Centre for South Asian Studies

Description

The paper advances debates in critical infrastructure studies and the contemporary history of decolonization via a critical reading of Antonio Gramsci, especially his incomplete essay “The Southern Question”. It draws out and translates Gramsci's notions of uneven development, racialisation, and hegemony, to better understand the process of political decolonization and territorial partition in 20th century Asia. The paper first examines the production and dissemination of a racialised imaginary of internal peripheries as places of developmental backwardness in Pakistan (current day Pakistan and Bangladesh). It then compares and connects this process to the historical geography of decolonization and partition in Malaya (current day Peninsular Malaysia and Singapore) during roughly the same period. The paper draws primarily on archival planning and policy documents to argue that official geographic imaginaries of racialized and backward internal peripheries enabled an authoritarian and technocratic approach to infrastructural development and nation-building and shaped the territorial reconfigurations of post-British Asia in the middle of the 20th century. Going beyond nostalgic invocations of the 'Bandung Spirit' and revolutionary third world nationalism, this paper sheds light a different, and arguably more influential, mode of Asian decolonization: technocratic, authoritarian, and racialised. The paper concludes by revisiting Frantz Fanon's critique of narrow nationalisms, and by considering the role of critical comparative methodologies for understanding the historical and present geographies of Asia.

This seminar will be chaired by: Dr Aaron Kappeler, Lecturer in Anthropology & Development, UoE