Danny Butt, Kurniawan Adi Saputro (ed.) - Postnational Art Histories: Rebordering the Archipelago: Asia-Pacific Exchanges

The late Tongan scholar Epeli Hau‘ofa wrote of the Pacific Ocean as a ‘Sea of Islands.’ Rather than imagining a scattering of small, defined island states, he sketched a vast oceanic continent characterized by movement, exchange and cultural flow. It’s an idea that permeates Rebordering the Archipelago: Asia-Pacific Exchanges, the second book in the Postnational Art Histories series. Growing out of the symposium of the same name – convened by the Asia Pacific Artistic Research Network (APARN) in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic – this collection of texts and images weaves an interconnected dialogue across the breadth of art practices, knowledges, research and scholarly work traversing the Asia-Pacific. Eschewing the definitive and conclusive, the essays, artworks and broad-ranging discussions that populate this book are points of embarkation. The notion of ‘rebordering’, in this sense, is inherently generative and postnational in its bearings. While only scratching the surface of the Asia-Pacific’s activity, Rebordering the Archipelago reflects the diversity of practices and voices that resonate throughout the region. Refusing to conform to the Western academic paradigm and its flat global world of knowledge, this is a book that foregrounds both intergenerational knowledges from the past and new modes of listening, reading, sharing and resistance