Global Borderlands Project
Global Borderlands is a project meant to coordinate Open Society Universities Network research and teaching expertise on borderland areas and those indeterminate spaces in which local and more distinctly colonial and/or global traditions have collided. The project will examine borderlands broadly, both in the sense of contact zones in which local actors incorporate or alter distinctly colonial heritages, lose hold of their own traditions, or creatively reinvent them and in the sense of individuals or traditions that straddle or exist at the interstices, of distinct cultural worlds.
Global Borderlands is a deeply humanistic endeavor and grounded in the notion that literature and history have something to tell us about being “off-center among scattered traditions.” It is concerned with the messiness of being human – with the languages and heritages that are tangled together in human communities and traditions – and with the borders, figurative and literal, that apportion this complexity into more limiting categories.
Central Asian studies has been walled off in many ways from the theoretical concerns and interests that shape other disciplines. This project will help break down these walls by bringing AUCA scholars into contact with OSUN faculty specializing in Latin America, the ancient Mediterranean, and Africa, among others. Scholars from Princeton, CEU, and the Bard Graduate Center have committed to the project, including Jeremy Adelman, a specialist in the Atlantic world who also heads Princeton’s Global History Lab.
The project will revolve around two workshops to be held in Bishkek in late spring or early summer of 2022 and 2024, with the meetings providing a forum to workshop papers or coordinate “special issue” submissions and to engage faculty in outlining the skeletal structure of a borderlands concentration.
CASI plans to offer a summer course at CEU in 2023 as part of the project. Entitled “borderland archaeologies,” it will examine archaeological efforts to trace the fluidity and permeability of traditions in the Eurasian past in addition to exploring present efforts to patch together heritages from disparate material remnants and artifacts in Eurasia.
