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By Tim Oakes, Interim Faculty Director, Center for Asian Studies

On April 21^st, CAS hosted the annual Asia Symposium, focusing on this year’s theme of “Asia, Empire, Social Justice: Home & Abroad.” The symposium featured roundtable discussion panels on Asian indigeneities and environmental justice in Asia, and a keynote speech by Professor Sunil Amrith of Yale University. Panelists included CU graduate students as well as faculty from across campus and the Front Range. Rather than offering research presentations, panelists discussed a series of questions posed by moderators Natalie Avalos (Ethnic Studies) and Emily Yeh (Geography). Program and participant details can be found here.

During the first panel on indigeneity, panelists confronted the fraught tension between indigenous identity as both a term invented by colonialism and a source of anti-colonial and nationalist struggle. Meanwhile, for some marginalized groups in Asia – such as the Rohingya – indigeneity is not a useful or meaningful concept, or is wielded from a privileged position of oppression. Thus, the panel helped untangle the historical and geographical complexities of the term, suggesting that even though indigenous movements have a transnational aspect to them, the concept seldom translates easily from one local context to the next. The diversity of Asian places represented in the panel – Northeast India, Myanmar, Tibet, and Gaza – allowed for these place-based complexities and contradictions to emerge in the discussion.

After a lunch break, the second panel discussed issues of environmental justice in Asia, with particular attention to the ways climate change produces new vulnerabilities, injustices, and complicated politics across Asia. Topics covered included toxic marine spills in Vietnam, large scale dispossession and ground water depletion in India that results from the construction of massive solar farms which are otherwise heralded for combating climate change, local impacts of carbon capture and storage technologies in China, water treatment infrastructures in Taiwan, and the impacts of increased mining operations on nomadic herding communities in Mongolia. Throughout these discussions a key theme emerged regarding how ‘green’ development often legitimizes oppressive environmental practices for some of the most vulnerable populations in Asia. But an additional theme was clearly one of contradiction, as panelists grappled with questions concerning the outsourcing of hazardous waste and ‘waste imperialism,’ of pollution as a kind of neocolonialism, and of the local goals of environmental justice running up against powerful forces promoting green energy development at larger scales.

Professor Amrith’s keynote – “Life, Moving: Notes from a Small Island” – explored the broad theme of historical and contemporary redistributions of life on earth. He approached this from the case-study of Singapore, a place wealthy enough to insulate itself from its environment, for example through air conditioning or land reclamation. Amrith brought an historian’s perspective by starting his talk with a reference to the Burmese Banyan in the Singapore Botanical Gardens, a kind of colonial refugee – an ‘orphan of empire’ – removed from its native habitat in the 19^th Century by the British and now one of the Garden’s signature specimens. The Gardens, Amrith pointed out, were devoted to the development of tropical economic crops for the British Empire, illustrating the fundamental role of colonialism in the redistribution of life on earth. This theme has continued into present day Singapore, as the island-state’s demand for sand for land reclamation has caused massive redistributions of life in the Mekong River – in Vietnam and Laos – where much of the sand is now dredged for export. While Singapore has excelled at developing technologies of insulation (from a hot climate, or from potential sea level rise) it has been unable to escape the seasonal haze that chokes its spectacular skyline from burning plantations in Indonesia. These plantations, of course, are the legacies of colonialism’s redistribution of life and the Garden’s role in cultivating botanical ‘orphans of empire’ for economic gain. Thus, despite its various insulations from nature, Singapore remains part of nature as well.

Overall, the symposium drew clear connections between Asia and our worlds closer to home, connections that have developed through technology, legacies of imperial ambition, climate change, and social activism. If there was one key takeaway from the symposium as a whole it was perhaps this: not only does Asia provide a valuable comparative lens through which to gain better perspective on the seemingly ‘universal’ concerns of environmental justice and indigenous rights, but – more importantly – exploring these topics is Asia necessitates that we appreciate the webs of interaction and connection that make it impossible to view our lives ‘over here’ as separate from and unrelated to lives in Asia.