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Session Type: Panel

Theme: 2. From Oceanic Crossroads: Empires, Networks and Histories
Panel

Archipelagic Asias - Modalities and Methods I: Nautical Conduits of Exchange and Encounter

Tuesday, July 30, 2024
09:00 – 10:45 (GMT+7)
Location: ASEEC Tower, A8.03


‘Nautical Conduits of Exchange and Encounter’ is one of four linked panels under the title of ‘Archipelagic Asias: Modalities and Methods’ that the convenors have assembled in response to the thematic cluster ‘From Oceanic Crossroads: Empire, Networks, and Histories’. Asia, from the pre-colonial period onwards, has functioned as an oceanic crossroads between empires, continents and other oceans, not least because of its entire southern edge that provides the Indian Ocean with a littoral connected on its western wing to the east coast of Africa right down to the Cape of Good Hope, and dissolving into a mass of islands, peninsulas, and archipelagos on its eastern, Pacific-facing side. Living on this extensive, complexly indented littoral with its passageways to the connected oceans, and, therefore, inhabiting and shaping these oceanic crossroads, are the people of Asia who have generated networks of know-how as well as transregional cultural and political histories. At the same time, the colonial and postcolonial histories that have fractured Asia, Asia’s geographic vastness and cultural variety, and the disciplinary silos of our academic training, all create gaps of memory, history, critical method and vocabulary that impede attempts to recover those connected histories and their contemporary manifestations. In response to this challenge, the organisers of these panels bring to the study of Asia archipelagic theory, a body of thought that turns to the archipelago as not only a geographic but an epistemic structure capable of productively reconfiguring gaps and fragments in hitherto unforeseen ways. Through the four panels we reconfigure archipelagic theory’s materials to fit the Asian context. We bring thereby to the emergent scholarly assemblage of ‘global Asias’ the vocabulary of creolisation and transculturation refreshed through the archipelagic approach. Each panel is assembled around a particular heuristic modality as signalled in its title. The individual presentations assemble different perspectives on this modality to reveal an Asia defined not by constrictions of nation-states, geopolitics, mother languages, and religious orthopraxy, but assembled, experienced and remembered through a mesh of contingent connections and alternative modernities.
In this panel, two literary historians and a performance studies specialist present different case studies of how nautical vessels—both small boats and large ships-- are not just the vehicles for transporting people across the oceanic crossroads but conduits of encounter and exchange that invite archipelagic re-readings of the formative relationship between sites and flows that underlies collective understanding of ‘Asia’, including in the local Indonesian context.


Institutional panel by: King’s College London

Presentations:

  • 09:00 – 10:45 (GMT+7)
    Chelingue, Kattumaram, and the close view of the coast: Jacob Haafner's Coromandel journeys

    Presenter: Ananya J. Kabir – King's College London

  • 09:00 – 10:45 (GMT+7)
    'A little bit of India': goodwill cruises as vehicles of archipelagic connections

    Presenter: Luca Raimondi – King's College London

  • 09:00 – 10:45 (GMT+7)
    Bringing the Empire Closer: Joachim Stocqueler's 'Route of the Overland Mail' as Archipelagic Asias in Theatre Historiography

    Presenter: Priyanka Basu – King's College London