Theme: 2. From Oceanic Crossroads: Empires, Networks and Histories
Anthony Medrano
Yale-NUS College, Singapore
Shelly Chan
University of California - Santa Cruz, United States
Faizah Zakariah
National University of Singapore (NUS), Singapore
Anthony Medrano
Yale-NUS College, Singapore
Shelly Chan
University of California - Santa Cruz, United States
Martyn Low
National University of Singapore (NUS), Singapore
Meta Sekar Puji Astuti
Universitas Hasanuddin, Indonesia
This panel leverages new research on the promise of oceans to open up how we study and think about Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By centering a history of interactions in and around Asian waters, we complicate the divides and demarcations that have long fed an historiographical gulf between islands and continents, regions and areas, cities and seas. In bridging this gulf, we mobilize the idea of “oceanic Asias” to disrupt traditional narratives that remain largely tethered to nation-based, Western-centric, and terrestrial forms of knowing in area-specific terms. From our research, we show how the promise of oceans is rich and replete not only for new ways of reimagining Asia across fields, histories, geographies, archives, and languages, but also for shifting how we make sense of time and space in Asian waters—and on them too. By braiding case studies that span from Madras to Surabaya, and from floating ships to laboring workers, our panel examines how methodological diversity and cultural specificity are central to recasting Asia through a language of oceans.
As such, this panel demonstrates how “oceanic Asias” promise new kinds of questions while revealing, too, new types of sources, stories, actors, and moments. Collectively, we suggest a timely corrective to dominant modes of analysis about Asia through the waters that have long shaped its worlds. Martyn Low opens our panel by drawing on oceanic voyages and the reems of data they produced to cast the port-city of Singapore in new historical waters—waters that are at once ecological and economic, (inter-)cultural and (de)colonial, and profoundly networked. Port-cities also animate Meta Sekar Puji Astuti’s ocean-based perspective, which looks at how karayuki-san (Japanese female prostitutes) were fundamental to the ways in which the idea of Japan’s nanyo (the “south seas” ) was figured on the ground from Singapore to Aru in the prewar years. Working across disciplines, Anthony Medrano recovers a history of Indian ichthyology through a reading of Madras, its local scientists, and their pioneering research on the prized fishes of the Bay of Bengal (1850s-1950s). Shelly Chan completes our panel’s transdisciplinary journey across Asian waters with a look at the lives of Chinese sailors, arguing that these racialized seamen were central to the rise and power of European steam shipping and sea power. Taken together, a turn to the oceans promises both sharp and subtle ways to challenge the historical imagination about Asia.
Presenter: Anthony D. Medrano – Yale-NUS College
Presenter: Shelly Chan – University of California - Santa Cruz
Presenter: Martyn Low – National University of Singapore (NUS)
Presenter: Meta Sekar Puji Astuti – Universitas Hasanuddin