This seminar will demonstrate how Asia was not just a historical backdrop for the expansion of industrial civilisation but also the originator of an indigenous form of globalisation.

Manimporok Dotulong will be presenting “The Arafura Zone: Indigenous Globalisation in the Asian Pacific"

Zoom Registration / In-person at St Antony’s

In the heyday of colonialism and empire, global connections conspired to produce a singular industrial and ‘civilised’ world on the ruins of many others. But another form of connectivity facilitated the survival of worlds of an entirely different kind. One example can be found in the late 19th century, in day-to-day interactions that linked East Asia, Southeast Asia, and Australasia at the non-state level. Indigenous and non-state actors turned to the ocean, where their local knowledge of nature served to facilitate transnational coexistence and mutual aid, inadvertently undermining colonial forms of relating. ‘Japanese’ fishers, ‘Manillamen’, ‘aboriginal Australians’, ‘Melanesians’, and many others thereby shaped the contours of what I call the ‘Arafura Zone’.

Dr Manimporok (Maro) Dotulong is Postdoctoral Fellow at Brown University.

Manimporok (Maro) Dotulong is Postdoctoral Fellow in International Humanities in the Department of East Asian Studies and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities at Brown University, located on lands within the ancestral homelands of the Narragansett. He specializes in multilingual archival research and the history of trans-Asian connections across the Western Pacific. Focusing on questions of how nature shapes the course of history, his research explores competing modernities and the intellectual history of ordinary people and thereby offers non-Eurocentric and non-colonial takes on ideas of civilization, freedom, progress, and science.