The archipelagic imaginary as a way forward

By Clement C. Camposano, Ph.D.

(This special lecture explores the archipelagic imaginary as a way to unsettle and rewrite the geographies of Southeast Asia and the Indo-Pacific. It was delivered by the author during the SOUTHEAST ASIA AND INDO-PACIFIC IMAGINARIES forum hosted by the National Museum of the Philippines – Iloilo, Bonifacio Drive, Iloilo City, Philippines on January 29, 2026. The author is the 11th chancellor of UP Visayas)

Introduction: An inherent tension

“Southeast Asia and Indo-Pacific Imaginaries,” as the conference title goes, is somewhat provocative. There is, in my view, an inherent tension in the phrase. On the one hand, you have the notions of “Southeast Asia” and the “Indo-Pacific,” which are, as geographic demarcations, artifacts of 20th and 21st century geopolitics. As such, they are rooted in specific configurations of politico-military power — that is, in attempts by state actors to map out their long-term strategic interests. In both cases, China looms large. Indeed, the idea of a “free and open Indo-Pacific” is a response to China’s growing economic and military assertiveness.

On the other, the deployment of the term “imaginaries” suggests a reflexive posture that highlights the social construction of reality, which may call into question such dominant formulations. In disclosing and interrogating the assumptions (“imaginaries”) that underlie social practices and institutions, we are able to imagine other possibilities and thus challenge existing power structures. Not surprisingly, your conference note ends by inviting “students, scholars, and researchers to rethink the concept of the Free and Open Indo-Pacific” from the standpoint of the “non-centric geographic space” of this city.

Cultural imperatives

But why would there be a need to explore other imaginaries? Why rethink Southeast Asia and the Indo-Pacific? First, I should point out that, in historical terms, SEA and the Indo-Pacific are recent inventions — the first as an attempt to define the theater of military operations during the Second World War, and the second as a repurposed concept directed at an increasingly assertive China. Born out of the actions of nation-states that are themselves bundles of contradictions, these are in fact veneers that poorly mask the entangled complexities brought about by the colonial and post-colonial histories of the different countries within these geographical demarcations. Here I find it convenient to invoke Caroline Hau’s (2000) notion of “excess” as a way to make more explicit the fragility of such otherwise dominant notions — “heterogenous elements… that inform, but also exceed, … attempts to grasp, intellectually and politically, the complex realities at work…” (6).

To illustrate, allow me to present a couple of divergent examples: What would Southeast Asia, or its multilateral incarnation, ASEAN, mean (or supposed to mean) for the stateless “Halaw” now struggling to survive in Tawi-Tawi, itself an area that has been marginalized within the Filipino nation-state? One may extend this question to include the lived realities of the Sama Dilaut in the maritime border zones of Southeast Asia. What is the place of the Sama Dilaut in the narrative of ASEAN solidarity? In the case of the broad commitment to a “Free and Open Indo-Pacific,” and the alliances that have emerged in the wake of this formal strategy, what does one make of the attempt of Pacific Island leaders to advocate a common Oceanian identity and Pacific self-determination through the concept of a Blue Pacific, which resists attempts to draw the Pacific Islands into intensifying geopolitical power struggles (Louey 2024)?

Beyond the challenge posed by “dissonant” or resistant elements, there is also the more intractable problem of fundamental shifts in the global cultural landscape. The unprecedented and technology-driven linking of markets, economies, and societies, as well as the sustained transnational movement of peoples at ever larger scales, has led to a world constantly in transit (Augé 1995) and, to a significant degree, “deterritorialized.” Appadurai (1996), Gupta and Ferguson (1997), Castells (1996), and Hannerz (1996) have all argued that global flows, networks, and mobilities have disconnected cultural forms and practices on the one hand, and geographical locations on the other. This deterritorialization of culture has profound consequences for settled identities and relationships.

The persistence of place-based identities

Indeed, the world may no longer be imagined as constituted solely — perhaps, even predominantly — by well-demarcated spaces such as nations, countries, or regions. Such a condition is productive of what may be described as new forms of deterritorialized or diasporic belonging, even as it is also conducive to the gradual “[abandonment] of traditional geographic frames for more disjunctive and amorphous renderings that speak to the nonlocalized reproduction of identity” (Camposano 2021, 136). Yet, this process is complex and ambivalent, even contradictory. It cannot be assumed, for instance, that culture can be completely severed from geographical location, and there are processes today suggesting the persistence of locality in globalization or even the rise of digitally mediated localization (Camposano 2021, 136).

Szeman’s (1997) critique of Appadurai is a clear reminder of the persistence of place-based identities in the face of a globalizing world: “In the diasporic public spheres described in Appadurai’s book, why is it that Turkish guest workers continue to watch Turkish films, and that Pakistani cabdrivers in their solitary journeys through the modernist monuments of Chicago’s city center, listen to prayers recorded in another time, another world?” (6). Why indeed? Once, while exploring an area adjacent to Statue Square in Hong Kong, I observed a small group of Filipina migrant workers congregating around a store. The reason was not the items on sale, which are a constant draw, but the widescreen TV strategically placed near the store’s entrance showing the popular Filipino game show “Wowowin.”

The persistence of the local (or, alternately, the localization of the global) revealed by these cases clearly points to countervailing processes to deterritorialization that break down the dualism between the local and the global. Indeed, there is a need to acknowledge the fragility of concepts such as Southeast Asia and the Indo-Pacific, but this imperative need not lead to a totalizing posture that signals the inescapable collapse of these broad territorial frames. As processes of globalization disrupt dominant imaginaries, it might be useful to ask how these very same imaginaries might be appropriated, reconfigured, or even repurposed by communities or groups as they engage in meaning-making and the crafting of new identities. Southeast Asia and the Indo-Pacific need not be tied to the nation-state.

 

Conclusion: Charting the way forward

Imaginaries, as implicitly shared understandings and narratives that allow people to imagine a collective life, are cultural artifacts. As such, they shape and are in turn shaped by people. The dominant state-led demarcations of Southeast Asia and the Indo-Pacific are not carved in stone and may be reimagined, perhaps not by states but by groups, communities, and institutions as these navigate the unsettled (and unsettling) realities of globalization, and other challenges such as those driven by climate change and the unsustainable use of the world’s oceans.

In a context increasingly defined by connectivity and both physical and metaphorical mobility, this must be a distinct possibility. A promising way forward is archipelagic thought, a proposed imaginary that draws from the work of the Caribbean philosopher Édouard Glissant (1990). Archipelagic thinking eschews static and essentialized notions of identity and culture. As a way of understanding the world, it builds on interconnectedness and shared experiences, embracing a model that is not organized around a single center and its implied hierarchies — thus creating the political and epistemological space for perspectives from marginalized areas.

To ground this vision and understand what it can mean for us today, let me take you back to Tawi-Tawi, that beautiful and distant corner of the great Philippine archipelago. Using an archipelagic lens, let us consider the grand political choices before us: Do we continue to maintain our sovereign borders, enforce them ever more strongly and in the process create more statelessness, or do we open them ever more widely with a view to building on centuries of seaborne commerce in order to transform our frontiers into zones of intensive cultural and economic exchange?

This is not distant political fantasy. In fact, this has all happened before — that is, before the advent of European colonialism and the consequent carving out of Southeast Asia into sovereign nation-states. Seaborne trade created the Sri Vijayan trading system, the great Malacca entrepôt, and the Sultanate of Sulu. We know this from the historical record. Just as important, and perhaps to close this extended argument, I must emphasize that the means for realizing this vision are well within our reach. We need only to end our fixation with borders.