Talk by Guangtian Ha (Religion, Haverford College)

This talk draws from a book manuscript of the same title under preparation for Columbia University Press. Weaving together sources in classical Arabic, Persian, Chinese, and Bahasa Indonesia/Malay, and combining an array of methodologies from historiography to literary criticism to ethnography, From Baghdād to Baghpūr aims to excavate or reimagine a premodern global – global as in across the Indian Ocean, tying East Africa, Arabia and Persia to South, Southeast and East Asia (the problematic nature of these geographical terms is not lost on the present author) – history where multiple regimes of racialization overlap and heterogeneous conceptions of Blackness intersect. The majority of the sources the book draws on are from late antique and medieval times – if one is to adopt, not without misgivings, European historiographical terms for periodisation. By examining entangled histories and listening to entwined tongues, From Baghdād to Baghpūr asks if there could be a space where an inchoate premodern history is possible of a certain “Black Pacific” that predates modernity yet lays the ideational, if not also the political and economic, foundation for the rise of the Black Atlantic in later times. In this presentation, I will first lay out the general framework of the book, clarify a few key concepts whose theoretical articulations remain (constructively) disputed within Asian studies and medieval studies, and offer several concrete examples to demonstrate the kinds of sources I utilize for the project and the manner whereby I approach them. I aim less to draw definitive conclusions than to open up new avenues of research and new spaces for alternative imaginations.