Chapter 16 - Global Asias

Summary

Global Asias is a conceptual framework generated out of the frequently incompatible institutional structures that organize the academic knowledge production of Asia and its multiple diasporas. Bringing Asian Studies, Asian American Studies, and Asian Diaspora Studies into nonaligned relation, this chapter acknowledges the structural incoherence of Global Asias as both object and approach and proposes the concept of imaginable ageography. The chapter draws attention to the ways in which key conceptual topographies such as the Orient, Asian America, the transpacific, and Global Asias bring into visibility specific geographic features and characteristics (and acknowledge geopolitical structures) but develop conceptual realities that simultaneously reference, exceed, and remake such topographies imaginatively. The chapter illustrates the theoretical possibilities of ageography by treating contemporary Asian/American works of speculative vision - including Ruth Ozeki’s novel A Tale for the Time Being (2013), the literary anthology The SEA is Ours: Tales of Steampunk Southeast Asia (2015), and the digital photographic collages of Yang Yongliang’s From the New World (2016). In drawing out the ageographic dimensions of conceptual topographies, the chapter argues for the critical potential of discordance in theorizing Global Asias.