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.

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.