Verge: Studies in Global Asias

Editorial Collective and Advisory Board

Editor

Tina Chen

Associate Editor

Charlotte Eubanks

Managing Editor

Su Young Lee

Editorial Assistant

Choa Choi

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

Erica F. Brindley, 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

Paul D. Barclay (2025), History, Lafayette College

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

Sugata Bose (2025), History, Harvard University

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

Patrick Eisenlohr (2023), Anthropology, University of Göttingen

Joseph Jonghyun Jeon (2024), English, University of California-Irvine

Ronak K. Kapadia (2025), Gender and Women’s Studies, University of Illinois Chicago

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

Laura Kina (2024), Art, Media & Design, DePaul 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

Bakirathi Mani (2025), English, Swarthmore College

Brinda Mehta (2024), French & Francophone Studies and Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, Mills College

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

Krishnendu Ray (2024), Nutrition and Food Studies, NYU Steinhardt

Zelideth Maria Rivas (2023), Japanese, Marshall University

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

Nitasha Tamar Sharma (2025), African American Studies and Asian American Studies, Northwestern

Li (Lily) Wong (2025), Literature and Critical Race Gender and Culture Studies, American 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

Verge Issue 9.2                                              

CULINARY CULTURES ON THE MOVE

Edited by Krishnendu Ray (NYU Steinhardt), Jooyeon Rhee (Penn State), and Tina Chen (Penn State)

Boundaries and borders are neither static nor innately cartographic: they are in constant flux and always in process of being reconfigured. This special issue highlights how studies of place and movement can help us remap culinary cultures and become more aware of the spatial dimensions of gastronomic practice. How does bodily movement and its constraints direct us to new points of view about culinary cultures in Global Asias? What are the forces behind the formation of culinary nationalism, nativism, and ethnocentrism in Asian and diasporic communities—and how have they affected the ways people practice and contest foodways? How do material contexts—from squatting to standing, from wells to sinks, from floor level cutting utensils to cutting boards, from cowdung cakes to natural gas— shape techniques, taste, and culinary habits? How do infrastructural investments and aesthetic imaginaries of food expand our understanding of the relationship between self and other? 

We invite papers on transnational flows (both imaginary and real), border making and breaking, culinary heritages and innovations, techniques and technologies, and the relationships between the production, distribution and consumption of food in Asia and its multiple diasporas. We welcome projects that approach the study of food contextually and that highlight the intersectional and cross-disciplinary implications of spaces and movements of bodies, dead or alive, as produce, product or terminus. Theoretical explorations on the shifting grounds of the intersection of disciplines are also welcome.

Submission Deadline: May 15, 2022

Verge Issue 10.1                                            

Special Issue: brown/ness(es)

Edited by Neelofer Qadir (University of North Carolina Greensboro), Naveen Minai (University of Toronto), and Tina Chen (Penn State)

Deadline: August 15, 2022

Feeling brown, feeling down. Feeling down, being brown. A name for law, a name for affect, a name for ontology, a name for relation, a name for not relation, a name for antagonism, a name for empire(s), a name for capital, a name for an accusation, a name that can be convenient, a name that does not work, a name that can stop working, a name for shades, a name for fantasy.

This proposed special issue considers both when brown might be useful and may be used to do the work of relation, inquiry, theory—and when brown does not work (Macharia 2013, 2016, 2019). Crucially, we reorient questions about brown and brownness away from frames centered in the continental northern Americas (Prashad 2000, Bald 2013) — and the American academy, and borders thereof in particular. We turn towards sites, relations, and geohistories imagined through terms such as (but not limited to) Indigenous, Afro-Asia, Asian- and/or African Latin America (Kim 2017, Kantor 2018), Indian Ocean, Global Asias, Inter-Asia, and more (Chen 2010). We think through how brown is shaped and weighted by different cartographic modes, for example, the Levant, Latin America, Africa, and archipelagos across Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans. 

We consider race and ethnicity as co-constitutive logics and forms of difference across different geohistories, including the ways in which these logics form, transform, transfer, congeal -- or not. We ask after brown, black, yellow, red, and white (and bright) as codes for difference, as metaphors of color made to matter through the matter of different bodies. We prompt reflection on how race, religion, ethnicity, and caste overlap and congeal into one another, troubling normative vocabularies of difference and relation.

We invite critical perspectives from scholars working in and across multiple languages, and provocations of brown as rubric, methodology, disorientation device (Ahmed 2006). Submissions might explore the politics that brown/ness(es) are heavy with, and their attendant contradictions, confusions, and frictions, including those between. Writers may think through these terms as names for cartographies of intimacy, violence, capital, memory, labor, culture are shaped by multiple empires — Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, German, English, Dutch, American, Russian, Safavid, Mughal, Ottoman, Qing, Byzantine.

Essays (between 6,000-10,000 words) and abstracts (125 words) should be submitted electronically to verge@psu.edu and 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, address, institutional affiliations, 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.