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Verge: Studies in Global Asias

Editorial Collective and Advisory Board

 

 

Editor

Tina Chen

 

Associate Editor

Charlotte Eubanks

 

Managing Editor

Yi-Ting Chang

 

Editorial Assistant

Eunice Lim

 

 

PSU Editorial Collective

Jessamyn Abel, Asian Studies

Jonathan E. Abel, Comparative Literature and Asian Studies

Kathlene Baldanza, History and Asian Studies

Jessica Vantine Birkenholtz, Asian Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Prakash Kumar, History and Asian Studies

Jooyeon Rhee, Asian Studies and Comparative Literature

Chang Tan, Art History and Asian Studies

Nicolai Volland, Asian Studies and Comparative Literature

Ran Zwigenberg, Asian Studies, History, and Jewish Studies

 

 

Advisory Board

 

Cemil Aydin (2021), History, University of North Carolina 

Ian Baird (2021), Geography, University of Wisconsin-Madison 

Brian Bernards (2022), East Asian Languages and Cultures and Comparative Literature, USC 

Nicole Boivin (2023)—Archeology, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History

Erin Aeran Chung (2020), Political Science and East Asian Studies, Johns Hopkins University 

Lan Duong (2023), Cinema & Media Studies, USC

Patrick Eisenlohr (2023), Anthropology, University of Göttingen

Paize Keulemans (2022), East Asian Studies, Princeton University

Namiko Kunimoto (2023), History of Art, Ohio State University

Jerry Won Lee (2023), English, Anthropology, Comparative Literature, East Asian Studies, and Asian American Studies, University of California-Irvine

Lori Meeks (2021), Religion and East Asian Languages and Cultures, USC

Josephine Nock-Hee Park (2021), English and Asian American Studies, University of Pennsylvania

Michael J. Pettid (2022), Premodern Korean Studies, Binghamton University

Zelideth Maria Rivas (2023), Japanese, Marshall University

Cathy Schlund-Vials (2021), English and Asian/Asian American Studies, University of Connecticut, Storrs

Sarita Echavez See (2023), Media and Cultural Studies, University of California-Riverside

We Jung Yi (2021), Asian Studies, Vanderbilt University

 

SUBMISSIONS

 

Essays (between 6,000-10,000 words) should be prepared according to the author-date + bibliography format of the Chicago Manual of Style. See section 2.38 of the University of Minnesota Press style guide or chapter 15 of the Chicago Manual of Style Online for additional formatting information.

Authors' names should not appear on manuscripts; instead, please include a separate document with the author's name and address and the title of the article with your electronic submission. Authors should not refer to themselves in the first person in the submitted text or notes if such references would identify them; any necessary references to the author's previous work, for example, should be in the third person.

Submissions should include anonymized essay, abstract (125 words), and a separate document containing author’s name, institutional affiliation, and contact information (both email and mailing address).

 

Queries and submissions should be sent to: verge@psu.edu

 

CALL FOR PAPERS

 

Issue 8.1

INDIAN OCEAN STUDIES, AFRO-ASIAN AFFINITIES

Edited by Emmanuel Bruno Jean-Francois (Penn State) and Neelima Jeychandran (Penn State)

 

While the longue durée history of the Indian Ocean involves the constant movement of peoples, tracing such migration has often undervalued the dynamic commercial, cultural, and religious exchanges between Asia and Africa over extended historical periods. Indeed, many sites of the Indian Ocean World (including coastal belts and their hinterlands and myriad islands) evidence the cross-pollination and transformation of cultural performances, modes of being, and ways of knowing—many of which have traditionally been assigned to specific “source” cultures or geographies. Expressions of transoceanic consciousness—visible through hybrid architectural structures, material cultures, cuisines, sacred geographies, literatures, music, and linguistic traditions—point to the prevalence, within the oceanic scape, of fluid localities and practices. These localities are constantly redefined by unscripted processes and transversal ontologies that transfigure subjects, spaces, cultures, and ecosystems by disrupting the fixity of established cartographies and ascribed identities. In Indian Ocean studies, while much attention has been devoted to studying mobilities, commercial and kinship networks, and religious exchanges, artistic transactions, shared affinities, and transcultural expressions remain under-researched.

 

This issue of Verge thus invites original essays that pay special attention to alternative narratives, uncharted networks, and invisible cartographies of the Indian Ocean World that call for a re-assessment of localities, idioms, and scapes. Building on new scholarly frameworks—such as Indian Ocean Studies, Afro-Asian Studies, and theories of the Global South—that have expanded the perspectives through which we define and theorize relations beyond the inherent tension of postcolonial studies, we solicit work that maps the dissemination of indigenous knowledge and related practices between Afro-Asian geographies to understand how older frameworks of knowing generate eclectic projections and renderings about Africa in Asia and vice versa. We are particularly interested in considering how vernacular or so-called local expressions and ontological narratives of mobilities foreground complex histories of exchange that construct and disseminate the idea of transcultural consciousness differently. Engaging with the arts, literatures, performances, popular cultures, diasporic narratives, new media, and cinema from both Asia and Africa via the transoceanic circuit of the Indian Ocean, we ask: How do communities construct and reinvent the Indian Ocean as a space of transcultural assemblage? How do creative and expressive cultures reactivate or present occluded (his)stories of shared affinities, ontologies, and knowledge? Topics of interest may include (but are not restricted to): littoral imaginings, navigating languages, performative historiographies, and artistic and bodily practices.

 

Submission Deadline:

November 1, 2020

Issue 8.2

Visualizing Asias: Interventions in Asian and Asian Diasporic Art

Edited by Laura Kina (DePaul University) and Chang Tan (Penn State)

 

How does Asian and Asian diasporic art position itself in global, local, and transnational contexts in a post-identity-politics age when the concept of “Asian-ness” has been thoroughly deconstructed? How are these newly carved positions reflected in Asian and Asian diasporic art exhibitions, archives, and collecting? How do art practices, and the academic discipline of art history, allow us to visualize “Asias” anew as a multitude brought together by what individuals choose to do, instead of by what they are? How might shifting attention from identity to enactment underscore what Asian and Asian diasporic art stands for and intervene in how this art has been understood and/or conceptualized?

 

This special issue invites artists, curators, and scholars to envision and examine the flows, convergences, alliances, borders, and resistances of Asian and Asian diasporic art in terms of intervention. We interpret intervention in two ways. Drawing on an outward-facing definition of the term, we ask: what is the agency of artworks and projects in the world beyond art institutions? How does art tackle the entropic and the quotidian of its specific locality? How do artists, as individuals as well as collectives, create bonds and negotiate confrontations with communities? Concomitantly, we are also interested in the inward possibilities of intervention, asking contributors to consider how Asian and Asian diasporic art intervenes in the discipline of art history as well as contemporary art practices, instead of merely adding a new territory to the existing map of world art. 

 

We invite articles, artworks and curatorial projects addressing issues that are at the front edge of the arts and humanities—such as transnational feminisms and queer practices, transpacific studies, ecocriticism, and digital humanities—through the means of the visual and the performative. Theoretical explorations on the shifting grounds of the discipline are also welcome.

 

Submission Deadline: May 1, 2021

 

 

Issue 9.1

OPEN ISSUE

 

This open issue invites essays related to the broader project of Verge: Studies in Global Asias, which 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.

 

Submission Deadline: November 1, 2021