Storying Global Asias

Abstract

Storying Global Asias Tina Chen (bio) In their contribution to the A&Q feature on pedagogy in this issue, Nadine Attewell and Anushay Malik begin their collaboratively authored essay on teaching with the story of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, a Pakistani poet whose peregrinations connected him to a global network of writers and thinkers committed to realizing the unfulfilled dream of decolonization. Attewell and Malik suggest that Faiz’s global itinerary produces “a Global Asia/s story” that we should recognize as such. We might understand labeling this a Global Asias story as a move that is primarily descriptive in nature, referring to Faiz’s South Asian origins, his international collaboration with other leftist thinkers while living in Beirut and editing the quarterly Lotus, his long-standing relationships with readers and supporters in and beyond Asia, or some combination of these elements. But, as Attewell and Malik remind us, Global Asias stories are not always centered on the representational, important as that is. Indeed, while these stories can be about the figures and places constellating Asia and its multiple diasporas, they are also about how the “imaginable ageography” (Chen 2021) of Global Asias enables us to tell new stories about people, places, and the nature of the work we are doing as writers, thinkers, readers, and teachers. In other words, what if we expand our notion of what counts as a Global Asias story by exploring the ways in which such stories are platforms of invention, narratives that allow us to illuminate the possibilities and limits of the vast imaginable ageographies encompassed by Global Asias itself? Inspired by this prospect, this editor’s introduction synthesizes the diverse features and essays included here through the varied practices and uses of storying Global Asias. Although the topics, figures, issues, and problems examined in this open issue are widely varied, they collectively [End Page vi] operate to make visible the conjectural opportunities generated by the Global Asias story, a narrative praxis that is never singular but rather proliferates across and between borders and boundaries. Storying Global Asias brings into visibility nodal points of collective interest and engagement, idiosyncratic constellations that nonetheless cast light on some of the questions and concerns animating the unruly nature of Global Asias as both epistemology and narrative. As Louise Gwenneth Philips and Tracy Bunda (2018, 43) have demonstrated, “stories and storying are located,” inextricably bound up with particular times and particular places even if they operate to expand the space and time of meaning-making. The importance of understanding the stories of Global Asias as located even as Global Asias is, itself, not always locatable is evidenced here. Beyond siting their work in particular locations— Okinawa, Brazil, Taiwan, the Philippines, Vietnam, Japan, Kashmir, mainland China, and Hawai‘i, among other places— the contributors to this issue draw attention to the importance of locating themselves as writers, thinkers, researchers, and teachers, emphasizing the significance of storying Global Asias as a dual process of knowledge creation and situatedness. Accordingly, less geographically stable paradigms— the transpacific, diaspora, socialist Américas, Asian America, the oceanic, empire, and institution—operate in dynamic tension with the geohistorical sites listed above to make visible the paradox of location/unlocatability that marks Global Asias stories. ________ This issue’s Convergence section opens with an A&Q feature titled “The Problems and Possibilities of Global Asias Pedagogy.” Building on a series of Global Asias Cyber Chats in 2021– 22 that Verge and the Global Asias Initiative cosponsored with the Global Asia program at Simon Fraser University and the Global Asian Studies Program at the University of Illinois Chicago, this feature invites colleagues to reflect on their experiences in the classroom, in their programs, and at their institutions in an effort to bring the theoretical and conceptual developments of Global Asias scholarship into dialogue with their role as educators. Working in varied institutional contexts and approaching the challenge of teaching Global Asias from different disciplinary vantage points, the feature’s authors— Nadine Attewell, Anushay Malik, David Ludden, Michael R. Jin, and Mark Chiang— share a series of generative insights about Global Asias pedagogy. They collectively encourage us to “interrogate Asia as not just a place, a...