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 the 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.

With regional, sub-imperial, and neocolonial forces across the Pacific, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean, Asian powers have crossed WEB Du Bois's global color line in the twenty-first century. This session asks how scholars of Global Asia can intervene in histories and theories of race tied to Western epistemes and imperial and colonial forms. Racial ideas have long served as conduits of power beyond Euro-American empires, liberalism, and global white supremacy. Take for example (pre)modern Chinese racial ideas of color, civilization, human, and slave, or how imperial Japan used the idea of racial proximity to distinguish itself from Euro-American colonialism. Diasporic communities have navigated racialized belonging and exclusion within Asia as well.

This session examines how race is globally constituted through Asian racial histories, categories, and ideologies and the transnational construction of racial meanings and identities. We invite theoretical and methodological approaches to histories of global race-making, imperial "blurred genres" centering Asia, and the incommensurabilities of categories. Through collective readings, we aim to grasp how racial ideas have been configured and mobilized in particular historical, global, and epistemological contexts, including the retooling of existing modes of social differentiation, the production of exclusions, disidentifications, and solidarities, and different disciplinary and media representations.