Event — Workshop

Belonging Across the Bay of Bengal: Migrations, Networks, Circulations

This is a workshop in the framework of the three-year pilot-programme \"Rethinking Asian Studies in a Global Context\". Building on a May 2011 discussion at Princeton University with colleagues, focusing on the Tamil diaspora, Buddhist circulations, and national politics, this workshop will focus on contested notions of belonging across the Bay of Bengal that were fashioned by moving ideas, peoples and things.

This project reframing conventional area studies divides in two ways. By encompassing South and Western India, Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia within a common frame, it challenges the artificiality of a South Asia-Southeast Asia divide. Moreover in giving the Bay of Bengal a central place it will redress the prevailing imbalance of attention on the Western half of the Indian Ocean, and thereby open new perspectives on long-overlooked processes that contributed to the shaping of an interactive zone that now involves some five hundred million people.

For the full text see: Forum 3 - Asian Spatialities 1: The Indian Ocean World - Belonging across the Bay of Bengal


This workshop is part of:

Rethinking Asian Studies in a Global Context
Forum 3 - Asian Spatialities 1: The Indian Ocean World

"Rethinking Asian Studies in a Global Context" (2014-2016) is a three-year IIAS pilot programme funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (New York) aimed at reshaping the field of Asian studies by fostering new humanities-focused research.