Francis Allard

The international conference, “Contact Zones and Colonialism in China’s South,” will encourage interdisciplinary discussions from the fields of history, linguistics, and archaeology concerning this region. We will focus discussion around questions of colonialism in early South China and mainland Southeast Asia: to what extent were cross-cultural and cross-ethnic contacts characterized by colonial types of power relations? To what extent was migration into the region a form of settler colonialism? And was there nonetheless a colonial dynamic among disparate peoples and in local communities of the South when cross-cultural interactions were commercial or agricultural, and not directly supported by an imperial government?