240515 SE Global (Southeast) Asias (P3) (2022S)

Content

What can coastal cities, rural infrastructure projects, migrant workers, vast palm oil plantations, and unexploded bombs teach us about Southeast Asia’s place in the world? What can they teach us about the world in - and the social worlds of - Southeast Asia? How might tacking back and forth between Southeast Asia and the global allow us to move beyond conventional area studies paradigms? Why might it matter to address these questions now?

This course presents Southeast Asia not as a pre-given, stable geographical reality, but rather as a world-region that is more mobile and contradictory, constructed differently at various points in time from historical and material relations to other parts of the world. The provisional point of departure is the notion of "global Asia", a concept that has obtained significant traction across academic, policy, and cultural institutions in recent decades. "Global Asia" tends to stand for an inquiry into the global impact of countries in Asia, locating Asia within global processes not only in the present period - as per debates over the rising political and economic power of certain countries in Asia - but also over the longue durée, that is, since ancient times.

Overall, this course asks how our contingent object of knowledge and politics - Southeast Asia - relates to, "fits" within, or even challenges wider discussions over Asia’s supposedly ascendant position in the global order. The course begins with a consideration of how best to understand the history and materiality of regional designations in Asia, including Southeast Asia, itself a fraught concept with roots in Western military power. We will address Southeast Asia’s place in early imperial history, the colonial and anti-colonial encounters that followed, decolonization and postcolonial development, the problem of globalization in an (arguably) always-already globalized part of the world, the material infrastructures that bind together this world-region and others, and gender, environment, and empire’s afterlives in an area still shaped by global warfare and imperial power. Special consideration will be given to histories of capitalism and empire, particularly US empire in the wake of American colonial history in the Philippines and the American war in Vietnam. The course closes by turning to provocative work in Transpacific Studies. This field brings Asian Studies into conversation with American Studies across the Pacific. It challenges existing area studies paradigms, addressing the Transpacific as a space of conquest and resistance, extraction and accumulation, experimentation and fantasy.

Aims

Through reading, discussion, research, and writing, this course aims to extend and deepen students’ understanding of Southeast Asia in three important ways: (1) as an object of conventional area studies paradigms in its own right, with a specific historical and material genealogy; (2) as a world-region that might raise questions about broader "global Asia" debates; and (3) as a mobile and contradictory set of places in the world that might itself raise questions about area studies research, global capitalism, imperial power, and how these intertwined forms of knowledge and power relate to each other in the past and the present. The course also aims to enhance students’ research capacity with respect to course content; to improve students’ ability to conduct oral and written presentations, while critically engaging course content; and to stimulate active and productive group discussions during course sessions.

Methods

Methods will include response papers to be submitted before each course session; course participation, consisting of attendance, active participation in in-class discussion, and in-class presentations introducing the required readings for each session; and a final term paper based on a topic chosen by the student in consultation with the instructor. See "Assessment" below.