This seminar approaches these developments through histories of empire, colonialism, and race-making situated in the expansive geographies of 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 also centers studies of intimacies, solidarities, nonalignments, and alternate world-making. How can histories of empire-making in Asia illuminate current imperial revivals?

Conceptualizing the inter-imperial present through palimpsest, debris, and colonial legacies, this seminar interrogates how we engage questions of sovereignty, race-making, diaspora, indigeneity, and racial capitalism. Attentive to contingency, we trace how imperial pasts shape emergent geopolitical and capitalist agendas. Building on recent scholarship, we examine imperial formations, shared settler idioms of countersovereignty and counterinsurgency, racial ideologies, imbricated infrastructures, and militarized/intimate/affective labor.

The seminar seeks to unsettle disciplinary boundaries by adopting an Inter-Asian, global framework. This includes histories of Asian imperial ambitions and Euro-American imperialism across East and South Asia, Asian America, and connected oceanic worlds of the Chinese Atlantic, Trans/Black Pacific, and Indian Ocean. Centering the entanglements of imperialism, settler colonialism, and global race-making, we seek to decenter Western paradigms of race and colonialism. We ask how radical traditions of decolonization and Afro-Asianism help us reimagine anticolonial, antiracist freedom struggles, activist networks, and indigenous epistemologies that have facilitated the unmaking of imperial subjects.

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.