Asia Inside Out: Connected Places ed. by Eric Tagliacozzo, Helen F. Siu, Peter Perdue (review)

Indexes are the very last place to start reading a book. How can they tell us anything? In the index of the second installment of the Asia Inside Out trilogy, the entries with the highest number of citations are nations, such as Burma, China, India, Japan, South Korea, and Vietnam, closely followed by concepts like place-making and boundaries and borderlands. If nothing else, this tells us that in a volume that seeks to challenge the spatial boundaries of Asia as a whole, individual authors still tend to fall back on a vocabulary that invokes its “intact national spaces” (p. 6). Even though the collection’s aim is to examine how spaces and places emerged from historical and social conditions without presupposing their bounded existence, we lack adequate terminology to capture all the complexities of what the editors call “regional assemblages” (p. 7), or what Charles Wheeler calls a “space of flows” (p. 56). Naming a space amounts to attempting to delineate that space, and to assert possession of or control over it, and using that name legitimizes that attempt, as Donald Emmerson already argued in 1984, and Martin Lewis and Kären Wigen further considered in their 1997 The Myth of Continents.³ But how do we discuss specific regional spaces without the delineations, over-simplifications, and legitimizations of power that inevitably form part of naming those spaces?

The editors and the individual authors included in this volume offer a variety of possible solutions to that dilemma. One of these is the concept of “place-making,” used as shorthand for developments in the fields of human geography and social theory that have problematized concepts of space and place. Willem van Schendel, for example, focuses on four distinct moments in which the geographical space located in the delta that forms the contact zone between “the seaborne Eastern Indian Ocean network and the river-borne Brahmaputra-and-mountains network” (p. 101) became a place known by many names. The concept of place-making helps to reveal the complexities, contradictions, and compromises that form part of that process, even if using Chittagong, just because it is “the name that stuck” (p. 98), hides much of that from view.

Another is to move from land to sea, or, more precisely, away from the study of land-based units to a focus on maritime connections and the littoral and delta-based societies they shaped. In fact, the editors argue not only for a move toward the maritime realm, but also for a study of “regional assemblages” that “go beyond the land-ocean dichotomy” (p. 7). Alan Mikhail’s study of the horses and elephants that were transported through the Indian Ocean by ship exemplifies this approach. Horses were shipped from the Arabian Peninsula to power warfare in India and China, while elephants shipped from India to the Middle East fueled what Mikhail calls a “charismatic economy” (p. 135) and served as symbols of power and authority. The circulation of animals in the spaces located roughly between Cairo and Beijing reveals a much larger regional assemblage than the Indian Ocean, because these animals also connect the major land-based political powers of South and East Asia and the Middle East. Again, referring to this complex assemblage as “the Indian Ocean economy” does not quite do it justice. Clearly, the search for “multiple geographies of oceanic space” as proposed in 2006 by David Lambert, Luciana Martins, and Miles Ogborn continues to be fruitful, even if it does not provide all the answers.⁴

A third proposed solution to the dilemma caused by a desire to recognize the multiple, ongoing, and contradictory processes by which spaces are constructed as places, without prioritizing a single discourse of power by naming it, is a focus on mobility. People, things, and ideas were rarely static; instead, they were circulatory, translocal, and frequently moved across borders. Several of the chapters engage with mobility in [End...