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This paper examines Arif Dirlik's work on the Asia-Pacific region's transformation into a "model region of globalization." Writing amidst the crisis of the Social Sciences, Dirlik analyzed how global capitalism's drive to simultaneously homogenize and fragment the world, a condition he termed "global modernity," had not only restructured the Asia-Pacific region so as to meet the demands of a new flexible mode of production, but also transformed knowledge production about the world, giving way to an endless splintering of knowledge that reinforced the logics of global capitalism and foreclosed any possibility for radical critique. Drawing on Asian American studies, Pacific Studies and Indigenous Studies, which emerged in the Asian-Pacific borderlands between social activism and the academy, Dirlik called attention to the local as the primary site of inquiry and advocated for radical scholarly and activist approaches grounded in a "critical localism" against the hegemony of global capitalism. This paper explores how Dirlik's work on the Asia-Pacific region generates the possibility for crafting what the anarchist sociologist Philippe Corcuff describes as "fragile epistemologies" of the plural social global. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on topics including Asia Cultural Studies "Asian American Studies in Asia"; "Studying and Teaching Asian American Studies in East Asia"; and South Korean journal "Studies in Modern Fiction".

This essay investigates the stakes involved in responding to transpacific texts in East Asia, specifically in universities in Macau and Taiwan. It focuses on responses to two texts that represent in distinct ways precariatized lives in a transpacific frame: Souvankham Thammavongsa's Found, a text that uncovers a path from Laos to a refugee camp in Thailand to Canada, a path made legible through a scrapbook kept by Thammavongsa's father; and Rita Wong's forage, a text that cuts across and between South China and North America to track the movements of peoples and goods and waste, including the movement of electronic waste (or "e-waste"). By discussing selected responses to these texts, this essay investigates how such responses can be considered as part of a long-term pedagogical process of cultivating imaginations and striving to develop forms of responsibility to what this essay calls transpacific precarities. It suggests that carefully attending to such responses, always partial and in progress, can help us to better understand Asian American studies in East Asia as it continues to evolve through acts of teaching and learning in different sites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Nanking Massacre is a historical event that invokes many contestations and tensions, as the recollection of what took place in Nanking during the six weeks from December 1937 to February 1938 is always under the influence of political circumstances and ideologies. This article explores the contemporary historical narratives and fictional representations of the Nanking Massacre to see how it has been remembered. The article mainly addresses North American academic debates over the Nanking massacre, and analyzes three novels by immigrant Chinese American authors, Qi Shouhua’sWhen the Purple Mountain Burns, Ha Jin’sNanjing Requiem,andYan Geling’sThe Flowers of War. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Seminal essays on Korean American writers were published in Korea in the 1960s and 1970s. But Asian American literary studies has been flourishing only from the 1990s thanks to Korean scholars' interest in overseas Korean literatures, the centennial of Korean immigration to the US in 2003, and the rise of Asian American literary studies in the US. An analysis of the articles and book-length studies shows the general trends of Asian American literary studies in Korea: Korean scholars are interested more in close readings of individual texts than in general, intraethnic, interethnic, and interracial studies; they prefer narratives to plays and poems; they focus on Korean American literature; they study not only Anglophone Korean American literature but also Korean-language American texts. Korean scholars' focus on Korean American literature significantly points at new directions in Asian American literary studies—towards broader, comparative, transnational, and translingual readings of Asian American texts. In conclusion, Korean scholars have actively participated in the international discursive networks of scholars interested in Asian American literature with their uniquely Korean perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article sets forth the history of the academic activities of the Asian American Literature Association (AALA) in order to explore the evolution of Asian American Studies in Japan. When the AALA was established in 1989, several scholars had already published research papers on Asian American literature, as had researchers involved energetically in the study of Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans. Around the time when AALA was established, other research groups focusing on immigration studies were formed. In 1993, several members of the AALA presented their papers at the annual meetings of other associations and, as a result, the activities of the AALA became known to a wider academic community. In 1994, the AALA published its first annual journal and, around 1995, the number of papers on Asian American literature and culture accepted by authoritative journals in Japan began to increase. By the end of the 1990s, Asian American studies made its presence conspicuous in the field of American studies in Japan. Since the turn of the century, a growing number of Asian Americanists in Japan have become engaged in interdisciplinary studies, thus providing new perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This short essay situates this journal's special issue within the Cold War history and politics of transpacific knowledge formation by calling on Edward W. Said's concept of ‘traveling theory.’ Contributors to this groundbreaking collective project have shown us that Asian American critique interfaced with Asia can upset the discipline's boundary and its assumptions enough to generate new questions and objects of inquiry. At the same time, a discipline's travel necessarily accompanies and (re)institutes troubling apparatuses of knowledge and power. Of particular concern here are the two elements that largely set the discursive parameters of Asian American studies as they have been institutionalized in the United States: liberal multiculturalism and the ethno-national organization of knowledge. Also integral to the area studies formations, they have together served as a powerful epistemic tool for the US-led Cold War geopolitical management of the post-Second World War, postcolonial world. What are the consequences of traveling knowledge uncritical of such earlier history? The essay suggests that the inter-Asia, transpacific critique and its historical materialist interrogation of the Cold War legacies in Asia should remain urgent if we were to sustain the productively unsettling effects of Asian American studies' travel to Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the significance of engaging in Asian American studies in Asia, with examples drawn primarily from Japan. It asks: what happens when this US-based racial minority studies is relocated to the place where Asians do not constitute racial minorities? The paper argues that, on the one hand, the intellectual encounter between Asia and Asian America encourages the US-based minority studies to examine their implications in American imperialism in their perceptions towards Asia. On the other hand, Asian American studies as the racial minority discourse forces ethno-racial majority Asians, with all our ethnic, national, and other differences, to reflect upon the racial, ethnic, and (neo)colonial relations in our own lands while critiquing the inequalities that are taking place in and across Asia. The paper looks at the forms of minority struggles in Japan, zainichi Koreans and Okinawans, in order to propel the US Asian American scholars to decentralize their work and perspectives. It is my hope that this new perspective generated from Asia-based Asian American studies will help construct a place of mutual learning, where we can engage in conversation to ask new questions, to challenge and transform Asian American studies as we know it. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]