作者：Tina Chen(The Pennsylvania State University, English and Asian American Studies Associate Professor, Global Asias Initiative Director), Charlotte Eubanks(The Pennsylvania State University, Comparative Literature, Japanese, and Asian Studies Professor, School of Global Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Director)
DOI: 10.30402/EAS.202606_57(1).0004
In North American academic practice, scholarship typically segregates the study of Asia from the study of any of its many diasporas. This means that scholarship concerning Asian peoples, languages, histories, and cultures does not proceed holistically but is, rather, split into three distinct, and distinctly political, silos: Asian studies, Asian American studies, and Asian diaspora studies.
Asian studies is an area-based, Cold War institutional formation that places emphasis on language acquisition and the strategic integration of historical, cultural, and political context. As Barbara Shubinski and Teresa Iacobelli note, the “idea for area studies grew out of the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP), which had used US land-grant universities to train specialists quickly for the war effort” in the early 1940s.[1] Even in times of extended peace, when the immediate context may shift from military conflict to economic competition, the emphasis of area studies is on national security.
By contrast, Asian American studies is an ethnic studies formation that places emphasis on the critical examination of the cultures, histories, perspectives, and embodied experiences of people of color. The origins of ethnic studies in the United States stem from the Civil Rights Movement and other liberatory, activist movements of the 1960s. For instance, student strikes at San Francisco State University and the University of California at Berkeley in 1968 and 1969 played a crucial role in the foundation of the first ethnic studies programs.[2] Asian American studies generally focuses on Asian diasporas within the United States. As an approach that centers questions of ethnicity, race, class, and gender in the US, Asian American studies speaks most commonly with African American, Latinx, Native American, and gender and sexuality studies. In the very processes of drawing attention to questions of identity and advocating for logics of belonging, however, Asian American studies has historically tended to downplay or disregard continued points of connection with Asia.
Finally, diaspora studies is a developing, post-national formation which, at its most foundational level, recognizes that not all Asian diasporas are located in the United States, nor is diasporic movement as linear as leaving one place in Asia and relocating permanently in another place. Diasporas can be multiple and can quickly outstrip the merely bilateral; indeed, Asian diaspora studies as an intellectual and political project productively disrupts “the tendency in Asian and Asian American studies to think of diaspora solely in binary terms of homeland and place of residence.”[3] Diaspora as a contested analytical term gestures to the inadequacy of nation-based approaches in isolation and emphasizes the transnational dynamics undergirding the movement of Asian peoples. Even more generatively, the study of Asian diasporas can, as Rhacel Salazar Parrenas and Lok C.D. Siu argue, “facilitate two sets of comparative analysis at once: the place-specific, cross-ethnic study of how racializing-gendering processes affect different diasporic groups in one location and the transnational relations and interactions among the geographically dispersed communities of each diaspora.”[4]
As an emergent scholarly field, Global Asias reckons with this siloed scholarly landscape, placing Asian studies, Asian American studies, and Asian diaspora studies into conversation without forcing them to align. The distinctions and the politics separating these approaches are real and continue to be important. And yet, we believe it is important to communicate across disciplines in a collaborative, curious, self-reflexive manner, and we have also demonstrated that it is possible to do this without collapsing different kinds of scholarship into a unified set of perspectives. In this sense, we understand Global Asias primarily as an architecture that makes critical conversation across discipline, field, area, period, and methodology possible.
Global Asias as Critical Architecture
How does one build this kind of critical architecture? How does one encourage scholars to stay in relation and in conversation, without pressuring alignment? How does one push back against the many demands for critical consolidation?
Structure is key. In Global Asias: Tactics and Theories, we decided to structure the book’s body sections around five main keywords: Transits, Indigeneity, Epistemology, Language, and A/Geography. A traditional “keywords” volume would choose more obvious words, would choose terms that have enjoyed a decade or more of sustained critical interest, and would ask each contributor to provide a critical genealogy for the keyword, tracing the ways that scholars have used and developed the term over a period of time. This is a very useful form of scholarship, but it is a scholarship of critical consolidation.
In designing Global Asias: Tactics and Theories, we aimed for something quite different: namely, a scholarship of suspension. As we note in our editors’ introduction, Global Asias is a collective intellectual endeavor and as such, requires “a praxis of suspension [that] attends to and stays with moments of unsettling, desettling, friction, and dissonance.”[5] What this praxis entails is a series of decisions about how to construct a set of conditions for a diverse group of scholars working in many different areas on a variety of topics to be able to fruitfully engage each other and their assigned keywords. So first, instead of a keyword like “Area” which might invite a reconsolidation of Cold War apportioning of the globe into East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and so on, we chose instead to focus on the keyword “Epistemology.” This focused conversation not on the objects of knowledge but on the subject of knowing, the embodied processes of knowing, and the politics of claiming to know. Second, instead of asking one senior scholar to write a history of a keyword, we invited a team of scholars across ranks (tenured full professors, junior professors, lecturers, and advanced graduate students) to collaborate in co-authoring a reflection, or what we call a convergence, which registers the back-and-forth engagement and interplay of scholarly knowledge production as it is generated across field and disciplinary boundaries. And finally, we invited keyword teams to think about scholarly knowledge production in expansive ways, generating both a research forum and a pedagogy forum to show how these different forms of academic labor are interconnected.
Collaborative Knowledge Production via Keywords and Convergences
The convergence on epistemology co-authored by Junyong Verónica Kim, Naveen Minai, Youngoh Jung, and Carla Nappi provides a prime example of resisting critical consolidation. Their piece takes as its central commitment the view that the question of knowledge is intimately intertwined with the question of positionality: the who shaping the how and the what. Collectively, the team was interested in thinking about where they know from. In her contribution to the collaborative endeavor, Junyong Verónica Kim thinks from Asia Latin America, trying to open or at least move the borders of disciplines that have tended to keep Asia, Latin America, and Asian America separate. Naveen Minai’s section works through the experience of what it means to be a scholar “from an area studied” and how her work is not “on” Pakistan but “from” Pakistan (179). Youngoh Jung meditates on refusing a method of building an oral history archive that pushed him to accumulate sources and records as if his family “were a bank account” (183), and elaborates instead a teaching module on critical listening. Finally, Carla Nappi comes to the forum’s questions about praxis and methodology as a set of “pandemic questions,” arguing for letting things rot, decompose, and lie fallow, rather than constantly pushing to produce, to “fly across the world to talk to each other for fifteen minutes at a time [at a conference presentation] and to go into debt doing so” (193).
Fundamental to Global Asias knowledge production is a commitment to relational nonalignment, which is a way of acknowledging discordance between different academic knowledge forms and practices. Relational nonalignment makes visible how the dissonance created from discrete vocabularies, methods, and topics can be productively conceptualized as that which is created by bringing contradictory, oppositional, or disarticulated approaches into shared space without forcing agreement or consensus. In their discussion on the keyword “A/Geography,” three scholars–Jini Kim Watson, Omer Aijazi, and Shaolu Yu–debate the possibilities and limits of this neologism. Working across very different areas and disciplines, they visibly stage the difficulties of keeping knowledge forms from their respective disciplines (spanning critical disaster studies, decolonial ethnography, comparative literature, postcolonial studies, geography, and urban studies) in conversation. By creating an interlocutory research forum that puts into dialogue their respective scholarly research on atmospheric violence and repair in Kashmir, how inter-Asian literature and film register political power and cultural forms of decolonization during the global Cold War, and Asian urbanization under the impact of globalization, Aijazi, Watson, and Yu stage a lively discussion that leans into the discontinuities of the knowledge practices that each brings to the discussion–but also reveals the possible overlaps and synergies of considering Global Asias as “an alternative geography that decenters Western perspective, de-romanticizes a friction-free global village, and resists a singular narrative” (324).
In addition to critical unconsolidation and relational nonalignment, another hallmark of Global Asias is the call to attend to structural dissonance. Here, we might consider the concept of Indigeneity. The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), a document which has circulated globally but with differential uptake, assumes that Indigenous peoples are, and wish to be, rights-bearing subjects who can enter into “constructive arrangements with States.”[6] In assuming that claims regarding “lands, territories, and resources” are among the most contested, the UNDRIP belies its legal and conceptual origins in a settler colonial context. Indeed, as Diego Javier Luis points out, the very etymology of the term “Indigenous” is intertwined with the history of European colonial expansion: “The colonial Spanish category indio clearly indicates a connection to a geographical locus in the Indus River valley of South Asia. While it first referred to the Indigenous subjects of the Hispanic world, indio (as “Indian”) came to index a wider spectrum of Indigenous peoples, particularly but not exclusively in the Americas” (128). This conception of Indigeneity is structurally dissonant with conceptions of “minority nationalities” (shaoshu minzu 少數民族) as deployed by the Chinese state or ideas of “ancient inhabitants” (Adivasi) as a strategic neologism developed in 1930s Jharkand.[7] As Erin Suzuki, Jenny Chio, Kyle Shernuk, and Diego Javier Luis wryly note, “How can one term be used to encompass and identify the diversity of people and communities living in extraordinarily different historical, political, cultural, and ecological conditions around the world?” (106). The point is to stick with the structural dissonance, rather than trying to resolve it, to explore the slippages and disagreements between various concepts without insisting that one paradigm must emerge ascendant.
Staying with slippages and disagreements can lead to new ways of conceptualizing familiar terms. For example, the scholars working on the keyword “Transits” begin their research forum by suggesting that “transits is a familiar term and a relatable reference frame to bring together innovative methods and polyvocal perspectives on the state of people, practices, and places in flux in discrete Asian worlds (i.e., regional, national, diasporic, and expat spaces)” (54). Even as we might all have a general sense of what transits signal, Desirée Valadares, Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi, Alexander Murphy, and Neelima Jeychandran argue that this term should be deployed in ways that draw attention to friction, stasis, and incommensurability, thus making it a useful complement to existing emphases on connectivity and movement advanced by mobility studies. Specifically, they argue that the complex assembly of sites and situations they engage across Global Asias (including transborder carceral geographies, archipelagoes, African-Asian exchanges across the Indian Ocean, and Japanese/American performances in the Transwar Pacific) can only be thought of in relation by making visible the ways in which transits is a concept “best defined by the duality and complexity embedded in the slash: im/mobility, im/materiality, im/permanence” (55).
Admittedly, the very term “Global Asias” might invite skepticism. To some, “Global Asias” might sound like just another intellectual land grab, the name of a would-be mega-field, or a sort of cheerleading for Asian economic expansionism and the forward march of global capitalism. But here is where we think it is important to resist the very idea of coverage and to return to the idea of Global Asias as an unsettling project. Consider, for instance, the convergence on “Language,” co-authored by Jerry Won Lee (Professor in the department of English at UC-Irvine), Fiona Lee (Senior Lecturer in English at the Universiti Malaya), and Andrew Way Leong (Assistant Professor of English at UC-Berkeley). Jerry Won Lee leverages his contribution toward outlining a milieu of World Englishes, the circulation of which entails both opportunities and costs. Fiona Lee then considers the place of “Malaysian literature in English” as it intersects with and raises questions about the rubric of “Global Anglophone literature.” Finally, Andrew Way Leong returns us to a crucial point in the formation of Asian studies and Asian American studies in the United States, a point at which distinctions between those fields had not congealed and a “buried past” in which community languages (Cantonese spoken at home, for instance) may have been differently valued. Crucially, rather than ignoring the fact that the entire volume is written in English, the convergence on language actually centers the matter of Anglophone dominance, both as a structural condition and as a provocation that asks to be rethought.
Final Thoughts and an Invitation
As these thumbnail sketches should indicate, Global Asias as conceptualized in this volume embraces collaboration, multidisciplinarity, and generic innovation, while pushing back against consolidation. Our hope is that the book will be useful to a range of audiences. For those who administer funding agencies or direct research centers, the volume provides an orientation to a rapidly developing critical conversation with wide cross-disciplinary relevance. For instructors, each convergence team has composed a pedagogy forum as well, offering ideas about syllabus design, lists of materials to view and read, selections of in-class exercises, and annotated bibliographies to guide additional exploration. For researchers at all stages of their career, we hope the volume serves as an invitation, a warm welcome to an exciting conversation and a space for them to engage and to add their own voices.
Thanks to the generosity of the Luce Foundation and the technical know-how of the University of Hawai’i Press, the book is available worldwide open access.[8] Additionally, the Global Asias Initiative at Penn State hosts many programs for scholars interested in learning more about—and being a part of—a Global Asias scholarly community.[9] We welcome colleagues excited by collaborative, non-consensus, and generically innovative scholarship on Asia and its diasporas to be part of this developing conversation.
[1] Shubinski, Barbara and Teresa Iacobelli, 2022, “Building Global Understanding: Area Studies, Language, and History,” Re:source: https://resource.rockarch.org/story/philanthropy-birth-of-area-studies-field-building/ (Accessed on May 27, 2026)
[2] Vélez, Manuel, Carlos Guerrero and Tamara Cheshire, 2023, “The Driving Principles of the Ethnic Studies Disciplines,” Academic Senate for California Community Colleges: https://www.asccc.org/content/driving-principles-ethnic-studies-disciplines. (Accessed on May 27, 2026)
[3] Parrenas, Rhacel S. and Lok C.D. Siu, 2007, Asian Diasporas: New Formations, New Conceptions. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Page 3.
[4] Ibid, 9.
[5] Chen, Tina and Charlotte Eubanks, 2025, Global Asias: Tactics and Theories. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, Page 13. Hereafter, otherwise unattributed page numbers refer to this volume.
[6] United Nations, 2007, “United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples”: https://www.un.org/development/desa/indigenouspeoples/wp-content/uploads/sites/19/2018/11/UNDRIP_E_web.pdf. (Accessed on May 28, 2026)
[7] For a discussion, see Ghosh, Kaushik, 2006, “Between Global Flows and Local Dams: Indigenousness, Locality, and the Transnational Sphere in Jharkhand, India,” Cultural Anthropology 21, no. 4 (2006): 501-534.
[8] https://manifold.uhpress.hawaii.edu/system/actioncallout/5/d/2/5d2208b3-1bbf-486a-a707-f5d2dcce7f47/attachment/2fa3eed26117cf99356fe2fbf8bea977.pdf