Global Asia Colloquium 

Spring 2019

4:00-6:45 in 701 KJCC (53 Washington Square South) with wine and cheese

March 15, 2019. Sunil Amrith and Francis Bradley

on

Mobility and Territoriality Around the Indian Ocean, 1750-1950

4:00- 5:15. Francis Bradley, Pratt Institute

Title: Mecca to Southeast Asia: The Patani Islamic Knowledge Networks

Here is a useful reading.

5:15-5:30. Break

5:30-6:45. Sunil Amrith, Harvard University

Title: “Space, Inequality, and the Bay of Bengal’s First Migration Crisis”

Abstract: My presentation will examine why modern citizenship in South and Southeast Asia was built upon the disavowal of migration. This history has enduring consequences in the region today: witness the protracted and violent conflicts that have consumed Sri Lanka and Burma since the 1980s, to all of which the issue of citizenship has been central, or the enduring marginalization and discrimination faced by minorities in Malaysia. This is the central paradox I hope to explore: it was precisely because a world of circulating migrant labor seemed so starkly an illustration of the inequalities and the violence of colonial capitalism, by the 1930s, that so many postcolonial states stepped in to regulate or even to prevent it; yet, in doing so, new laws had a devastating effect on the lives of millions of people who had built their lives upon mobility. While focusing on the political history of struggles over migration in the 1930s and 1940s, I hope to bring in the spatial and even ecological dimension of this, arguing (from my new book, Unruly Waters), that one corollary to the sense of enclosure that set in across the Indian Ocean, was a newfound struggle to control natural resources, and water above all.  

READINGS on File Here.