[KS] CFP Deadline Sept. 8 Genealogies of Financialization: Reframing Sovereignty in Asia (1600–present)

[Saeyoung Park]

*REMINDER: Deadline, September 8, 2015*

For questions: Sankaran Krishna (krishna at hawaii.edu) or Saeyoung Park (
spark34 at jhu.edu)

This workshop is part of SSRC InterAsian Connections V: Seoul (2016)
<http://www.ssrc.org/pages/interasian-connections-v-seoul-2016/>

*CALL FOR WORKSHOP PAPERS*

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. *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.*

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.

Exploring new ways to periodize and historicize financialization, this
workshop focuses on three inter-related themes:

   1. *Financialization and Nation/Empire making*: 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?
   2. *Forgotten intermediaries of finance*: 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.
   3. *Problematizing the state-market binary*: 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?

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.

To submit: http://www.ssrc.org/pages/interasian-connections-v-seoul-2016/

 ---End announcement---
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://koreanstudies.com/pipermail/koreanstudies_koreanstudies.com/attachments/20150825/e4527900/attachment.html>