Organizers: Christina von Hodenberg (GHIL), Felix Lüttge (GHIL), Tim Winter (Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore)

Venue: GHIL

In today’s multipolar world, history, religion and culture are shaping international affairs in complex and consequential ways. The Indo-Pacific is the epicentre for such developments, a region where ideas about history and heritage are being transformed by geopolitics, frontier digital technologies and the climate crisis. Dramatic changes are occurring in the ways cultural heritage is being preserved and constructed by archaeologists and museum practitioners and presented for public audiences through new technologies. As China, India and others mobilise their civilisational legacies to exert their will on the future, our module addresses the past as a vector of South-South and North-South regional competition and collaboration spanning both terrestrial and oceanic regions.

This workshop will bring together scholars from the Indo-Pacific, Asia in general and Europe to engage with some of the key political, intellectual and institutional forces and processes that have shaped the discourses of history and heritage that have constituted the region. These include empire, civilisation, decolonisation, geopolitics, diplomacy, extraction, to name a few. The workshop will engage critically with the category of the Indo-Pacific, unpack its use by scholars and political actors and thus aim to de-provincialize Eurocentric discourses that have historically constructed the region in Western terms. In particular, it will focus on discourses and practices within the region itself and will foreground scholarship on the region within the region.

For invited participants only.