MCLC: Verge new timelines

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: grace wu <gracewu at psu.edu>
Subject: Verge new timelines
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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:
http://www.upress.umn.edu/journal-division
 
Queries and Submissions should be sent to: verge at 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 Dean Chan, Alexandra Chang, Catherine Asher,
Catherine Ceniza Choy, Magnus Fiskesjö, Pamela Kyle Crossley, Evelyn
Hu-Dehart, Stephanie DeBoer, Martin Svensson Ekstrom, Pika Ghosh,
Yunte Huang, Suk-young Kim, Joachim Kurtz, Meera Lee, Wei Li, Colleen
Lye,Tak-wing Ngo, Haun Saussy, David Palumbo Liu, Sheldon Pollack, Eleanor
Ty, and Jeffrey Wasserstrom.

 
Submission deadline: February 1, 2014
 
 

Issue 2: 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:  August 1, 2014

 
 
Issue 3: 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.
 

Deadline: April 1, 2015


Issue 4:
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: August 1, 2015