Reimagining the Pacific: Towards an Oceanic Intellectual History
Date ＆ Time
13 March 2025, 9.45-18.45 (JST)
14 March 2025, 10.00-18.00 (JST)
Venue
Lecture Hall, 21 Komaba Center for Educational Excellence (21 KOMCEE) West, B1F, UTokyo, Komaba, Japan
（駒場キャンパス KOMCEE West 地下一階 レクチャーホール）
Mode
In person（対面） ＊オンラインでの視聴はありません。
Language
English
Registration form
https://forms.gle/us99ENJhwMEH5Pgq7
Vision Statement
Covering about one-third of the Earth’s surface, the Pacific Ocean serves as an experimental ground for global intellectual history. A gigantic geo-cultural entity, it has constituted a singular reservoir of historically projected visions, aspirations and values. Beneath its waves lie both strands and fragments of kaleidoscopic thought and consciousness—like deeper invisible currents and submarine rivers—originating from various corners of the globe: from the Ocean’s rim, the islands at its heart and beyond the Pacific. From the late twentieth century onwards, many writers and artists from the post-independence Pacific Islands region have cultivated “Oceania’s library,” a distinctive collection of knowledge and imagination about its culture, nature and history, developed in ways emancipated from European systems of knowledge. However, Oceania’s library is partly rooted in engagement with these systems, as exemplified by the indigenization of Christianity and Christian cosmologies, a process that has evolved over the last several centuries. As with numerous other examples, worldviews have “clashed and converged” in the Pacific Ocean. This ocean functions as a global crucible of human imagination.
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*Please note that there are some changes from the poster.
《Thursday, March 13》
Opening Remark (9.45-9.55 am)
Tomohito Baji (UTokyo)
Panel 1: The Japanese Archipelago and Pacific Islands in the Early Modern Period (10.00-12.00 am)
Chair: Tsuyoshi Kamimura (Kwansei Gakuin University)
・Thomas Ashby (European University Institute): “Archipelagic Islanders: English Conceptualisations of the Pacific Archipelago of Japan as an Island Nation, c. 1600-1623”
・Robert Hellyer (Wake Forest University): “Conceptualizing Land and Sea in the Pacific: Japanese Perspectives c. 1700 to 1876”
・Aerim Ryu (Kyushu University): “Seas Converging on Land: Political Thought on Seas and Islands in Early Modern East Asia”
Panel 2: Oceanopolitical Visions from Modern Europe and India (1.00-3.00 pm)
Chair: Tomohito Baji (UTokyo)
・Hansong Li (American University): “Polar Oracles: The ‘Arctic Moment’ in InternationalThought”
・Bahar Gürsel (Middle East Technical University): “Archibald R. Colquhoun’s Narratives about the Straits Settlements, North Borneo and Java in The Mastery of the Pacific (1902)”
・Arnab Dutta (University of Groningen): “Imagining the Pacific in Indian Anticolonial Großraum: Kalidas Nag’s India and the Pacific World, 1920s-40s”
Panel 3: Mare Imperium, Japan and the United States (3.15-5.30 pm)
Chair: Atsuko Watanabe (Kanazawa University)
・Mire Koikari (University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa): “Cultivating Masculinity for the Oceanic Empire: Kaikoku Kenji (海国健児), Imperial Naval College, and Japan’s TranspacificSeascape”
・Jiaying Shen (University of Toronto): “Reorient the Pacific: Matsunami Ni‘ichirō’s Search for New Maritime Laws” [online]
・Takuya Furuta (Nishogakusha University): “The Occultic and Conspiracist Origin of Asia-Pacific”
・Jodi Kim (Dartmouth College) and Eng-Beng Lim (Dartmouth College): “Aqua Nullis: Oceanic Seizure and US Militarist Settler Imperialism in the Pacific”
Keynote 1: Pacific Inter-tidal Communities as Unsettling Identities in Global Intellectual Debate (5.45-6.45 pm)
Paul D’Arcy (Australian National University)
《Friday, March 14》
Panel 4: Rethinking How to Narrate the Pacific (10.00-12.00am)
Chair: Hassall Yasuko Kobayashi (Musashi University)
・Sana Sakihama (UTokyo): “Narratives of the Sea in Okinawa: Oblivion of Memory over the Pacific”
・Maria Cynthia B. Barriga (Hitotsubashi University): “The Japanese Question: Writing History amid Successive Empires”
・Lewis Mayo (University of Melbourne): “Framing and Narrating Pacific and Asian Intellectual History: Fiji, Hawai’i and Aotearoa New Zealand”
Keynote 2: (De)colonizing Transimperial Waters in the Pacific (1.00-2.00pm)
Nadin Heé (Leipzig University)
Panel 5: Visualizing and Representing Oceanic Imaginaries (2.10-3.40pm)
Chair: Naoki Nishida (UTokyo)
・ Christopher Lee (Columbia University): “Oceanic Cybernetics: Steel Ships in the Manufacture of Affective Pacific Seascapes”
・ Thomas Schwartz (Nihon University): “The Pacific as a Laboratory of the Anthropocene”
Panel 6: Colonial Pasts, Oceanic Futures (4.00-6.00pm)
Chair: Tomohito Baji (UTokyo)
・Jonas M. Rüegg (University of Zürich): “The Search for Modern Micronesia: Star-Shaped Genealogies of a Colonial Past”
・Jonathan Galka (Harvard University): “Deep Flow: Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion and the History of Archipelagic Futures after Empire”
・Kevin Lujan Lee (University of Buffalo) and Josh Campbell (UCLA): “Contesting Oceania”
Conference Organization Committee
Tomohito Baji (UTokyo, Principal Organizer)
Takuya Fruta (Nishogakusha University)
Tsuyoshi Kamimura (Kwansei Gakuin University)
Naoki Nishida (UTokyo)
Aerim Ryu (Kyushu University)
Sana Sakihama (UTokyo)
Shaun Yajima (UTokyo)
Institutional Organizer
Institute for Advanced Global Studies, UTokyo, Komaba
Sponsorship
・Global Studies Initiative Caravan Project “A Global Intellectual History of the Pacific” (UTokyo)
・Nomura Foundation Research Grants (Social Sciences)「『大洋の政治思想史』の創造に向けた国際共同研究」（研究代表者：馬路智仁）
・JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B) 「冷戦期のオーストラリアにおけるアジア・太平洋研究の形成の歴史」（研究代表者：小林ハッサル柔子）
・JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)「エコロジカルな海洋国際共同体の構想：20世紀後半、太平洋・先住民知識人の想像力」（単独：馬路智仁）