This seminar approaches these developments through histories of empire, colonialism, and race-making in Global Asia. Asia has long been central to studies of imperialist competition, military occupations, multiple colonialisms, client regimes, extraterritoriality, wars on drugs, and extractive economies. Asia has also been a site for theorizing intimacies, solidarities, nonalignments, and alternate world-making. How can the interconnected histories and expansive geographies of Global Asia illuminate current imperial revivals and reconfigurations?

This seminar conceptualizes the inter-imperial present through palimpsest, debris, and colonial legacies, considering how we write with archives of empire and the stakes of historical narratives. This seminar engages entangled questions of sovereignty, race-making, diaspora, indigeneity, and racial capitalism. While attentive to contingencies, we trace how imperial pasts shape emergent geopolitical and capitalist agendas through shared settler idioms, racial ideologies, imbricated infrastructures, and forms of militarized, intimate, and affective labor.

The seminar seeks to unsettle disciplinary boundaries by bringing together different geographies and positionalities, examining histories of Asian imperial ambitions, then and now, and Euro-American imperialism across Asia, Asian America, and oceanic worlds. We seek to decenter Western paradigms of race and colonialism, and complicate how we name and study colonial, imperial, and racial formations within Asia. We turn to radical intellectual and political traditions of Global Decolonization and Afro-Asianism to reimagine forms of anti-colonial, anti-racist affinities and divergence within a shifting world order.

Historians and scholars at all stages, particularly PhD students and early career researchers, are encouraged to apply to participate in the seminar and share their work. Interdisciplinary perspectives are welcome.

This session considers new directions that scholars of Global Asia can chart in histories of imperialism for the present moment. We reflect on the ways that Asia has repeatedly served as the grounds for theorizing and contesting empire, whether Marxist conceptualizations of formal subsumption, critiques of area studies during the Vietnam War, the postcolonial turn and cultural inquiries into colonial modernity, histories of early modern territorialization and its techniques, interdisciplinary studies revealing continuities between Japanese and US empire, or recent debates concerning a rising China. This session asks how a focus on the entangled archives and expansive geographies of Global Asia can further illustrate the coeval, interconnected, and layered histories of imperial formations in Asia.

We invite contributions that revise our understandings of shifting modes of countersovereignty, inter-imperial rivalries and cooperation, contexts of multiple colonialisms, and the infrastructures of colonial racial capitalist projects and security states. Our discussions will also attend to radical political traditions that revealed the instability of imperial subject formation, cooptation, and infrastructures with decolonial epistemologies, world-making practices, and networks of solidarity. This session will also raise methodological questions about categories of historical analysis, different temporalities, the politics of comparison, and the stakes of historical narratives today.