“Asia” happens anytime, anywhere and applies to everyone. This provocative proclamation was made by founding editors Tina Chen and Eric Hayot of Verge: Studies in Global Asias in their inaugural editorial of the pathbreaking journal in 2015. Since then, the concept of Global Asias has gained currency in academia including at the University of Washington where faculty are currently conceptualizing and planning for a university-wide initiative. Intimations of Global Asias has taken on myriad forms from the potential merging of Asian Studies with Asian American Studies to the study of intersections between different media forms known as intermediality. Join moderator Nazry Bahrawi (University of Washington) in a generative dialogue with Verge’s editor herself Tina Chen (Penn State University) and Sinophone scholar Brian Bernards (University of Southern California) as they articulate the spirit and future of Global Asias.

 

Tina Chen is Founding Editor of Verge: Studies in Global Asias, Associate Professor of English and Asian American Studies, and Director of the Global Asias Initiative at the Pennsylvania State University. She is interested in speculative fictions, the imaginable ageography of Global Asias, and the genres of academic labor. Her first book, Double Agency: Acts of Impersonation in Asian American Literature and Culture (Stanford UP, 2005), was named a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title. She is currently completing two books: Global Asias: Tactics & Theories, a collaborative project that will be published as the inaugural volume of the Global Asias MAP book series (University of Hawai’i Press), and Alien Form: Global Asias and Other Speculative Genres of Academic Labor, a monograph that explores how Global Asias can engender a more expansively conceptualized scholarly praxis (forthcoming Duke UP).

Brian Bernards is Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Writing the South Seas: Imagining the Nanyang in Chinese and Southeast Asian Postcolonial Literature (UW Press, 2018) and the co-editor of Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader (Columbia UP, 2013). He is currently working on a manuscript entitled Inter-Asian Cinema: Migrant Labor, Popular Culture, Tourism, and is co-editing a collection with Elmo Gonzaga entitled Inter-Asia Intermediality. He was formerly the chair of the Southeast Asian and Southeast Asian Diasporic Forum at the Modern Language Association as well as the Program Director of the Society of Sinophone Studies.

Nazry Bahrawi is Assistant Professor of Southeast Asian Literature and Culture, and Program Coordinator of the Southeast Asian Program at the Department of Asian Languages and Literature at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is currently working on a manuscript exploring the intersections between animal narratives and racial discourses in the Malay-Indonesian world. His work on racialism, folklore, literary Islam and translation have appeared in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes. He is an editor-at-large at Wasafiri literary magazine on international contemporary writing and has published short stories and literary translations from Bahasa to English.