233. Re-working the State: Geographies of Power in Colonial and Post-colonial Burma. Sponsored by the Burma Studies Group

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

This panel explores the various dimensions through which state power is imagined, acted on and reworked in different settings in Burma. The papers lay out this contested terrain from different vantage points, where individuals and communities understand the state through their own cultural and communal mediations, and lay their spatial and historic claims on it. In the process, these mediations themselves have evolved and have undergone change. Giovine in her paper studies local understandings of the colonial marketplace through popular literature during the early twentieth century and shows how race and nation were central to that logic. Baillargeon in his paper on British Mining Corporation in Burma’s Northern Shan States shows how colonial state-making often involved private international commerce and labor, and poses larger questions about the nature of British Empire. Wittekind and Mazumder study the spatial encounters between state and “population” in postcolonial moments, considering, for one, how documentation and land markers like maps, signs and fences are the constant reminder of the presence of the state. But at the same time, they show how communities, often in subtle (and sometimes more aggressive) ways, challenge these encroachments with their own memories, narratives and historical claims on these spaces.

Area of Study

• Southeast

Session Organizer

• Rajashree Mazumder, Union College

Chair

• Rajashree Mazumder, Union College

Individual Presentations

• The Logic of the Colonial Marketplace: Race, Nation, and Prosperity in the Popular Burmese Imagination, 1910-1930 - Allegra E. Giovine, University of Pennsylvania

• “The Commonwealth of Namtu”: British World Mining, Finance, and Development in the Northern Shan States, 1906-1935 - David Baillargeon, University of California Santa Barbara

• Entangled Geographies, Spatiotemporal Frames, and Territorial Claims-Making in Southern Shan State - Courtney T. Wittekind, Harvard University

• Illegal Border Crossers and Unruly Citizens: Burma-Pakistan-Indian Borderlands 1940s-1960s - Rajashree Mazumder, Union College

Discussant

• Patrick A. McCormick, University of Zurich