CSEAS-Cornell workshop: “Trans-national Southeast Asia: Paradigms, Histories, Vectors”

Date: January 11-12th, 2013
Venue: Rakuyu Kaikan Kyoto

“Trans-national Southeast Asia” is a timely notion. Not only is the idea of the trans-national au courant in academic study across a variety of fields, but Southeast Asia as a region is perhaps the most trans-national of spaces in the global realm. In what ways? Southeast Asia has always existed at a crossroads position in the global trade routes; this has been true since the transmission of Hinduism and Buddhism more than a millennium ago. In the intervening centuries, Islam and then Christianity on a massive scale followed on these circuits (fully half of Southeast Asia’s populace became either Christian or Muslim by the late seventeenth century). But the energies of trans-nationality have not only been religious in stream, of course: human beings, commodities, ideas, and pathogens have all moved in these channels as well. In the contemporary world, trans-national modes of governance and surveillance are also utilized, alongside traveling literatures of diasporic communities situated both inside and outside the region. Considering the important breadth and depth of these contacts, this workshop will try to flesh out the meaning of the trans-national in Southeast Asia over the long term, both as a constitutive process, and also as a way of knowing the past and the evolving present in Southeast Asia as an ever-evolving region.

We are interested in trying to explore this notion of Trans-national Southeast Asia through a number of different windows. The workshop would be a great “moment” to try to define, with some theoretical rigor, what this paradigm could mean, especially over the longue durée. Crucially we see this exercise as a chance to connect the faculties and young researchers of CSEAS-Kyoto and SEAP-Cornell, and to begin a conversation that would then grow and take place over the long term across a number of different fronts. By focusing on “Trans-National Southeast Asia” as a broad but narrow-able theme to connect us, we hope that the workshop can help align intellectual agendas, and also – at the same time – eventually give way to a solid publication that charts the notion of this sub-field in interesting ways. We see the field of trans-national Southeast Asia stretching from Japan and China south to the region, and tendrils of the discussion also moving west in a great arc toward the Indian sub-continent and the Middle East. We see the time frame as pliable, starting perhaps in early centuries (depending on the kinds of research put forward) and tailing off in our own time. We are very hopeful that this workshop can be accomplished as the beginnings of a conversation, and we look forward to receiving feedback from Kyoto on
how our strengths and aims might jibe with similar energies emanating from Japan.

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