CFP: VERGE ISSUE 12.1 STUDIES IN GLOBAL ASIA

Verge Issue 12.1: Studies in Global Asia

“Trade in Humans”

A PDF of this call is available here. Please direct all questions to verge@psu.edu.

Trade in humans is a vast and age-old engine of migration between regions in the Asia-Pacific and, since the sixteenth century, from Asia to the Americas, Africa, and Europe. This special issue of Verge seeks to illuminate both the ubiquity of the trade in Asian people and its particularities across time and space. Indispensable to both Asian polities and Western empires, to nation-building in the Americas and to the development of global capitalism, Asians as agents and objects of trade in humans also formed the core of Asian diasporas and hybridized cultures worldwide. Such circulation of Asian persons and labor profoundly influenced the formation of our modern world.

In documenting the widespread trade in Asian people, scholars have been divided on whether to call it a slave trade, with some identifying cases that clearly fit the term, while others eschew it in favor of a range of alternatives. Asian languages offer many relevant terms – such as人身売買 [Japanese for “buying and selling human bodies”] or sŏnsang nobi 選上奴婢 [Korean for “slaves selected and sent up to the capital”] – for practices that may not map neatly onto Western legal and cultural categories.

We use the term “trade in humans” in hope that this issue will engage with a broad scope of historical and contemporary forms of commodification, sale, alienation, and forced migration of Asian people. Rather than presume the forms and limits of exploitation, we seek to open up a conversation across fields and terminological silos. Topics explored may potentially range from slave trading to adoption, child marriage, resettlement, trafficking, indentured labor, “coolietude,” and military conscription.

This special issue will attend to problems of translation and the texture of human experience undergirding linguistic, legal, political, and cultural attempts to represent or obfuscate the transregional trade in humans. We seek contributions from a wide variety of fields: Asian studies and Asian American studies, history, legal studies, sociology, anthropology, and diaspora studies, among others. We welcome contributions that explore the influence of these diverse trades across all Asian regions, the Americas, and beyond, as well as local or international legacies.

Convergence Feature Proposals

One of Verge: Studies in Global Asias’ 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 several 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, films, or exhibits; 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 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 be 1–2 pages in length and 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 include a short (2 pg) cv.

The Convergence proposals deadline is March 15, 2024; however, we encourage those interested in submitting a proposal to contact the editors about their ideas in advance of this date. Please direct all inquiries and submissions to verge@psu.edu.

Essay Submissions

Essays (between 6,000-10,000 words) and abstracts (125 words) should be submitted electronically through this submission form by August 30, 2024 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.

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CFP: "CURRENT COMPARATIVE LITERARY STUDIES IN EAST ASIA", CONCENTRIC LITERARY AND CULTURAL STUDIES

“Current Comparative Literary Studies in East Asia”,

Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies Vol. 50 No. 2 September 2024

This special issue seeks articles that address issues related to current comparative literary studies in East Asia, including its establishment as a discipline, institutionalization, historical development, methodological models, critical paradigms, etc., and more importantly, the tendencies within the discipline in the face of the drastic changes in current culture and society. The discipline of comparative literature in East Asia, including Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and others, was established largely after World War II, although some would argue that it germinated during much earlier historical stages. In other words, the institutionalization of comparative literature in East Asia was greatly influenced by the Cold War geopolitical framework over which the US had the prevailing dominance. This fact also explains why the entire “interpretative community” of comparative literary studies in East Asia has been closely associated with that in North America and followed closely its critical paradigms. As a result, East Asian literatures often become literary examples to attest to “Western theories,” and sometimes are viewed as an integral part of Area Studies from the American perspective.

However, the common background and tendency in the development of the comparative literature discipline in East Asia by no means suggests that this region should be considered as having a literary and cultural unity and can be treated uniformly. Instead, different countries and areas in East Asia have developed various ramifications of comparative literature with distinct characteristics based on their own linguistic environments, historical experiences, political conditions, national objectives, etc. Some countries regard comparative literature as an extension of a national literature, whereas others recognize it as a branch of foreign literatures. In a similar fashion, some institutes lay stress on native language and local issues, whereas others emphasize the use of English as a necessary channel to connect to the outside world and to gain better visibility for their local affairs. These diverse and discrete concerns demonstrate precisely one prominent feature of comparative literature in East Asia—i.e., existing in an interspace between East and West, native and foreign, local and global, etc.

Like in other regions, comparative literature in East Asia has always faced challenges that were caused either by the changes in geopolitics or precipitated by paradigm shifts within the discipline. The last decade has witnessed a reform of the discipline in confronting various obstacles, especially the urgency of reconsidering the idea of East Asia. In brief, the idea of “Asia as method” proposed by the Japanese scholar Takeuchi Yoshimi more than half a century ago has been raised once again as a useful reference for reviewing contemporary humanities studies in the region. However, it places an emphasis less on overcoming the so-called Western modernity than on a return to the East Asian context. This quest provides a chance to examine the divergence and diversity of East Asian literatures and cultures, which may deviate from the long-standing Western criteria for comparative studies and also create alternative connections between various areas in the region and beyond. Take, for example, the emergence of Sinophone studies. It provokes a time-space reconstruction of the Sinophone articulation with an emphasis on voicing the minority’s conditions. Clearly, the call for reshaping the social and cultural order in the Sinophone world echoes perfectly the discourse on world literature that promotes a “worlding” process rather than a presumed world order.

At present, comparative literature faces even more challenges than before. The breakout of the COVID-19 pandemic has drastically changed our daily lives, means of communication, social relations, and many other aspects of life, not to mention the radical changes in domestic governance and international politics. Literature of our time will focus on and describe these transformations; likewise, comparative literary studies will examine the effect of all these changes on the human condition, e.g., from the perspectives of political economy of affects, mode of bio-politics, and the geopolitical situation, etc. Alongside the COVID-19 pandemic, other important developments like the continuing war in Ukraine, the advancement of science and technology, the emergence of cyberspace, the surge of populism in politics, racial conflicts and climate change, to name just a few, are having profound impacts on the environment and human lives. Considering all these challenges, comparative literature in East Asia is no doubt approaching a new phase that requires a more wide-ranging and comprehensive vision.

Please send complete papers of 6,000-10,000 words, 5–8 keywords, and a brief biography to concentric.lit@deps.ntnu.edu.tw by December 30, 2023. Manuscripts should follow the latest edition of the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. Except for footnotes, which should be single-spaced, manuscripts must be double-spaced in 12-point Times New Roman. Please consult our style guide.

Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, indexed in Arts and Humanities Citation Index, is a peer-reviewed journal published two times per year by the Department of English, National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan. Concentric is devoted to offering innovative perspectives on literary and cultural issues and advancing the transcultural exchange of ideas. While committed to bringing Asian-based scholarship to the world academic community, Concentric welcomes original contributions from diverse national and cultural backgrounds. In each issue of Concentric we publish groups of essays on a special topic as well as papers on more general issues.

For submissions or general inquiries, please contact us.

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CFP: GLOBAL ANTI-ASIAN RACISM FOR ASIA SHORTS

Call for Proposals: 

Global Anti-Asian Racism for Asia Shorts

Guest Editor: Jennifer Ho (University of Colorado Boulder)

Series Editor: David Kenley (Dakota State University)

This special issue of Asia Shorts (Columbia UP and the Association for Asian Studies) focuses on “Global Anti-Asian Racism,” a phenomenon, particularly in the guise of Yellow Peril, that has endured for centuries around the globe. In Europe and the Americas, Asian immigrants and refugees are and were treated as threats to national security, as well as the society/culture of American (whether US, Latin American, Central American, Caribbean or Canadian) and European people. Yellow Peril and anti-Asian racism is also found in Africa, Australia, and New Zealand—wherever Asian immigrants and refugees found themselves, anti-Asian sentiments quickly followed.

In the hope that this volume will be widely adopted by specialists and non-specialists alike, as well as serve as a valuable pedagogical resource for teachers, we seek shorter submissions that range in variety—traditional academic essays that have a historical or theoretical orientation or that thematically engage in cross-comparative Asian national perspectives—as well as creative and personal pieces that delve into how people have experienced or witnessed anti-Asian racism and/or Yellow Peril from different vantage points and perspectives. While we are living in an era of profound and violent anti-Asian racism, the volume seeks perspectives that go beyond our current COVID-19 moment to consider the ways in which anti-Asian racism has persisted across time and space.

Logisitcs:

• October 1, 2022: 1-2 page abstracts due (12 point font, double spaced please)

• April 1, 2023: Essays due (not to exceed 5,000 words, including all notes and works consulted – if anyone wants to include illustrations/graphics, that’s also fine so long as you have permission)

• May 1, 2023: Feedback on essays sent out (may happen earlier)

• July 1, 2023: First revisions due

• Summer/Fall 2023: Page Proofs

Further questions can be sent to Jennifer Ho: Jennifer.Ho@colorado.edu

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