D'où Venons Nous, Que Sommes Nous, Où Allons Nous?

Abstract

2 A & Q whose work, institutional locations, geographic foci, and disciplinary training showcase Verge’s range and interests. Bringing together scholars working in disparate fields—including literary studies, history, political science, theater studies, film and media studies, art history, geography, and urban planning—we asked contributors to reflect on the state of their discipline and field at the present time and to consider what they themselves might, knowing what they know now, do differently. Specifically , A&Q participants were tasked with answering one or more of the following questions: 1. What is the idea, your own or someone else’s, whose future most excites you today? 2. If you could go back in time and meet yourself in graduate school, what field or subfield outside your current area of expertise would you encourage yourself to study, and why? 3. To what overlooked book or “outdated” concept of the last two or three decades could your field most benefit from returning with fresh eyes today? To tease out connections as well as possible conflicts, we asked David Palumbo-Liu and Jeffrey Wasserstrom to read over the replies and write responses to them. The lively, eloquent, provocative, and thoughtful approaches demonstrated in the following essays make this A&Q one of the features we’re most excited about for the journal’s inaugural issue. D’où Venons Nous, Que Sommes Nous, Où Allons Nous? David Palumbo-Liu It was hard to resist thinking on Paul Gaughin’s famous Tahitian painting of 1897, conceived at a particular nodal point of Euro-Pacific meandering and cultural production. It is hard to decide where or who the “we” are in that painting, which kinds of psychic or cosmic maps to deploy, what ontological or epistemological frames to impose. In not unlike fashion, the essays collected in this first issue of Verge do all they were asked to do—and that is to reassess where we have come in the past many years in our thinking about Asia, and Asian America, and to (re)imagine the possible connections between these two fields. Verge is aptly named— as a noun, the term verge indicates a border, an edge, a rim; as a verb, it indicates closing in on something, being proximate in character or space. All of the essays collected here verge toward each other from A & Q 3 different angles (largely disciplinary); some meet fairly squarely on similar terrain, others gesture toward one another from a distance, some are faintly resonant, others just exist on different facets of a rim. In commenting on them, from my assigned position—as a meta-reader of these texts and also as someone who began in eleventh-century Chinese poetry and ended up in contemporary Asia Pacific America—I find that we are exploring new concepts and inventing new subfields while still working within the residual disciplinary practices and assumptions in which many of us were brought up. In what follows, I both trace these issues as they exist in Asian studies and in Asian American studies and also show how the two fields, while converging, also diverge in critical ways. This tension between convergence and divergence helps illuminate both fields and also suggests common ways forward. Because we have been invited to be autobiographical, I will take that license to say that my involvement in both Asian and Asian American studies came from a particular personal interest that would probably be mappable via the degraded rubric “identity politics.” A Chinese American growing up in a rigorously all-white community separated from the hot bed of Berkeley by only a twenty-minute drive through the Caldecott Tunnel, I was confounded by the spatial separation rather than the temporal one. One had to drive through a mountain tunnel to get from the intense homogeneity of still-pastoral suburbs to the radical multiracial enclave of Berkeley. My interest in delving into traditional Chinese culture was animated by a desire to legitimize myself as Chinese as much as my desire to join the Asian American movement that was fed by an interest in community activism and what would come to be called multi­ cultural education. This was facilitated by Ling-chi Wang, himself a refugee from the University of Chicago’s...