JOURNAL
ANNOUNCEMENT
VERGE: Studies in Global Asias
Senior Editors, Tina Chen and Eric Hayot
Verge: Studies in Global
Asias is a new journal that includes scholarship from
scholars in both Asian and Asian American Studies. These two fields have
traditionally defined themselves in opposition to one another, with the former
focused on an area-studies, nationally and politically oriented approach, and
the latter emphasizing epistemological categories,
including ethnicity and citizenship, that drew mainly on the history of the
United States. The past decade however has seen a series of rapprochements
in which, for instance, categories “belonging”to Asian American Studies
(ethnicity, race, diaspora) have been applied with increasing success to
studies of Asia. For example Asian Studies has responded to the postnational
turn in the humanities and social sciences by becoming increasingly open to
rethinking its national and regional insularities, and to work that pushes,
often literally, on the boundaries of Asia as both a place and a concept. At
the same time, Asian American Studies has become increasingly aware of the
ongoing importance of Asia to the Asian American experience, and thus more open
to work that is transnational or multilingual,
as well as to forms of scholarship that challenge the US-centrism of concepts
governing the Asian diaspora.
Verge showcases scholarship on “Asian” topics from
across the humanities and humanistic social sciences, while recognizing that
the changing scope of “Asia” as a concept and method is today an object of
vital critical concern. Deeply transnational and transhistorical in scope, Verge
emphasizes thematic and conceptual links among the disciplines and
regional/area studies formations that address Asia in a variety of particularist
(national, subnational, individual) and generalist (national, regional, global)
modes Responding to the ways in which large-scale social, cultural, and
economic concepts like the world, the globe, or the universal (not to mention
East Asian cousins like tianxia or datong) are reshaping the ways
we think about the present, the past and the future, the journal publishes
scholarship that occupies and enlarges the proximities among disciplinary and
historical fields, from the ancient to the modern periods. The journal
emphasizes multidisciplinary engagement—a crossing and dialogue of the
disciplines that does not erase disciplinary differences, but uses them to make
possible new conversations and new models of critical thought.
For more information, please
see our website:
Queries and Submissions
should be sent to: verge@psu.edu
Issue 1: OPEN ISSUE
The history of
scholarship on Asian America, when juxtaposed with the fields of Asian Studies,
reminds us how much nations, national movements, and other forms of national
development continue to exert powerful effects on the world in which we live.
Such movements also remind us of the importance of inter-nationalism, of
the kinds of networks that can spring up between states and which can work to
disrupt the smooth passage of the planet into a utopian post-national future.
The growing interest in the global and the transnational across disciplines
thus brings the various Asia-oriented fields and disciplines—history and
literature, Asia and Asian America, East and South, modern and premodern—closer
together. This inaugural issue seeks to feature work that illustrates the
diverse engagements across disciplines (literature, history, sociology, art
history, political science, geography) and fields (Asian Studies and Asian
American Studies) that are possible once we begin thinking about the possible
convergences and divergences such divisions have traditionally represented.
We welcome a range of perspectives; featured contributors include Ien
Ang, Dean Chan, Alexandra Chang, Catherine Ceniza Choy, Magnus Fiskejo, Pika
Ghosh, Evelyn Hu-Dehart, Yunte Huang, Suk-young Kim, Joachim Kurtz, Meera Lee,
Wei Li, Colleen Lye, Sucheta Mazumdar, Tak-wing Ngo, Haun Saussy, David
Palumbo-Liu, Sheldon Pollack, Shuh-mei Shih, Eleanor Ty, and Jeffrey
Wasserstrom.
Submission deadline:
December 1, 2013
Issue 2: ASIAN EMPIRES
& IMPERIALISM (edited by On-cho Ng and Erica Brindley)
The
nature of Asian empires in the past, as well as the definition of imperialism
in contemporary times, is a topic of ongoing discussion among scholars from a
wide range of fields. In this special issue of Verge, we will explore a cluster of issues concerning the mechanics
and influence of empires, imperial authority, and imperial types of influence
over indigenous cultures and frontiers in Asia, as well as their diasporas
abroad and in the USA. We invite submissions that address one or some of the
following questions: How did various imperial efforts interact with local
concerns to shape the history of cross-cultural interactions in this region?
How did imperial regimes propose to solve the issue of a multi-ethnic empire?
What were the roles of specific geographic and economic spheres in Asia (such
as those of nomadic, agricultural, maritime, high altitude or lowland, and
far-flung/diasporic cultures) in contributing to the distinctive quality of
certain empires? How do certain characteristics of imperial administration and
control in Asia compare to those of imperial states in other regions of the
world? In addition to questions concerning the long history of Asian
imperialism and comparisons with other empires, we also solicit submissions
that speak to questions concerning contemporary Asian diasporas and their
reactions to various forms of imperialism in the modern age. Questions might
address such topics as “Yellow Peril” fears about Asian cultural imperialism;
Japanese internment camps as a US response to Japanese imperial expansion in
the Pacific; the Tibetan diaspora in South Asia and the Americas as a reaction
to contemporary Chinese imperialism; Vietnamese responses to French, Chinese,
or American imperialisms, and the treatment of Japanese-Americans in Hawaii in
the aftermath of Pearl Harbor.
Submission
deadline: April 1, 2014
Issue 3: COLLECTING (edited by Jonathan
Abel and Charlotte Eubanks)
As a construct and
product of powerful institutions from empires, to nation-states, museums, to
universities, Asia has long been formulated at the level of the collection.
Whether through royal court poetry compilations, colonial treasure
hunters, art historians, bric a brac shop keepers, or librarians of rare archives,
the role of collecting and classification has been deeply connected not only to
definitions of what counts as Asia and who can be considered Asian, but also to
how Asia continues to be configured and re-configured today.
With this in mind, this special
issue of Verge seeks to collect papers on the history, finance,
psychology, politics and aesthetics of collecting Asia in Asia and beyond.
This collection hopes not only to bring into relief how “Asia” has been
created but also to promote new definitions of Asia. What, for instance, are
the historical implications of government-sponsored poetry anthologies in
Mughal India, Heian-era Japan, or 20th century North Korea? What do the
contents of treasure-houses -- at Angkor Wat, Yasukuni Shrine, or Vishwanath --
tell us about evolving concepts of art and of the elasticity of cultural and
national contours? When did Japan become a geographical base for the collection
of Asia? Who collects Chinese books? How has Indian art been defined by
curatorial practices? Why did South Korea begin to collect oral histories
in the 1990s? What politics lie behind the exhibition of mainland Chinese
posters in Taiwan? How much money do cultural foundations spend on
maintaining collections? Where are the limits of Asian collections in
geographical and diasporic terms? How do constructions of these
collections impact our views of the collective, whether of Tibetan exiles in
Dharamsala, Japanese internment camps in Indonesia, global Chinatowns, or
adherents of new Asian religions in the Americas and former Soviet Republics?
This issue is interested
in the various cultures of collecting Asia and collecting Asians, in the many
politics of collecting, in the odd financial restrictions on collectors, in the
psychology of collecting, in the anthropology of how communities form around
collected objects, and in the sociology around collective histories.
Submission deadline:
November 15, 2014
Issue 4: ASIAN
URBANISMS AND URBANIZATIONS
(edited by Madhuri Desai and Shuang Shen)
In the contemporary age
of globalization, the city has gained new importance and attention as a center
of information industry, a node of transnational and translocal networks, and a
significant site of capital, labor migration and culture (Saskia Sassen, Manuel
Castells and David Harvey). While this renewed interest in the city both
perpetuates and revises theories of the city as a metaphor of modernity (Walter
Benjamin, Georg Simmel), it also opens up questions regarding the uniqueness
and relevance of earlier cities and their experience of urbanization. When we
move us away from Eurocentric understandings of modernity and time, it becomes
increasingly possible to study non-European urbanisms in the past and at
present with theoretical rigor and historical specificity. For this special
issue, we invite submissions (around 8000 words) that explore urbanism as a
site of comparison and connection among various Asian locales and beyond. We
are interested in not just studies of Asian cities and their urban experience
but also how “Asia” has been imagined both historically and contemporaneously,
through urbanism and urbanization, and how “Asia” as a term of travel is
registered in the urban space. This special issue will draw attention to the
following questions: As cities become increasingly connected and similar to
each other, how do they express their distinct identities as well as articulate
their unique histories? Besides circulation, movement, and networks that have
been much emphasized in contemporary studies of the city, how do borders,
checkpoints, and passwords function in urban contexts? How does the city
articulate connections between the local, the national, and the transnational?
How does the Asian experience of urbanization and ideas surrounding Asian
urbanism revise, rethink, and in some cases revive Asia’s colonial past? What
does the Western perspective on some Asian cities as unprecedented and
futuristic tells us about the imagination of Asia in the global context? How do
migrant and ethnic communities negotiate with and redefine the public space of
the city? How is the urban public shared or fragmented by co-existing ethnic
and religious communities? How is the rising cosmopolitanism of these cities
challenged through migration and sharply defined ethnic and religious
identities? We invite submissions that address these questions within the
context of Early modern, colonial and contemporary urbanisms and urbanizations.
