Editors

Tina Chen
Associate Professor of English and Asian American Studies
The Pennsylvania State University

Associate Editor

Charlotte Eubanks

Managing Editor

Akash Belsare, The Pennsylvania State University

Editorial Collective

Jessamyn Abel, Asian Studies and History

Jonathan E. Abel, Comparative Literature and Asian Studies

Kathlene Baldanza, History and Asian Studies

Erica Brindley, History and Asian Studies

Madhuri Desai, Art History and Asian Studies

On-cho Ng, History and Asian Studies

Nicolai Volland, Asian Studies and Comparative Literature

We Jung Yi, Asian Studies and Comparative Literature

Ran Zwigenberg, Asian Studies, History, and Jewish Studies

Advisory Board

Andrea Bachner (2018), Comparative Literature, Cornell University

Donald Baker (2019), Korean History and Civilization, University of British Columbia 

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

Stephanie De Boer (2019), Communication and Culture, Indiana University  

Kale Fajardo (2019), American Studies and Asian American Studies, University of Minnesota

Evelyn Hu-Dehart (2018), History and Ethnic Studies, Brown University

Moon-Ho Jung (2019), History, University of Washington

Chris Lee (2019), English, University of British Columbia

Fred Lee (2019), Political Science, University of Connecticut, Storrs

Ania Loomba (2018), English, Comparative Literature, South Asian Studies, and Women’s Studies, University of Pennsylvania            

Andrea Louie (2018), Anthropology and Asian American Studies, Michigan State University

Colleen Lye (2019), English, University of California-Berkeley

Michael Meister (2019), History of Art and South Asia Studies, University of Pennsylvania 

Carla Nappi (2019), History, University of British Columbia 

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

Peng Hsiao Yen (2018), Chinese Literature and Philosophy, Academic Sinica

Jing Tsu (2018), Chinese Literature and Comparative Literature, Yale University  

Rob Wilson (2019), Literature, Creative Writing, and Cultural Studies, University of California-Santa Cruz

Submissions

Essays (between 6,000-10,000 words) should be prepared according to the author-date + bibliography format as outlined in section 2.38 of the University of Minnesota Press style guide, and submitted electronically to verge@psu.edu.

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.

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

CALL FOR PAPERS

Issue 5.2

Forgetting Wars

Edited by Tina Chen (Penn State), Josephine Park (UPenn), and We Jung Yi (Penn State)

Historian Bruce Cumings notes that the Korean War was first branded the Forgotten War "in 1951, two years before the war ended." In the decades since, scholars and policymakers alike have come to affirm diplomat Charles Bohlen's assertion that "[i]t was the Korean War and not World War II that made the United States a world military-political power." Forgotten wars are thus not doomed to be inconsequential. Yet so much of war studies has been devoted to what historian Carol Gluck has termed the "operations of memory," its material and psychic modes of production and consumption in public and private realms extended all the way to postmemory. War memories are products of amnesias both selective and vast, but the political and psychic work of forgetting is more than the other to commemoration. What of the significant omissions that have not only been neglected by projects of recovery or redress but, in fact, have been disabled or made impossible by such efforts? What are the operations of forgetting wars?

This special issue invites essays on forgotten wars, whether those military exercises were deemed "small wars" or obscured conflicts within "great wars." We welcome scholarship devoted to the myriad forgotten wars within the Asia-Pacific region as well as those that have shaped US-Asian relations, and we are interested in the ways in which regional and transpacific skirmishes are erased, neglected, or otherwise rendered illegible. We also encourage interdisciplinary theorization of the possibilities and limits of cultural amnesia as a response to atrocity and conflict; critical attention to the dynamics between individual and social forgetting; and sustained engagement with the ethical and moral implications of forgetting in relation to memory and counter-memory. In addition to the politics of forgetting within local and transnational contexts, we invite contributions that explore the manipulation and representation of cultural and aesthetic artifacts in these wars, as well as the effacement or trace of such materials in their aftermaths. We seek to examine forgetting as a means toward comprehending operations of war that remain untouched within the dominant frame of memory; to this end, we are interested in accounts of forgotten wars of differing scales, alignments, and implications.

Submission Deadline: June 1, 2018

Issue 6.1

Displaced Subjects: Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Critical Refugee Studies

Edited by Tina Chen (Penn State) and Cathy Schlund-Vials (University of CT-Storrs)

This special issue – focused on global human rights and international humanitarianism – is from the outset guided by what sociologist/cultural critic Yên Lê Espiritu has productively characterized as a connected and connective frame of academic inquiry: critical refugee studies. As Espiritu’s strategic nomenclature suggests, “critical refugee studies” takes seriously displaced subjectivity, nationless bodies, and statelessness. The layered contemplation of critical refugee studies deliberately moves beyond the acknowledgement of stateless figures and nationless subjects to methodologically engage what Espiritu has concomitantly defined as integral to this emergent interdiscipline: critical juxtapositioning. Such comparative analyses, which anticipate this issue’s contents and themes, encompass a dialogic situating of ostensibly opposing disciplines (for instance, sociology, education, performance studies, and literature) and seemingly incompatible spaces (for example, military bases, libraries, art galleries, digital platforms, activist workshops, and secondary education classrooms). In so doing, contributors will collectively address the wide-ranging conditions which brought such displaced subjects “into being.”

Equally significantly, these “before” assessments make necessary multivalent and multidisciplinary explorations of wartime aftermaths, which more often than not include involuntary relocations, resistive articulations, imaginative personhoods, and alternative subjectivities. Correspondingly, this scholarly discussion of displaced subjects seeks to move refugees from the periphery to the center of rights-oriented debates involving (non)personhood, (non)selfhood, and (non)nationhood.  We welcome critical studies of forced migration on global and intimate scales; the development of alternative analytical frames for understanding displacement and relocation; theoretical treatment of the inter-relationship of militarism and imperialism; multivalent investigation of the varied sites of refugee life; and focused attention to the cultural, aesthetic, and affective dimensions of displaced subjectivity. Integral to this issue’s refugee-centric recalibrations is the extent to which “displaced subjects” render urgently discernible unreconciled histories of global human rights violations as well as the ongoing failures of international humanitarianism. 

Submission deadline: December 1, 2018

Issue 6.2

Infrastructure

Edited by Jessamyn Abel (Penn State University) and Leo Coleman (Hunter College) 

The infrastructures of the modern world—from roads and railways to global communications, from codes of law to the code within computers—move things, people, and ideas and help craft regions and urban spaces while conveying the images that people use to shape selves and communities. In all these ways, infrastructures have been central to the historical and contemporary experiences of Asian communities. Across the humanities and social sciences, however, infrastructure has only recently emerged as a topic of focus, and questions remain about how to analyze infrastructures as material artifacts and media of the imagination, to read for their appearances in literature or interpret representations of them in film, and to understand their role in contemporary aesthetic, political, or ecological practices.

This special issue will gather new work from the humanities, arts, and social sciences examining “infrastructure” as concept or material reality in Asia, Asian America, and Asian diasporic communities around the world. We welcome scholarship that explores the relationships between real and conceptual infrastructures, concrete materials and codes of practice—both in particular parts of Asia and as Asian people, goods, and ideas circulate globally. We are especially interested in essays that use the concept of infrastructure to better understand questions related to development projects, technological changes, and emergent political and social realities. Our goal is to discover how infrastructure studies can renew classic approaches to Asian societies and their national or global histories, provide new insights into Asian and Asian diasporic literatures or arts, and help focus attention on current ecological and political concerns—for example, by mobilizing new concepts such as redundancy, resiliance, and repair. We seek close examinations of the evolution of the infrastructures that are fundamental to economic and political relations, and to the daily lives of billions of people, to reveal the ways in which material technologies, sociotechnical processes, legal forms, popular culture, and the natural environment interact to produce the physical and imagined spaces of city, nation, region, and empire.

Submission Deadline: June 1, 2019.