Workshop
Do 24 Nov 2011 – Sa 26 Nov 2011

Global Conjunctions in the Indian Ocean: Malay World Trajectories

Sumit Mandal (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)

Freie Universität Berlin, Raum J23/16, Habelschwerdter Allee 45, 14195 Berlin

The full workshop description including abstracts and biographies is available for download here: Workshop description

Convener: Sumit Mandal (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)

Description:
This workshop focuses on texts and what they tell us about the conjunction of global histories in the Malay world. It thus complements the broader and ongoing exploration of translocal histories that brings to light the longstanding connections between places and regions by situating them in meaningful historical locations and trajectories. The workshop is centred on the Malay world as there is still much to be learned about the region’s translocal dynamics.

The term “Malay world” is contentious and perhaps always a provisional form of naming what is a complex and differentiated seascape. Within Southeast Asian studies, the term usually refers to the Malay-speaking and largely Muslim archipelago that stretches out from the southernmost point of the Asian continent. The area covered by it today is constituted by the nation-states Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and others. This Malay world is demarcated from the countries of the mainland, namely Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, and so forth. Besides producing the subregional distinction between island and mainland Southeast Asia, the demarcation corresponds to present-day national borders. Nevertheless, histories of the Malay world are not contained within these boundaries but intertwined with the translocal movement of people, trade, and texts in the Indian Ocean, South China Sea, Java Sea, and so forth.
In this workshop, it may be fruitful to consider the Malay world much as Sanjay Subrahmanyam treats the Mediterranean, namely as an idea that “allows us to transcend or refashion national boundaries in the search for meaningful objects for historical analysis, a procedure that is absolutely essential when one moves back in time to an epoch when the nation-state was as yet a distinct prospect.” By focussing on texts and their trajectories, the workshop shifts from a static to a mobile sense of the Malay world. Instead of assuming the region’s prior existence and coherence we might trace social and cultural trajectories, and then ask what is Malay world about them. Through an extensive engagement with texts, and the dialogues that emerge, we may even advance the exploration of the meaning and substance of the Malay world undertaken by Jane Drakard, among others.
This workshop is planned as a collective effort at reading the language, content, production, and circulation of Malay world texts. The aim is to examine texts not only in Malay but different languages, including mixtures thereof that emerge from Indian Ocean interactions. While the Malay world may be viewed in relation to multiple transregional interactions, this workshop focuses on the region’s interconnections with the Indian Ocean. Furthermore, the workshop focuses primarily on the nineteenth century, defined as a historical moment rather than in calendric terms. This century is typically characterised as the time of the gradual establishment and expansion of European colonial states in the region, and the reorientation, if not the decline, of prior social and cultural life. The workshop stops short of the era of advanced nationalism as this is a time that is more frequently studied, but also because colonial states were already well-established. The period covered might broadly be regarded, then, to be from the late 1700s to the early 1900s.

References:
Drakard, J. (1990) A Malay Frontier: Unity and Duality in a Sumatran Kingdom. Ithaca: Cornell Southeast Asia Program.
Subrahmanyam, S. (1998) “Notes on Circulation and Asymmetry in Two Mediterraneans, c. 1400-1800,” in Claude Guillot, Denys Lombard and Roderich Ptak, eds., From the Mediterranean to the China Sea: Miscellaneous Notes, Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, pp. 21-43. (The text quoted is on page 42).

ICS Export

Alle Veranstaltungen