<div dir="ltr"><p><strong>REMINDER: Deadline, September 8, 2015</strong> <br></p><p>For questions: Sankaran Krishna (<a href="mailto:krishna@hawaii.edu">krishna@hawaii.edu</a>) or Saeyoung Park (<a href="mailto:spark34@jhu.edu">spark34@jhu.edu</a>)</p><p>This workshop is part of <a href="http://www.ssrc.org/pages/interasian-connections-v-seoul-2016/" rel="nofollow">SSRC InterAsian Connections V: Seoul (2016)</a></p><p><strong>CALL FOR WORKSHOP PAPERS</strong></p><p>The
Great Recession of 2007 and the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997 have
ignited interest in how state power and peoples’ will are transmuted,
amplified, and undermined by global financial regimes. Few may know of
earlier financial crises, such as those in late Ming China (1368–1644)
that led to the Single-Whip silver tax reform that sparked the first
global integration of currency markets. Financial crises and state
responses have shifted state-society boundaries for centuries, giving
rise to novel transnational financial orders that discipline and
engender new ideas of personhood and political subjectivities. <strong>Situated
at the nexus of state power and finance from 1600 to the present, our
objective is to explore non-Eurocentric genealogies of financialization
across Asia.</strong></p><p>We conceive of financialization broadly as
an apparatus or a set of practices, discourses, and epistemologies that
mediate the contested reordering of the world along lines of credit,
assets, capital mobility and extraction. Whether it’s pilgrimage
financing through informal credit associations in the eighteenth
century, nineteenth century indentured service practices, or a twentieth
century M&A deal, our daily transactions and their attendant logics
of financialization are deeply imbricated in systems of value,
security, and regulation that give rise to the ubiquitous yet unseen
architecture of transborder finance.</p><p>Exploring new ways to periodize and historicize financialization, this workshop focuses on three inter-related themes:</p><ol><li><strong>Financialization and Nation/Empire making</strong>:
First, we will interrogate the ways in which financialization and its
accompanying socio-legal technologies are deployed in state and empire
building from 1600–present. Triumphalist western narratives often fall
short in explaining global finance’s failures to displace local, often
older, parallel systems of credit, or assume institutionalization occurs
only by alien imposition and with little local mediation. Hence, a
study of financialization over the longue durée reinscribes Asian
experiences into teleologies of finance, e.g. highlighting how the house
of Jagat Seth, a giant Jain indigenous banking firm brokered the rise
of Company Raj, hastening the eighteenth century decline of the Mughal
Empire. How do such analyses trouble a convergent understanding of the
state as postcolonial restorer of sovereignty and as a neoliberal
shepherd of economic development?</li><li><strong>Forgotten intermediaries of finance</strong>:
Our vantage renders visible mobile middle men and women whose political
alliances do not neatly align with geopolitical boundaries.
State-centered scholarship awkwardly accommodates the individuals,
private banks, and black market financiers that have historically
facilitated credit flows through the “plumbing” of regional and global
finance that existed prior to the modern institutionalization of
international finance. The slippery spaces between money and morality
can foster unlikely alliances that cross racial, gender, and political
lines. Hence, this workshop seeks new studies that explore how people
and institutions have navigated scales of financialization
(simultaneously global/local; Islamic/Western; colonial/postcolonial)
that disrupt traditional territorial orders that undergird sovereignty
by producing new geographies that bring Shanghai and faraway Mumbai
closer together than Shanghai and Shenyang.</li><li><strong>Problematizing the state-market binary</strong>:
International financial institutions (IFIs such as the World Bank and
the IMF) have broken out of their "straitjackets of transactional legal
work,” to invest in the construction of economic foundations—work
formerly within the domain of states. The recursive dynamics through
which IFIs and their partners acquire state functions, sometimes against
sovereign resistance, but at times in collusion with states (often
against other states) complicates straightforward analyses. Further, is
what we think of as the “work of a state” stable when states themselves
have been reconfigured by waves of financialization? How has
financialization shaped continuities in state practice over the
five-century decline and re-emergence of Asian economic hegemonies?</li></ol><p>Participants
are not required to engage the entire longue durée of Asian
financialization (1600–present), but we seek papers on the theme of
finance and sovereignty that use multidisciplinary methods, trace
historical lineages, and preferably range across more than one
(nation-)state.</p><p>To submit: <a href="http://www.ssrc.org/pages/interasian-connections-v-seoul-2016/">http://www.ssrc.org/pages/interasian-connections-v-seoul-2016/</a></p><p> ---End announcement---<br></p><div><div class="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><br></div></div></div>
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