Coastlines in Motion: A Sedimentary Rethinking of Southeast Asia
Abstract
National borders have typically defined Southeast Asia, a place long known for its extreme heterogeneity and historical global linkages. These presumably stable borders and their attendant coastlines fail to analytically capture the multispecies and material entanglements of history, policy, and national developmentalism currently reshaping landscapes within the region itself. The Anthropocene urges us to reconceptualize the region in a way that attends to critical ecological concerns for which the once fixed, geo-militarized formation of the region is proving irrelevant. At the core of our analysis are Southeast Asian coastlines and the sediments that comprise, create, and change them. In this collaboratively written paper, the authors provide a “sedimentary rethinking” of Southeast Asia. Sediments are actively remaking coastal zones in the region, shifting biotic and microscopic borders with often dangerous consequences. Over four micro-case studies, the writers offer snapshots of nickel mining and land reclamation in South Sulawesi, a rubble causeway across the Johor Straits, sediment isolation in Timor, and vertical sediment compaction on Jakartan coasts. Brought together, they offer new material and a scale of analysis that demonstrate the flimsy nature of colonial-era and state-based projects and the ongoing emergence of “area” under the disastrous accelerant of the Anthropocene.
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