Events

For centuries, travellers have celebrated the cosmopolitan energy of Asia’s cities. They have depicted urban centres across the continent—from Shanghai to Surat, from Samarkand to Singapore—as bustling centres of economic and cultural exchange. Historically, Asia’s cities were conglomerations of itinerant merchants, artisans, wayfarers, pilgrims, and slaves. Contemporary cities boast transnational business people, labourers, service workers, students, and refugees. Governing such cities has long been a challenge. Indigenous kingdoms, imperial regimes, and modern nation-states alike have struggled to manage the gaggle of cultures, languages, behavioural norms, livelihoods, and religious practices. In some cases, state officials have suppressed cross-community intimacies, mobilities, and collaborations. In others, they have tolerated and even promoted the autonomy of minority communities and the creation of new ethnic identities.

Asian cities have often adopted strategies of urban governance with reference to the successes and failures of other urban centres in Asia and beyond. Yet the transmission of ideas can take different paths: as information gathered by state officials, practices imported by diasporic communities, or ideas disseminated through scholarly networks or mass media. This conference invites scholars to push beyond the formal boundaries of individual cities, empires, and nations by interrogating this dispersal of people and ideas across urban Asia. Key questions include (but are not limited to):

• How is knowledge related to the administration of ethnic communities transmitted from place to place within or beyond Asia?
• How have diasporic communities contributed to the dispersal of different strategies of ethnic administration?
• To what extent were modern ethnic policies introduced to Asia by Western imperialists, and to what extent did they borrow from indigenous Asian models?
• How have state policies and practices been negotiated, resisted, claimed, or otherwise experienced by ethnic communities on the ground?

Through this conference, we hope to understand the development of ethnic administration in Asian cities through the interplay between the local and the transnational, between state actors and the diverse voices of society, and between the past and the present.

We anticipate a vibrant and productive scholarly exchange. In addition, the conference offers participants the opportunity to workshop article manuscripts in progress. The conference organizers are keen on collecting the revised versions of papers presented at this conference for publication as a special journal issue. To that end, we can only accept proposals for papers, which have not been published previously and are not committed elsewhere.

REGISTRATION

Registration is closed, and instructions on how to participate in this webinar have been sent out to registered attendees.
Please write to valerie.yeo@nus.edu.sg, if you would like to attend the event.

CONFERENCE CONVENORS

Dr Mathew Reeder | Postdoctoral Fellow, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore
Dr Yang Yang | Postdoctoral Fellow, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore
Dr Clay Keller Eaton | Postdoctoral Fellow, Division of Humanities, Yale-NUS College, Singapore