CFP Verge-sponsored panels AAS 2022
Verge-sponsored Panels 2022 AAS
Submission Deadline | August 3, 2021
- Transnational Religious Communities in a Globalized Asia | Bo Tao (taobo123@gmail.com)
- Magazine Culture and Imagined Communities of Global Asias | Kendra McDuffie (krm30@psu.edu)
250 word abstracts and 2-page CVs should be submitted to organizers by August 3, 2021. Please find the individual panel statements and the organizers' contact information below. Please note that although AAS 2022 will be hybrid this year that these panels will be in person.
Transnational Religious Communities in a Globalized Asia
Panel Organizer: Bo Tao (taobo123@gmail.com)
This panel examines the historical formation, development, and expansion of transnational religious communities that are either partially or fully based in Asia. Although transnational religious movements are hardly new phenomena, the technological and infrastructural advancements of modernity have greatly enhanced the ability of religious organizations to extend their networks beyond national borders, thus enabling them to more readily view themselves as being part of a larger, global community. In the modern period, communities of faith became markers of identity and rallying points for Asian peoples struggling under the burdens of colonial rule. On the other hand, in Japan—the only non-Western nation to become an imperial power in its own right—membership in a religious organization allowed for an alternative mode of engagement with the world, while also placing adherents under scrutiny from the agents of state control. The panel will explore the various ways in which religion negotiated, and at times, transcended, national and political boundaries to produce hybrid forms of spiritual beliefs and practices, with individuals often sustaining multiple identities and loyalties. By paying attention to both the transformation of religious culture in diasporic and immigrant contexts as well as its reciprocal influences back in the home country, this panel seeks to envision migrant and non-migrant religion as occurring within a single transnational social sphere, thereby bridging gaps between Asian studies, Asian American studies, diaspora studies, and religious studies.
Magazine Culture and Imagined Communities of Global Asias
Panel Organizer: Kendra McDuffie (krm30@psu.edu)
As a global form, magazines have been at the center of conversations about nationalism, gender, consumption, globalization, and modernity, but these discussions have relied on the concepts of the nation as a relatively static geo-political entity. A Global Asias approach can usefully put pressure on Benedict Anderson’s centering of the nation-state in imagining community by highlighting areas of collectivity and relationality beyond national borders. By focusing on transnational flows, and regional and other geographic alliances or relations, we can illuminate ways in which magazines create communities of consumers across temporal, national, gender, and disciplinary boundaries. Likewise, an investigation of magazines may give us access to new points of relationality in worlding Global Asias.
This panel addresses magazines in Asia and its diaspora and aims to contribute to growing scholarship on a Global Asias approach to publishing history, visual culture, gender studies, and literary geographies. The goal of this panel is not to come to an agreement on the role of magazines in imagining gender or national borders, but to resist creating a new paradigm to replace “nation” by drawing attention to the “structural incoherence” of Global Asias, which is the term Tina Chen uses to describe the contradictions of competing cultural, social, political, and economic dynamics of “Asia” as a place that is both real and imagined. How does focusing on gendered consumption in magazines help us to understand imagined communities in Asia and its diaspora? What are the transnational and transhistorical visual and literary trends in magazines that challenge the geographies of “Asia”? Further, what happens to the category of “Asia” and its imagined communities when we start including Asian diasporic and Asian American visual continuities in magazines and publishing histories? Finally, how can Global Asias help us to understand how magazines operate and constitute imagined communities within the geo-political space of “Asia” and outside of it?
Download the PDF of this CFP from the Global Asias Initiative Website at this link: https://sites.psu.edu/vergeglobalasias/2021/07/20/aas-2022-cfp-verge-sponsored-panels/