How can intellectual historians navigate and chart the seas and oceans? Exemplified by the rise of the Indo-Pacific vision, oceanic spaces have recently gained political prominence. Simultaneously, maritime and oceanic historiography has come into the limelight, as seen in David Armitage et al eds., Oceanic Histories (Cambridge UP, 2018), and Paul D’Arcy et al eds., The Cambridge History of the Pacific Ocean in Two Volumes (Cambridge UP, 2023). Intellectual history, however, largely lags behind this contemporary wave. How can it be updated, expanded or transformed if we consider the oceanic dimension seriously? The research project “A Global Intellectual History of the Pacific,” based at the Institute for Advanced Global Studies, the University of Tokyo, has explored these questions with a particular focus on the Pacific Ocean.

The world’s largest ocean with countless small islands, the Pacific is a geo-cultural entity that has drawn an assembly of distinctive visions, interpretations, projects and representations. Historically marked by the overlappings of empires, it has been a sited globality of layered political imaginaries, stemming from the rim, the antipodal and the local. At one pole, the Pacific has been subjected to hierarchic cartographies, such as ‘Japanese lake’ and ‘Anglo-Francophone lake.’ At the other pole, counter-hegemonic visions from various Pacific islands have challenged the existing views and have reconstructed the Pacific. In short, the Pacific Ocean can be seen as a global crucible of variegated visions, interpretations and projects derived from different corners of the planet. Construals of this ocean have been constantly reassessed and contested, but also blended and hybridized in ways leading to new meanings of it.

In this workshop, organized under the auspices of the ANU-UTokyo Strategic Partnership and with the support of the Institute of Humanities, Human and Social Sciences, Ritsumeikan University, some members of the above research project present their ongoing papers that shed light on aspects of such intellectual entanglements about the Pacific.

■Working Booklet  ➡　click here

■Program  ➡　click here

■Synopsis ➡　click here

■Bio  ➡　click here