This is the first post in a new blog series that I am launching after my retirement from NYU, to continue my Global Asia Program work as an independent author. It will present opinion pieces and academic essays.
Here goes.
The NYU Global Asia Program has brought together scholars, educators, artists, students, and activists to explore the countless forms of mobility that shape societies, cultures, politics, economies, environments, and geographies, all around Asia, from ancient times to the present. That mobility has travelled the globe. Its expansion and everyday local influence are the subject of my research.
The dominance of the idea that social life is naturally contained within boundaries of ethnicity, place, region, nation, or continent supports the power of boundary-enforcers, whose painfully exclusionary, discriminatory influence is all too obvious, today, when expansively global, inclusive mobility is also increasingly influential in our high-speed internet world of mobile phones, global markets, global supply chains, migration, and climate change. That mobility is not new; only its scale and technologies. Social space is essentially mobile. Boundaries are imposed on mobile social space. The idea that border-crossing violates, contradicts, evades, or weakens the natural necessity of borders is merely another brick to lay in boundary walls.
Histories of mobile humanity are the subject of this blog and related publications. They reveal the artificial contingency of all kinds of boundaries, including those of classical civilizations, national states, and every territory in between.
Comments welcome.