Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter

Boarding Gate C10, Suvarnabhumi Airport: midnight approaches at the end of the concourse, beyond the malls and gates collecting passengers for Singapore and Hong Kong. A long line of young Indian men wait to weigh their hand luggage before boarding the Kolkata flight. These are kuruvis, low-level ‘hand-carriers’ employed by shadowy bosses to transport consumer goods like electronics and garments between Thailand and India. Not surprisingly their pre-weighed luggage comes in exactly at the maximum weight allowance. But it is also carefully apportioned according to value, each carrier transporting just enough to stay under the Rs 5 Lakh limit that attracts prosecution for smuggling electronic goods into India. When the laden flight docks in Kolkata, the baggage hall is resplendent with commodities: plasma televisions, hi-fi systems, musical keyboards, not to mention the iPods, mobile phones, digital cameras and computer circuit boards stowed in makeshift bundles of shabby cloth. This is a full-scale logistical operation – a single link in the many networks of formal and informal labour that distribute consumer goods manufactured in China to markets around the globe.

From Flows of Culture to the Circuits of Logistics: Borders, Regions, Labour in Transit

Brett Neilson, Ned Rossiter and Soenke Zehle

When jurisdiction can no longer be aligned with territory and governance does not necessarily assume liberalism, there is a need to rethink the relations between labour, mobility and space. Bringing together researchers from different parts of the world to discuss and pursue various paths of investigation and collaboration, the Shanghai Transit Labour Research Platform moved between online and offline worlds. Sometimes sequestered in seminar spaces and at other times negotiating the city and the regulatory environment, the participants drifted toward a collective enunciation. We could say this was about the production of new kinds of labouring subjectivities that build connections between domains which are at once becoming more irreconcilable and more indistinct: life and work, public and private, political and economic, natural and cultural.

Images by Angela Melitopoulos

Borders are no longer only geographical lines or filters between states. Rather than existing solely at territory's edge, they have emerged as mobile control technologies strung across the world's infrastructures, circuits, cities and bodies. In China one of the most important borders is that between the urban and the rural. The movement of people between these spaces is deeply shaping Chinese society and its interactions with the state. Events such as the Shanghai Expo 2010 offer a hypermodern and green vision of the city. The migrant villages that have sprung up on the fringes of China's metropolises present a very different image: bleak, polluted and poor. These villages are sites of multiple borders, where the subjectivity of migrants is produced at the interface with governmental, nongovernmental and commercial actors.

Paper delivered at Flying University of the Transnational Humanities, Reseach Centre for Comparative History and Culture, Hanyang University, Seoul, June 2010.

What's Wrong with the Alternative Modernities Thesis

Critical accounts of regionalism always seem to end up as debates about modernity. Defined sometimes in terms of time and at others in terms of social or political form, modernity is perhaps too general a concept. Without doubt it has enabling effects which move the discussion of regionalism beyond the polarising bind of universalism and particularism. Yet it can also inhibit discussion by swinging the debate away from historical detail and toward schematic simplifications of interactions between civilizations or cultures. It is by now widely recognised that modernity is a global phenomenon and not merely the result of the upheavals, industrialisation, revolutions and enlightenments that began to occur in Europe over five centuries ago. At the very least there is acceptance that modernity must reckon with the history of European colonialism and that the two way traffic between metropolis and colony was central to its emergence. More forcefully than this, the thesis of alternative or multiple modernities posits a plurality of modernities throughout the world. Each arises under different circumstances and interacts with the others, but nonetheless displays its own internal contradictions.  It is to this thesis that I wish to turn my attention today.