Editor

Tina Chen
 

Associate Editor

Charlotte Eubanks

Managing Editor

Siting Jiang

 

Editorial Assistant

Yi-Ting Chang

PSU Editorial Collective

Jessamyn Abel, Asian Studies

Jonathan E. Abel, Comparative Literature and Asian Studies

Kathlene Baldanza, History and Asian Studies

Prakash Kumar, History and Asian Studies

On-cho Ng, History and Asian Studies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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 7.1

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, 2019

Issue 7.2

DIGITAL ASIAS

Edited by Jonathan E. Abel (Penn State University) and Joseph Jonghyun Jeon (UC-Irvine)

We have been willing participants in our own digital colonization.  This digitalization has some historical roots in Asia and today is routed through Asia.  It is saturated in stereotypical techno-orientalist images of a futuristic Asia, and proliferates through Asian media, finance capital, and artistic production. In short, Asia has been entangled in the global digital culture that occupies our everyday.  As a major node in digital mediations of the world, Asia plays a primary part in producing computational gadgets (whether made by Sunway, LG, or Fujitsu), designing new forms of social media (Line, Weibo, SyncYu, and KakaoTalk), or creating innovative digital content (Bollywood, K-pop, anime).  We welcome scholarship on all forms of Digital Asia.  This may include, for instance, the role Asian diasporas play in global digital life; the social, political, economic, and artistic functions of digital connectivity in Asian communities around the world; the stereotype of Asian identity as binary; the global infrastructures and logistical innovations that increasingly characterize global Asia; and Asian inflections of global activities like the algorithmic determination of risk for venture capital and the corporate and government abuse of big data.  

This special issue seeks to answer, at least provisionally, some of the following interrelated questions:  How has the digitalization of life in Asia, and of Asian lives, transformed the world?  How does a consideration of cultures that are born digital differ from those that grow up analog?  If daily life has been colonized by the digital, what is globally consistent about contemporary digitalization?  How is Asian cultural digitalization different from, innovating on, or resistant to popular modes elsewhere?  If the putatively real public persona has reigned supreme online since the dawn of Web 2.0, why have anonymous internet activities continued to flourish in Asia?  How do the supposed “new” economies that surround digital production reimagine and/or restructure late capitalist practices, particularly as deindustrialization becomes an increasingly global phenomenon? What is new about Digital Asia and what is atavistic? What does this focus on the digital in all of its forms bring to the surface in Asian and Asian American Studies that would not otherwise be visible?

One of the journal's distinctive features is an opening section called Convergence, where we curate a rotating series of rubrics that emphasize collaborative intellectual engagement and exchange.   Each issue features four of the following rubrics: A&Q, a responsive dialogue, either in interview or roundtable format, inspired by  a set of questions; Codex, a collaborative discussion and assessment of books; Translation, for texts, primary or secondary, not yet available in English; Field Trip, reports from various subfields of the disciplines; Portfolio, commentaries on visual images; and Interface, texts (and eventually online material) exploring the resources of the print-digital world. We welcome those interested in these features to submit a Convergence proposal for the issue.  Proposals should indicate what kind of feature is being proposed; demonstrate an awareness of the formats utilized by the journal; include an abstract and, if collaborative, a list of proposed contributors; and be accompanied by a letter of interest by the feature’s primary coordinator along with a short (2 pg) cv.

Submission Deadlines:

Convergence proposals—October 1, 2019

Essays—May 1, 2020 

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