Mainland Southeast Asia — Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar — has long been made and remade by commodity regimes: teak and tin under colonial extraction; rice, rubber, and opium across shifting imperial and Cold War orders; and today durian, hydropower, cassava, tourism, and rare minerals. Yet the region remains peripheral to both world-literary studies and the environmental humanities, which continue to privilege archipelagic and Atlantic plantation geographies. This seminar asks how the region's literatures, cinemas, and other cultural texts register, resist, and reimagine the commodity frontiers that traverse it.

We welcome comparative work from a broad range of approaches: world-ecology, the Capitalocene, and Plantationocene debates, certainly, but equally postcolonial and decolonial ecocriticism; multispecies and more-than-human studies; feminist political ecology; inter-Asia, borderlands, and highland (Zomia) scholarship; memory and trauma studies; translation and circulation studies; and readings grounded in Buddhist, animist, and other vernacular cosmologies. 

Key questions we ask include:

• How do regional genres and modes mediate regimes of extraction and exchange?
• What aesthetics emerge where smallholder lifeworlds meet agro-industrial monoculture, special economic zones, logistical corridors, and the dammed and dredged waters of the Mekong basin, from upstream hydropower to the salinizing delta?
• How do spirits, merit, and more-than-human agencies inhabit commodity landscapes?
• How do vernacular-language texts and screen cultures complicate Anglophone-centered accounts of "world" literature?

Topics may include: 

• Commodity frontiers in literature and media
• Extraction, infrastructure, and riverine/deltaic ecologies, including the Mekong and its delta
• Labor, migration, and borderland economies
• Religious and cosmological imaginaries of land, water, and wealth
• Multispecies and more-than-human relations
• Memory, haunting, and ecological loss
• Translation and the circulation of Mainland Southeast Asian texts