During the 2021-22 academic year, the World History Center will sponsor a series of events about survival, resistance, and social formation in and beyond the outer reaches of states and other large networks. As a part of these discussions, we will explore the evolving vocabulary for describing small societies, peoples who practice high mobility, and locales where territory and loyalty are contended between multiple peoples. These places have often been called frontiers, borderlands, and peripheries. More recent terminology refers to them variously as zomias, shatter zones, sites of cheap nature, sacrifice zones, and capitalist ruins. What are the conditions of life for the people and non-humans who inhabit such spaces? What are the ramifications of colonialism and resistance, the toll of extractive economies, and the rhetoric of wastelands for understanding global and transregional networks? What sorts of geographies and politics do they produce? We invite our colleagues interested in these themes and related ones to join us in this year’s discussions.
Series Events Fall 2021
Wednesday, September 29, 12:00pm - 1:30pm: Read & Discuss with Sharika D. Crawford “Limits at Sea State Claims: Territorial Consolidation, and Boundary Disputes, 1880s–1950s.” Register Here!
Wednesday, October 13, 12:00pm - 1:30pm: Read & Discuss with David Igler “Pacific Worlds, Indigenous Travelers, and Knowledge Production." Register Here!
Wednesday, November 3, 12:00pm - 1:30pm: Roundtable: Ottoman and post-Ottoman Peripheries. Register Here!
Images: Tlingit from Seal Hunters' Camp in Canoes alongside the Steamer George W. Elder, Yakutat Bay, Alaska, 1899 from Library of Congress;Log Sawing. Kuzminskoe, 1912, from Library of Congress; Syr Darya Oblast. City of Perovsk. Trade Stalls, 1865 from Library of Congress.