MCLC: Verge--cfp reminder

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Grace Hui-chuan Wu <gracewu at psu.edu>
Subject: Verge--cfp reminder
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Call for Papers
 
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 post-national 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.

 
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.  Our
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.  

 
Submission deadline: December 1, 2013

 
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




Grace Hui-chuan Wu
gracewu at psu.edu
Department of Comparative Literature
The Pennsylvania State University
433 Burrowes Building
University Park, PA 16802