Verge is sponsoring the following Global Asias panel and roundtable for consideration for the upcoming AAS conference:

• Inter-Asia Intermediality: The Transboundary Production of Global Asian Mediascapes | Brian Bernards (bernards@usc.edu) & Elmo Gonzaga (egonzaga@cuhk.edu.hk)
• Destabilizing Identities in Studies of Global Asias | Roy Chan (rbc@uoregon.edu)

250 word abstracts and 2-page CVs should be submitted to organizers by July 28, 2023. Please find the individual panel statements and the organizers’ contact information below. Please note: these panels will be submitted for the in-person AAS conference in Seattle, March 14–17, 2023.

A PDF of this call is available here. For questions, contact gai@psu.edu.

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Inter-Asia Intermediality: The Transboundary Production of Global Asian Mediascapes

Brian Bernards (bernards@usc.edu) and Elmo Gonzaga (egonzaga@cuhk.edu.hk)

Intermediality and inter-Asia have gained recent visibility as key buzzwords in the humanities, being the focus of scholarly conferences, journals, and monographs with intertwined timelines and trajectories. Theories of intermediality arose at the turn of the millennium in response to technological innovations that radically transformed the platforms and networks for media circulation and consumption, challenging the limits of media studies by laying the groundwork for emergent critical approaches to comprehend the digitization of print and audiovisual media not only as conditions of passage and transformation but as processes of simultaneity and hybridization. Similarly, inter-Asia cultural studies emerged as a challenge to the inadequacies of Asian area studies to encourage scholarship interrogating processes of regionalization in Asia in all their unevenness and variation while recognizing no natural “cultural and/or historical unity” to Asia as an imagined entity. Following the transboundary and transmedia impulses of both fields, our panel casts the concept of intermediality into a mutually productive dialogue with inter-Asia to forge a new framework for interpreting overlooked or unanticipated media and cultural phenomena and to expand the possibilities for interdisciplinary knowledge production in media studies, area studies, and cultural studies. Inter-Asian flows and conditions test and extend the parameters of media forms and platforms, while transmedia processes and technologies unsettle and transform understandings of national and regional identity. This panel proposes a framework and method of inter-Asia intermediality by inviting papers that highlight connections and exchanges but also uncover tensions and discontinuities in processes of transboundary and trans-platform media regionalization.

Destabilizing Identities in Studies of Global Asias

Roy Chan (rbc@uoregon.edu)

This proposed roundtable strives to form a dialogue between contemporary political and cultural debates over identity in studies of Asia and Asian diasporas. Instead of thinking of identity as an immutable essence, this panel considers the possibilities and limitations of the notion of “speculative identity,” which posits both the presence and lack of identity between subject and predicate. As such, speculative identity resists any already given notion of identity, but rather inaugurates a process of cognitive and affective labor by which such identity, in the words of Gillian Rose, “must be understood as a result to be achieved.” This roundtable welcomes approaches to identity that encompass misrecognition, error, disputed judgments, etc., while still taking the question of identity to be of crucial importance. Of especial interest to the roundtable are the connections and diremptions between articulations of identity we study in our respective fields of interest and contemporary debates about identity politics. Various forms of identity continue to take on new and challenging configurations that deserve debate and discussion. We hope the roundtable will illuminate connections between scholarly field and contemporary moment, but also facilitate discussion of how this manifests in Global Asias and Asian diasporas. How might comparison of present and past articulations of identity also invite an examination of identity and lack between those disparate horizons? We welcome investigations in topics such as race, nationality, gender, sexuality, as well as conceptual categories such as particularity and universality, type, and thinking and being.