Inter-Asian Borderlands/Crossings: Space and Time

Bringing together an interdisciplinary group of scholars from across the SFU community and beyond, this workshop aims to rethink conceptions of time and space in inter-Asian geographies. Beyond a redrawing of socio-political geographies alternative to the national and regional categories, uncovering inter-Asian social formations challenges the division of the world into the developed, modern, and global West progressing in teleological time, and the local, underdeveloped East and the “Third World” needing intervention to be on moral and developmental pars with the West. Alternative conceptions of time – entangled with yet disrupting the linear and abstract time – and space – contextually grounded and emerging out of local sources – are necessary to give shape and language to ever-revitalized inter-Asian networks and mobility.

Concepts such as cosmological and diasporic time, the long-durée, and time travels, offer novel possibilities of thinking about inter-Asian worlds, and of tracing the rhythms and returns of the past in connection to the present. Exploring spatial formations in and across borders that change shape and locational centers across time – whether interwoven by religious and diasporic actors, indigenous communities, or non-human species – unravels the familiar bundling of people, state, and economy within sovereign territories not only in the post-1980s globalization moment, but long before. The ways in which states develop strategic partnerships with such mobility assemblages, or shape, control, or surveil them using circulatory methods, are related questions to be investigated.

Sponsors: David Lam Centre, Centre for Comparative Muslim Studies, Department of History, School for International Studies, Global Asia