Interjectures - in midst of ‘either-or’s - 3

This episode sets sail across oceans to explore certain forgotten modes of space-fluency and to reclaim the potentials of traversion, dispersion and voyage as ‘a place without a place’, the ‘boat’, as Michel Foucault evoked, that is simultaneously the great instrument of economic development and the greatest reserve of imagination in civilisations. Permeating throughout urban history is the conception, based on Ptolemy’s Geographia, where terra takes the position of the centre, surrounded by the ōkeanos which takes the position of the periphery. By contending this projection and the centralising conception of oecumene as the basis of city and civilisation, this episode probes the marinus-urbanus as a (lost) model of cities that are never central nor singular, but always plural, partial and interdependent. This episode frames and debates the three key instigating factors of marinus-urbanus – ‘harbour' (conditions of in-fluence), ‘lighthouse' (conditions of ex-fluence), and ‘pirate’ (conditions of trans-fluence) – by attending to historical and contemporaneous contexts and evidence that have often been peripheralised as the edge between land and sea. These three sessions, crossing to the far edge of Asia and the interconnecting seas of East and Southeast Asia, examine disparate yet confluencing urban cultures that emerged along significant maritime trade routes, contiguous and trans-local connections between ports and patterns of inhabitation, to the transiting and dispersing spatial typologies of vessels-as-homes, a diasporic logic of settling and unsettling, that radically challenges the centred, bounded and settled premise to understanding a city.

Three seminar sessions on the theme of Portal Confluence will make up the third episode of the PhD seminar series INTERJECTURES 2023. The ‘Portal Confluence’ episode will be co-convened by Doreen Bernath, Ke Bo Izac Tsai and Shiyu Jin. Each session engages presentations by guest speakers, followed by comments and discussions, and is open to participants from the PhD and graduate school programmes, as well as open to the larger AA school and community.

The Interjectures seminar series brings forth, through forms of collaborative debates, positions and opinions poised as ‘either-or’ at fractures and junctures of histories, languages, identities and places. These are sites of interruption and mis-alignment, often marginal to centric views, foreign to assumed similarities, strangers to ourselves, where alternative intelligibility has been obfuscated under dominant projections. Each episode engages multilateral and recursive processes of re-reading and contesting stable pictures, particular those conserved through power, morality and tradition, to unravel incomplete and nuanced interpretations - the making of sense amidst digression and transgression - that expose the inadequacy of given meanings and acknowledge productive ambivalence. By operating more as dangerous supplements, complicit mediums, unfaithful translations and precarious hybrids, ‘interjectures’ conjure the ‘either-or’ as possibilities of unexpected affinity that defy the assumed boundaries under disciplinary, territorial, discursive or epistemological terms.

Session 1 Harbour in-fluence

11 May 2-5:30pm

From identity-making through the ‘discontinent’ of migration and diaspora, concessionary negotiation that invert the relation to land and property between the foreign and the local, to the gathering and distributing pulses of therapeutic spaces analogous to harbours and lighthouses, this opening session sets out to trace the in-fluence of and between port cities. These are harbours that harbour the temporal passage of the émigré, borrowing the protagonists in W. G. Sebald’s ficto-historical tales, who moves, makes and carries their places along, transitioning from dis-place to re-place, embracing the state of fluency and transactionary propensity. The protagonists of this session, not the familiar local dwellers nor stable settlers, but those who speak different tongues (cultures) while sharing the same vessel (experience of migration), have left their marks of in-fluence upon the portal urbanity connected through the maritime trade networks. The sense of place in these harbours is never simple; they are emigrants in themselves, just like the vessels they receive and send off, un/up/load and repair, make and mix, without the pretext of permanence, security nor integration. Between the conditions of greatest constraint and greatest expanse, between the exigence and sorrow of the exile and the return, harbours are the places of the gathering and dispersion of partial spatial fragments and inhabitations that evidence both the voyage and the voyagers as space-maker that shaped the harbours’ ‘con-fluential’ spatial parlance and contingent urbanity.

Watch online here.

Schedule

2:00pm - Introduction: Doreen Bernath and Ke Bo Izac Tsai

2:15pm - Huei-Ying Kuo: Beyond Chinese Diaspora - Rethinking Asia in the ‘European Age of Empire’ from an Archipelago Perspective

3:15pm break

3:30pm - Shiyu Jin: Shaping Modern Shanghai - Built Environment Transformation and Colonial Peculiarity

4:00pm - James Kwang Ho Chung: Crisis and Therapy - The Architecture of the Lighthouse Effect in the Midst of Darkness

4:30pm - Discussion with presenters and guest discussants Sean Gwee, Chia-Yu Liang and Stuart Thompson

Session 2 Lighthouse ex-fluence

12 May 2-4:30pm

Not only that the sense of place is emigrant in itself, it is also marked by the wavy journeys of goods and gods, blessings and omens, rituals and betrayals, opportunities and fortunes. The lighthouse effect that was explored in relation to the condition of harbouring across ports is further expanded here in the second session. It begins by tracing, with a zoomed-in focus on Southern China and Taiwan, the emergence, multiplication, migration and ex-fluence of temples, where the permanently illuminated fragrant oil lamps assert the lighthouse effect, along with affiliated marketplaces and urban spaces that grew around it. Furthermore, at a zoomed-out level across the maritime region between Japan and Indonesia, within which Tainan, created by the Dutch East India Company, was a crucial node, the lighthouse effect is manifested through the agency of pirates that offer protection and opportunities, as well as threats and forces that result in the rise and fall of cities. These two connected views on lighthouse ex-fluence reveal the deeper ties between spiritual networks and a system of economics with a particular maritime logic. It echoes the refutation by R. E. Coase’s economic theory, by studying the lighthouse system, that private enterprises (which are agencies including pirates) too can take on the function assumed by a government to build lighthouses as a matter of public and social good, serving both local and foreign ex-fluences.

Watch online here.

Schedule

2:00pm - Introduction: Doreen Bernath and Shiyu Jin

2:15pm - Fang-Long Shih: Multiplication of Pài-pài and Affluence - Lighthouse Effects of Tsi̍p-ìng Temples and Jingmei Marketplaces in Taipei’s Wenshan District

3pm - Ke Bo Izac Tsai: The Lighthouse in Urbanism - From Pirates to Interconnected Cities in the Far East and Southeast Asia

3:45pm - Discussion with presenters and guest discussants Javier Castanon, Shin Egashira, Sean Gwee, Teresa Stoppani and Stuart Thompson

Session 3 Pirate trans-fluence

12 May 5pm–7:30pm

Lecture, Civilisation and Humanity, Prof. Stephan Feuchtwang

With my close colleague Mike Rowlands and prompted by our joint workshops on civilisation in China with our friend Wang Mingming, I have co-written Civilisation Recast (Cambridge University Press, 2012). The book reformulates ‘civilisation’ making it a concept for anthropologists and other social scientists that can be used without falling into the danger of Eurocentrism or any other cultural and imperial centrism. We followed the great pioneer anthropologist Marcel Mauss in posing it as a counterweight to the cultural nationalisms of European states and their global spread. Our starting point is the anthropological observation that all cultures take pride in offering food to strangers in rituals of hospitality. In doing so strangers are recognised as fellow humans though they are beyond the cultural community of their hosts and might be trading, marriage or warring rivals. As David Graeber and Wengrow drew so well to our attention, the history of humanity has been one of migration and increasing ranges of associations of interaction. This has led to both cultural self-differentiation and observations of similarities between communities and the partnerships their widely spread relationships have afforded. Civilisation Recast posits cultures as self-centring and self-differentiating from other cultures that are similar in their civilisation. We define ‘civilisation’ as the sharing of an encompassing sense of the world of life-making and of past lives, including what is and what is not human. My talk will elaborate on all this and draw our conclusion that civilisations are themselves spreads and mixes.

Watch online here.

Schedule

5:00pm - Introduction: Doreen Bernath, Ke Bo Izac Tsai and Shiyu Jin

5:15pm - Lecture by Prof. Stephan Feuchtwang: Civilisation and Humanity

6:15pm break

6:30pm - Roundtable with all presenters and guest discussants Prof. Kent Deng, Shin Egashira, Javier Castanon, Chia-Yu Liang, Teresa Stoppani and Stuart Thompson