southeast Asia from the outside in
    
5. Popular Cultures in and of and out of Asia
    
6. Asian Concepts of Development
    
7. Civil Society in Asia reconsidered: Rights, Governmentality and Inclusion of the Disadvantaged
    
8. Economic Integration in Asia

Read more about the panels here.

Keynote speakers:

Prasenjit Duara, Professor, National University of Singapore
"Circulatory and Competitive Histories: Temporal Foundations for Cosmopolitan Theory"

Willem van Schendel, Professor, University of Amsterdam
"Mapping Quirky Linkages: Asia beyond the continental straitjacket"

Adam T. Smith, Professor, Cornell University
"Barbarians, Backwaters, and the Civilization Machine: Integration and Interruption Across Asia's Early Bronze Age Landscapes"

Programme  22 October 2014

PDF

Programme  23 October 2014

Preliminary programme  24 October 2014

Busses to Asia House will depart from the conference venue after the final keynote lecture.

Asia House
Indiakaj 16
2100 Copenhagen Ø

Much scholarship on and in Asia is compartmentalized in subcontinents (South, East, Southeast, Central Asia) and – within these larger regions – in individual country studies (e.g. China, Japan, India, Indonesia). This is understandable, given the investment it takes for non-Asians to learn languages and build effective research networks. But ‘Asia’ as we know it today is the result of myriad, multidirectional flows: economic, political, military, cultural, religious. In spite of ‘hard’, modern borders, such flows still define much of Asia. We only have to think about Chinese manufactured goods, Japanese investments, Korean soap operas, Nepalese Gurkhas, various diasporas with their feet in ‘host’ and ‘home’ countries, or transnational ethnic and religious movements to bring these to mind. Even today, Asian landscapes, ethnoscapes and ideoscapes are continuously remade, and centres and peripheries rearranged, through processes of capitalist expansion, globalization and regional integration, and the flow and circulation of people, ideas and objects. Obviously, this is not a one-directional process and attention should be given to the agency of actors in various localities to engage with transnational connections.

In this conference, we invite panels and participants to explore interactions and flows within Asia. We emphasize intra-Asian connections in order to highlight the historical contingency of modern borders and hence of area studies themselves. Mongols no longer rule East Asia, Hindu-Buddhist polities like the Cham principalities have vanished from the map, and new states like Timor-Leste appeared. Without abandoning the attention to detailed empirical (ethnographic and historical) research focusing on single regions, we encourage topical panels that situate localized phenomena in intra-Asian flows or that focus on cross-border interactions, spanning various disciplines and historical eras. Through comparative and cross-border perspectives we seek out opportunities to rethink the ‘maps in our minds’; to theorize alternative temporalities, spatialities and modernities that emerge when Asia is not simply cast in opposition to the West; and to seek alternative epistemological grounding in conceptualizations of interactions, flows, and more dynamic landscapes.

We invite abstracts that reflect the conference theme, but especially welcome perspectives relating to one of the following panels envisaged for the conference:

1. Travel along the Silk Roads
    
2. Maritime Territorial Disputes: China and its Neighbours
    
3. Governing Landscapes across Asia
    
4. Centering Southeast Asia from the outside in
    
5. Popular Cultures in and of and out of Asia
    
6. Asian Concepts of Development
    
7. Civil Society in Asia reconsidered: Rights, Governmentality and Inclusion of the Disadvantaged
    
8. Economic Integration in Asia

22-­24 October 2014 - Asian Dynamics Initiative - University of Copenhagen

22 Oct, 10.15-11.45
The opening of the conference

• Prorector Thomas Bjørnholm
• Danish Minister for Foreign Affairs Martin Lidegaard
• Associate dean of Humanities Julie Sommerlund
• Keynote lecture by Professor Prasenjit Duara
  "Circulatory and Competitive Histories: Temporal Foundations for Cosmopolitan Theory"

Link to podcast

23 Oct, 16.15-17.00

• Keynote lecture by Professor Adam T. Smith

  "Barbarians, Backwaters, and the Civilization Machine: Integration and Interruption Across Asia's Early Bronze Age Landscapes"

Link to podcast