Organizer: The Southeast Asia Program at Cornell University

Description:

While Southeast Asia has long been a crossroad of influences and transnational movements, the rise of Asia-Pacific as an economic and political power center has brought increased attention to regional dynamics and transnational connections, processes and practices.  Transnational flows of people, goods, capital, and ideas have engendered optimism about exchange, interdependence, and understanding, while persisting conflicts over resources, territorial claims, and national belonging have animated the discourse about borders, boundaries, lines of differentiation and stratification, crossings and transgressions in the examination of both the causes and consequences of conflict. These new im/mobilities and spatialities, in turn, compel a re-thinking of prevailing approaches and epistemologies that have been delimited by disciplinary boundaries. 

This talk maps and interrogates the ways in which global, regional and local forces and dynamics inform new im/mobilities, spatialities, and belongings, and the negotiations that Southeast Asian individuals and communities have to engage at multiple levels and in multiple arenas.  It is particularly attentive to the linkages between macro forces and the micro politics of the everyday struggle to survive and resist. It critiques and problematizes the binary between area and Ethnic/American Studies, and argues for a more expansive analytical approach that focuses on continuum, intersectionality, and relationality between peoples, communities, histories, and fields of study without abandonment of historical, contextual, and experiential specificities.

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