In Remoteness and Modernity (2015), anthropologist Shafqat Hussain describes remoteness as a “social-spatial concept” primarily tied to places identified as “marginal areas, frontiers, borderlands, and wilderness” (2015, 4). Peoples inhabiting these places, writes Hussain, “stand in contrast to the core cultural, economic, and political aspects of a society,” and are by consequence marked by “multiple constructions of the ‘other,’ each invested with different meaning” (2015, 4). In Remoteness Reconsidered (2021), Arctic University of Norway international relations scholar Christopher Rossi identifies remoteness as both temporal and geographic, holding a central place in philosophy, law, international relations, and historiography. Rossi writes,

Remoteness is the unredeemable, often unavoidable element of interaction. […] The distance between person and place, or subject and object, affects the image-building process of international relations and the construction of its geography and spatial order. Remoteness casts shadows over problems of historiography, or how scholars contextualize, sequence, and transmit readings of the past. (2021, 26)

Rossi’s assessment treats remoteness less as a concept identifiable with certain decentralized zones, and more as a distanced relation that obscures images and muddles accounts and events.

Studies in Remoteness systematically investigates what it means to historicize these distanced relations. The project dedicates needed research attention precisely to the “shadows” Rossi describes, which complexify context[6] and transmission, endeavouring to address the interlapping aesthetic, political, and cultural contours of inaccessibility that shape coloniality, modernity, and globalization’s distanced relations. Theorizing modernity by turning to its so-called outskirts, the project inquires sensoria of absence, distance, and neglect that have blossomed along the frontiers of colonial empires and sedimented among the margins of modern infrastructures of “global connectivity”. Studies in Remoteness thus examines places, peoples, practices, and knowledges cast as arcane or irrelevant within dominant historical narratives. The project is formulated around the initial hypothesis that, both despite and because of their perceived remoteness, inaccessible peoples, places, and ideas – often romanticized as harbours of the “mysterious” and “unknown” – have powerfully influenced and motivated global knowledge production and aesthetic experimentation.    

Continue to II. Social imaginaries and the history of aesthetics