Carol Breckenridge Memorial Lecture

9 April 2018, The New School, Klein Conference Room, 66 West 12th St. Rm 510, 6:30-8:00PM 

David Ludden

“Global Asia and Postcolonial Predicaments: How to historicize the Rohingya Crisis.” Here is a draft of the substance of the paper, with a new title.

The horrors suffered by Rohingyas in Myanmar today – which now appear ever more frequently and graphically in the news — represent one brutal extremity of a kind of victimization that haunts countless people whose only crime is living in old spaces of human mobility that modern empires carved into national territories. Methodological nationalism justifies their precarity with histories that provide charters for national belonging, tying citizens firmly to specific places inside national borders. In a world covered by nations, human rights depend on that belonging. Old spaces of mobility can thus become perilous homelands where nations produce minorities as aliens eligible for marginalization, exclusion, and expulsion. Histories of mobile social space may implicitly disenfranchise their residents, but we need those histories to escape methodological nationalism and explore interactions of mobility and territoriality that generate globalization, at many levels of scale. All these post-colonial predicaments challenge any history of the Rohingya crisis, which I approach here through local histories of Global Asia around the Bay of Bengal.