AHA Session 205
Saturday, January 8, 2022: 1:30 PM-3:00 PM
Preservation Hall, Studio 9 (New Orleans Marriott, 2nd Floor)
Chair:
Berenice Guyot-Rechard, King’s College London
Papers:
Session Abstract
From the first evidence of long-distance trade between Sumer and Harappa in the third millennium BCE to the circulation of migrants, soldiers and revolutionaries across the 19th c. Bay of Bengal or the Arabian Sea, the Indian Ocean’s history is that of a nexus for the interaction of people, cultures, ideas and commodities. As a nexus for interaction across political borders, the ocean is an archipelago of borderlands. The ‘new thalassology’ around the Indian Ocean and Borderland Studies have largely developed in silos, however. The concept of the borderland remains under-employed in the study of the Indian Ocean while Borderland Studies is often centered on terra firma. What then can we learn about historical and contemporary borderlands if we focus our gaze on maritime or ‘terraqueous’ spaces? How do bordering and border-crossing technologies, as well as extractive or distribution practices, work in and shape maritime environments? What forms of co-existence might such environments foster? The three papers in this panel deal with these questions by interrogating the specific nature of the Indian Ocean as a borderland, taking in different geographies and scales and different historical periods. In doing so, we seek not only to open up new avenues of inter-disciplinary conversation but also to ponder the ways we write and border “Asia”.
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