Border Anxiety, Border Ambiguity: Nation and Empire Building in the Borderlands of East Asia

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

Defining and enforcing borders has been critical to processes of state formation in East and Southeast Asia since the early modern period. Yet equally significant to these developments have been anxieties about borders and movements across them. Drawing on the recent theoretical discussion on border/lands, our panel examines the anxiety and ambiguity that border/lands may retain, exploring the following questions: 1) What kinds and whose imaginations have come to play in making and remaking the concept of border and the affect of borderland? 2) In what ways has cartographic anxiety affected the everyday life of borderlands? 3) How has the particular characteristic of the border and borderlands shifted with national and imperial building processes in East Asia? Arina Mikhalevskaya investigates the role of local Burmese political practices in complicating Qing attempts to define and regulate the border through the tribute system. Noriaki Hoshino uses the lens of Japanese social scientist discourses on ethnic and racial contacts in the 1930s and 1940s to examine the relationship between anxieties about cross-border population movements and the construction of multi-ethnic empire. June Hee Kwon and Martin Fromm turn attention to the continuing role of border anxieties along China’s northeast borders with Korea and Russia. Kwon uses ethnographic research to examine the conflicted meanings associated with the Tumen River border between China and Korea and their appropriation in local economic policies and practices. Fromm analyzes a state-sponsored oral history project’s reconstruction of China’s northeast border with Russia as an ambiguous political space in the transition to a new form of post-Mao nationalism in the 1980s.

Area of Study

• Interarea-Border Crossing

Session Organizer

• Martin Fromm, Worcester State University

Chair

• June Hee Kwon, New York University

Individual Presentations

• Imagining the Enemy: Sino-Burmese Cross-Border Interactions between 1769–1788 - Arina Mikhalevskaya, Independent Scholar

• Imperial Security: Transnational Mobility, Contacts, and Japanese Social Science - Noriaki Hoshino, NYU Shanghai

• Memory Politics in China’s Northeast Borderland: Local and Regional Processes of Producing Post-Mao Nationalism - Martin Fromm, Worcester State University

• “Feeling Border Anxiety”: Border Tourism and the Tumen River in Yanbian, China - June Hee Kwon, New York University