Introduction: Infrastructure as an Inter-Asian Method

Abstract

The idea for this special issue grew out of a workshop the co-editors organized at the Conference on “InterAsian Connections VI: Hanoi” in December 2018. This special issue conjoins critical infrastructure studies with inter-Asian perspectives in an effort to transcend a techno-nationalist framework of infrastructure as solely an instrument of state power and superpower competition. We are particularly interested in exploring the “deep time” that critical infrastructure studies bring to the examinations of local and transregional connections in Asia and beyond. We argue that the “deep time” of infrastructure is evident in the ways in which previous and existing social relations are mobilized, appropriated, transformed, obscured or occluded with newer layers of infrastructural development. Furthermore, the essays collected here demonstrate self-reflection on the pertinence of the study of infrastructure to the production of knowledge about regions and regionalization in general, foregrounding such questions as “What is gained by adopting an infrastructural approach on ‘Asia’ as a social and cultural imaginary?” and “What does it mean to call something infrastructural?”