Of Copula, Quodlibets, and Liminal Spaces: Contingent Encounters of East Asian Political Thought and International Relations

International Relations experiences a rising interest in political thought beyond its putative Western confinements and particularly East Asian political thought attracts IR-scholars. By aiming to open up spaces to imagine alternative political orders, many of these contributions embark to uncover the multitude and diversity of East Asian thought, as they argue that this has been and is still being silenced through Western knowledge-impositions and the Eurocentric worldview the discipline is perpetuating. This panel aims to transcend the dichotomies, path-dependencies, and incommensurabilities of this kind of thinking by stressing a lacuna in it: contingent intellectual encounters have been an important stimulus for 19th and 20th century East Asian scholars to theorize about questions of subjectivity, community, and modernity and it enabled them to provide distinctive contributions. As these encounters were multi-dimensional, East Asia is not conceptualized logo-centrically, but it is a vehicle to identify and recapture the amorphous knowledge-transfer. Aiming to open up new spaces of political imagination finds, therefore, less satisfaction in an enclosed, essentialist investigation, but in reconsidering the moments of becoming by focusing on copula, quodlibets, and liminal spaces that these encounters generated which enabled East Asian scholars to rethink the political constellations of their time.

This panel proposal is to be submitted for the ISA convention taking place in February 2015 in New Orleans. If you are interested in contributing to this panel, please contact with your paper-abstract (max. 200 words) by 7th May 2014 the latest to Felix Roesch.

◇お問い合せ先：

Atsuko Watanabe:

Felix Roesch:

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