Papers by Geoffrey Rathgeb Aung
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2024
A pivotal Belt and Road project, the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor (CMEC) includes port, pipeli... more A pivotal Belt and Road project, the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor (CMEC) includes port, pipeline, economic zone, and transport projects that cut across Myanmar to southern China. Along this corridor, severe episodes of violence have shadowed the CMEC: communal violence, insurgencies, and counter-insurgencies, including atrocities against Rohingya Muslims. This article considers the relation-direct and indirect-between the logistical infrastructure projects of the CMEC, dedicated to capitalist valorization, and the episodes of violence that have occurred in their vicinity. Revisiting critical logistics scholarship, I suggest that the turbulence of logistical worlds does not necessarily reflect an internal logic of capital. Drawing on a form-analysis view of the state, rather, I show how the CMEC requires a conjunctural grasp of logistical worlds whose turbulence can stem from multiple determinations, including state-backed, extraeconomic force. Emphasizing the ties between the CMEC and Myanmar military operations, I argue that logistical infrastructures in Myanmar are dual in form. They are incorporative and connective, fuelled by fantasies of boundless growth and endless valorisation. Yet they are also "anti-relational," forging not only connections but disconnections along spatial, gendered, and racialized ethnic divides. These racialized processes of dispossession and immiseration present violent limits to logistical imaginaries of connective relation.
Dialectical Anthropology , 2024
This article historicizes and conceptualizes the Myanmar radical tradition: a tradition of though... more This article historicizes and conceptualizes the Myanmar radical tradition: a tradition of thought and practice that has animated radical politics across Myanmar’s twentieth and twenty-first centuries. From anti-colonial struggle to decolonization, and from communist insurgency to left feminism, ethnic rebellion, and today’s revolutionary upsurge following the 2021 coup d’état, this radical tradition is best understood not as something bounded or solitary. Rather, it names a productive conjoining of radical thought and practice from within Myanmar, as well as from other times and places, beginning in the imperial world order of the early twentieth century. Revisiting scholarship on transatlantic and transpacific radicalisms, we argue that attention to imperialism offers important insights into Myanmar’s modern history and contemporary dynamics, including the Myanmar radical tradition. Yet, the Myanmar radical tradition—heterogeneous and internally conflictual, a site of historical dispute—also sheds light on the changing imperial world order, which we show has a fundamentally reactive, counter-revolutionary quality. Today’s late imperialism, we argue, can be seen as a retaliatory response to the long arc of decolonization, a story within which Myanmar’s contemporary revolutionary struggle renders the Myanmar radical tradition very much a living tradition.
Journal of Cultural Economy, 2022
This article follows the history of the Dawei special economic zone (SEZ), a port, industrial zon... more This article follows the history of the Dawei special economic zone (SEZ), a port, industrial zone, and logistics project located in Myanmar's southern borderlands. Suspended in 2013 due to financing shortfalls and public criticism, the Dawei project's implementation has been far from straightforward. This article dwells on the non-linear temporality of the project, focusing on the problem of financing. It is there, above all, that project proponents continually entertain both prospects of progress and frustrating obstacles. This story of financing shows, I argue, that frontiers are temporal projects, constituted by fits and starts, slowdowns and accelerations, and periods of deferral and delay. Beginning with the project's origins and moving through recent attempts to revive it, I foreground three moments of labor in and of timethree timescapes, in shortwhich I describe in terms of futurity and deferral, boom and bust, and suspension and renewal. The complex temporality of the project raises doubts about the notion that capitalist modernity consists of a singular, abstract, homogeneous timedefined by acceleration, speed, or time-space compression. On this frontier, rather, the intermingling of multiple times suggests not vestiges of the premodern, but the heterogeneous timescapesunstable, unruly, uneventhat compose capitalist modernity itself.
Focaal, 2021
“But the chief thing about Melville’s crew is that they work,” C. L. R James (1953: 29) wrote in ... more “But the chief thing about Melville’s crew is that they work,” C. L. R James (1953: 29) wrote in the early 1950s, reflecting on Moby-Dick. James’s comment draws the attention of Allan Sekula (1995) in Fish Story, Sekula’s magisterial account of logistics, shipping, and the ocean in global capitalism. Striking, for Sekula, about James’s study of Moby-Dick, is his disinterest in allegorical or psychoanalytic readings of Ahab and his crew. For James, the Pequod is a workplace, prone to the unruliness of worker solidarity and revolt. Yet in the early postwar years, Sekula observes, the opposite image flitted across the dreams of the shipping industry’s experts: a dream of ships without workers, prefigured in the hulking outlines of the increasingly automated oil tanker. If modern logistics founds itself upon a vision of transcending human labor power—a fantasy of the automatic subject, as Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (2013) note by way of Marx—then what might it mean to track the human and human labor power in and around logistics today?
Transmediale 2021: Research Refusal Newsletter, 2021
A short manifesto (of sorts) and newsletter on logistical capital and resistance to it in the Glo... more A short manifesto (of sorts) and newsletter on logistical capital and resistance to it in the Global South, from our research collective Logistical (B)orders - Eylul, Geoff and me.
This newsletter was made collaboratively as part of the Research Refusal workshop in transmediale 2021 (organized by DARC, Aarhus University and partners), after a few months long exchange of ideas via a listserv. The design/execution of the newsletter is by Open Source Publishing (osp.kitchen).
See other transmediale research workshop newsletters at https://darc.au.dk/publications/peer-reviewed-newspaper/
Critical Asian Studies, 2018
This commentary examines how futurity has been imagined across politics and political economy in ... more This commentary examines how futurity has been imagined across politics and political economy in Burma/Myanmar. Three areas are discussed: the revolutionary horizons of anti-colonialists, who combined Buddhist and Marxist ideas of historical progress; the developmental socialism of the early independence area, with its industrial telos and modernist commitments; and a contemporary development project in southern Myanmar, where processes of dispossession are troubling earlier temporal imaginaries. I suggest that a vision of postcolonial transformation coheres across anti- colonial and early independence claims to futurity. This temporal imaginary, which I call postcolonial futurism, promises transitions from farm to factory, peasant to the proletariat, and precapital to capital. This imaginary resonated widely. Today, however, scholars of South and Southeast Asia argue that modernist promises of transition now lack empirical and political purchase amid ongoing dispossession and trends towards low-wage, informal labour. Yet in the wake of postcolonial futurism, responses to dispossession are creating novel political possibilities. Responding to Kuan-Hsing Chen’s call to rework Bandung internationalism in the present, I consider how struggles over dispossession today indicate both openings and limits for the making of new political futures. Integrating Glen Coulthard’s work on colonialism and dispossession, I argue that decolonizing subjectivity is central to this process.
European Journal of East Asian Studies, 2018
This article examines the trajectory of struggles over land and resources in Dawei, a town in sou... more This article examines the trajectory of struggles over land and resources in Dawei, a town in southern Myanmar. The site of a major special economic zone project, Dawei has seen sustained mobilisation around displacement, dispossession and environmental degradation, against the backdrop of national political and economic reforms. Recently, scholars have argued that earlier visions of postcolonial transition have lost their empirical and political purchase, as farmers dispossessed of land increasingly become excluded from formal capitalist production. What happens to politics and political form if dynamics of exclusion, rather than transition, organise political activity under today's conditions of accumulation? Repurposing Kalyan Sanyal's concept of postcolonial capitalism, this article describes and theorises the politics of disposses-sion in Dawei. Tracing the political activities of activist groups and villagers, it argues that two contrasting political trajectories—one secular–egalitarian, one situational– differential—constitute a heterogeneous political field, reflecting the complexity of postcolonial capitalism itself.
Journal of Borderlands Studies, 2014
The dominant approach to understanding migration in the Thai–Burma borderlands frames migration l... more The dominant approach to understanding migration in the Thai–Burma borderlands frames migration largely as an economic effect of industrialization in Thailand and economic stagnation in Burma. Drawing on a range of secondary sources and long-term field-based research on the Thai–Burma border, this article pursues a different approach, seeking to situate current migration trends in a historical and political context. James Scott’s recent work on Zomia and upland Southeast Asia is instrumental here. Key factors Scott cites as drivers of flight from state space over the longue durée—taxation, forced or corvée labor, and war and rebellion—remain strikingly relevant today. This article examines the applicability of Scott’s migration analysis to contemporary mobility patterns in the Thai–Burma borderlands, proposing two concepts that highlight the politics of mobility in this border area: the friction of cartography and migrant counter-topographies. The former evokes the protective quality of the border line itself, whereby ostensibly economic migrants who cross it achieve a measure of distance and refuge vis-à-vis Burma’s predatory state structures, especially the military; the latter seeks to name the spaces created by migrants to evade forms and structures of state power, in both Thailand and Burma. I argue that today’s migrant communities, far from being overdetermined reflections of recent trends in political economy, much resemble Scott’s state-evading peasants from centuries past, displaying political agency and intentionality in their strategic use of space to seek and secure refuge in the Thai–Burma borderlands.
Conference Presentations by Geoffrey Rathgeb Aung
The revolutionary upsurge that followed the 2021 military coup in Myanmar has reignited long-stan... more The revolutionary upsurge that followed the 2021 military coup in Myanmar has reignited long-standing debates over theory and practice on Myanmar’s radical left. Armed groups, newly formed left organizations, militant sections of student and trade unions, and an emergent left media ecology have returned to and re-examined concerns that animated leftist discourse at key junctures in Myanmar’s twentieth century, from the anticolonial struggle to decolonization and from Communist insurgency to ethnic rebellion. Questions about the mass strike and peasant insurgency; class structure and political leadership; the national question and communal attachments; and shifts in imperial power have all returned to prominence in an openly revolutionary present. Mapping this resurgent leftist landscape, I argue that it is indebted to—while in tension with—what I conceptualize as the Myanmar radical tradition: an anti-authoritarian leftist tradition in which capitalism, empire, and the militarized state apparatus demand outright abolition. This paper places Myanmar’s revolutionary past and present in conversation with radical traditions elsewhere, from calls for unconditional decolonization in the Philippines to the Marxism of the Black radical tradition. It also reads Myanmar’s ongoing revolution as a temporal provocation. Here, an array of political subjects recombine and rework multiple temporal scales, not least by rethinking historicity and historical memory in relation to Marxisms past. This (re)making of a revolutionary timescape suggests a need to move beyond the long shadows of earlier revolutionary failures, which find their echoes in recent discourses of disenchantment and melancholia.
Paper presented at the 2019 AAA/CASCA Annual Meeting as part of a double session titled "What is ... more Paper presented at the 2019 AAA/CASCA Annual Meeting as part of a double session titled "What is a financial frontier?"
Paper presented at the "Land, Law, and Nationalism" workshop hosted by Stockholm University, Apri... more Paper presented at the "Land, Law, and Nationalism" workshop hosted by Stockholm University, April 2019.
Dissertation chapter presented at the Sheldon Scheps Seminar, Columbia University, December 2018.
Paper presented at the 2018 Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), Nov... more Paper presented at the 2018 Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), November 2018.
Paper presented at the 2018 Crossroads in Cultural Studies conference, hosted at Shanghai Univers... more Paper presented at the 2018 Crossroads in Cultural Studies conference, hosted at Shanghai University by the Association for Cultural Studies (ACS). Part of a panel called "The Lives and Afterlives of the Inter-Asian 60s," which I co-organized with Thiti Jamkajornkeiat.
A video essay on the aesthetics and experience of a special economic zone project on hold, based ... more A video essay on the aesthetics and experience of a special economic zone project on hold, based on ethnographic fieldwork in Dawei, Burma/Myanmar. Presented at Displacements, the 2018 Biennial Meeting of the Society for Cultural Anthropology (SCA).
Paper presented at the ‘Bandung Humanisms: Towards a New Understanding of the Global South’ works... more Paper presented at the ‘Bandung Humanisms: Towards a New Understanding of the Global South’ workshop held at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, June 2017.
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Papers by Geoffrey Rathgeb Aung
This newsletter was made collaboratively as part of the Research Refusal workshop in transmediale 2021 (organized by DARC, Aarhus University and partners), after a few months long exchange of ideas via a listserv. The design/execution of the newsletter is by Open Source Publishing (osp.kitchen).
See other transmediale research workshop newsletters at https://darc.au.dk/publications/peer-reviewed-newspaper/
Commentary by Geoffrey Rathgeb Aung
Conference Presentations by Geoffrey Rathgeb Aung
This newsletter was made collaboratively as part of the Research Refusal workshop in transmediale 2021 (organized by DARC, Aarhus University and partners), after a few months long exchange of ideas via a listserv. The design/execution of the newsletter is by Open Source Publishing (osp.kitchen).
See other transmediale research workshop newsletters at https://darc.au.dk/publications/peer-reviewed-newspaper/