Looking for One Additional Paper for AAS Panel: "Locating China in the South"

Derek Sheridan Announcement
Location
United States
Subject Fields
Anthropology, Asian History / Studies, East Asian History / Studies, Immigration & Migration History / Studies, Sociology

Are you thinking of attending the Association of Asian Studies conference next March in Washington D.C.? We are looking for one additional panelist to participate in the panel with the following theme:

Locating China in "the South"

Abstract

The “Rise of China,” especially in the Global South, has incited a spectrum of discourses about South-South geographies where imaginaries of imperial repetition (i.e. “neo-colonialism”) are frequently paired against the afterlives, ideologies, and aspirations of alternative global relationships (i.e. “friendship,” “cooperation”). While these discourses emphasize the role of states and policymakers, this panel centers the often obscured role of transnational migrants as key authors in the constitution of the new South-South geographies. Their ambivalent positions as either/both subaltern subjects or/and “global modernizers” (Nyiri 2006) provide an alternative standpoint for interpreting what the contending imaginaries of “neo-imperialism” and “cooperation” mean for ordinary Chinese and their “southern” interlocutors.

The papers will cover a wide swath of “souths;” China’s south, the global South in Africa, the European south; following the arc of the so-called “New Maritime Silk Road,” an imagined geography premised on the prospect of non-imperial relationalities. What we seek to understand are not the conditions of already formed geographies, but the kind of relationalities of power, ethics, and evaluation that produce privileged and valued “norths” and vulnerable, devalued, or exoticized “souths.” We interrogate the work that “south” is doing vis-à-vis “north,” as these terms are less geographical terms but synonyms for “periphery,” “undeveloped,” and “low value,” and “core,” “developed,” and “high value,” respectively. These terms and positions are relational, and in China’s reorientation to the north, it is often China’s intimate connections with other “souths” that have become the focus of anxieties and ambiguity about both China and these regions in global hierarchies of value.

The discourse of South-South relations has often been rhetorically premised in gendered ways: “relationality” and cooperation versus the asymmetries and universalisms of Western ideology, but the dynamics of these relationalities often go unexamined. As ethnographers, our work considers the dynamics of these relationalities between unequally situated actors in the global economy, including how South-South relationalities and mutualities are mediated through differences of class, race, gender, and sexuality. As differences of race, gender, and sexuality and the management of desire have been central to historic regimes of power during colonialism and imperialism, they remain important analytics for understanding how South-South relationalities and power dynamics experienced and felt. Accordingly, the panel foregrounds social and affective dimensions in the workings of power and unevenness of the south.

 

If you have a paper or research topic which you think is relevant, please send me an e-mail at the address: dsheridan2017@brandeis.edu

Contact Information

Derek Sheridan (Brandeis University)

dsheridan2017@brandeis.edu

Contact Email
dsheridan2017@brandeis.edu