A roundtable in Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, titled ‘Global Intellectual History beyond Eurocentric Lenses: Connected Political Vocabularies across South and Southeast Asia, ca. 1800-2018’. The event is organized as part of the event series ‘Global Intellectual History as Political and Ethical Critique’ in LMU Munich, and is supported by the Bachelor of Arts Program in Language and Culture (BALAC), Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok. The roundtable will feature presentations and structured discussions – involving Milinda Banerjee (Munich/Kolkata), Simon Cubelic (Heidelberg), Helena Holzberger (Munich), Paulus Kaufmann (Zurich), Jowita Kramer (Munich), and David Malitz (Bangkok) – as well as open question and answer sessions.
~ * ~
In recent years, global intellectual history has emerged as one of the most dynamic academic fields, taking the study of political thought beyond bounded area studies concerns. Simultaneously, the charge of Eurocentrism has occasionally been levelled against the field. This roundtable intervenes within these debates by going beyond conventional frames of Europe-to-non-Europe conceptual diffusion and translation, and by centring, instead, vocabularies of Asian origin which migrated between South and Southeast Asia. By focusing on actors, conjunctures, and itineraries traversing India, Nepal, Thailand, Bali, Java, and beyond, this roundtable foregrounds trans-Asian intellectual fords and their role in the emergence of modern globalized political thought, around issues of sovereignty, labour and political economy, legal theology, colonialism and decolonization, ‘humanity’, and more.