Theatre Journal – Minor Asias

Theatre Journal

Call for Papers

Special Issue for September 2020: Minor Asias

The 50th anniversary of Asian American Studies has coincided with a number of phenomena that challenge the ways in which we might think about the utility and limits of that rubric. Increased policing of particular minority communities within China, protests in Hong Kong, growing recognition of indigeneity in Taiwan, ongoing tensions between Okinawa and Japan, recognition of Koryo-Saram in Kazakhstan, regional and ethnic articulations in Thailand, the circulation of diasporas within and beyond the eastern hemisphere—all of these examples point to networks that complicate how Asia means. Moreover, the global financial power of Asian economies, especially within the cultural industries, has produced a number of new subjects such as the African trader in Guangzhou and the white K-Pop band. Theatre and performance studies has slowly been responding to these shifts but, for the most part, has not assumed a central role in the scholarship. Nevertheless, the emphases of our fields on body, space, audience, and technology promise major interventions even as the shifts in Asia itself might challenge assumptions about some of those analytic categories. This special issue, then, takes up Asia together with Asian American and diasporic circulation in the wake of ongoing historical imperialisms and the current era of globalization.

The turn to Minor Asias recognizes several factors. Theatre Journal has accorded relatively little importance to Asian performance (notwithstanding a previous special issue on that topic) in spite of the magnitude and influence of Asian cultural flows now and in the past. Moreover, Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih’s edited volume Minor Transnationalism, argues compellingly for the need to explore what they have called the “transversal” relationships that move above and below the scale of the national and what one might call the continental. Such a call exists in tandem with various regional assertions that have existed and continue to influence politics from the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere imposed by Japan to the Asian Values discourse deployed by Malaysia and Singapore. Lionnet and Shih’s general attention to the minor builds on Edouard Glissant’s ideas of rélation which argues for a decolonizing poetics and an expansive ethics of connection and recognition. In an intersecting analysis, Kuan-Hsing Chen in Asia as Method has tried to articulate how globalization manifests as societies within Asia use one another as a reference point. In this vein, globalization perhaps paradoxically produces regionalization.

Such theoretical conundrums might be productively explored through several material examples, and the editors invite essays from any geographic site or historical period that might articulate “Minor Asia.” As Anna Tsing has written, globalization is a history of social projects that might be traced through the “sticky materiality of practical encounters” that might “give grip to universal aspirations.” We seek to amplify Asia’s importance to theatre and performance studies and to insist on the relevance of theatre and performance to Asian and Asian diasporic studies.

This special issue will be edited by Theatre Journal coeditor Sean Metzger. We will consider both full length essays for the print edition (6,000-9,000 words) as well as proposals for other expressions of interest for our on-line platform. For information about submission, visit our website:https://jhuptheatre.org/theatre-journal/author-guidelines

Submissions (6000-9000 words) should submitted no later than 1 January 2020.

Note: Watch for our transition to submissions via ScholarOne: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/theatrejournal

Until then, submissions should be e-mailed to managing editor Bob Kowkabany (bobkowkabany@me.com)

Feel free to contact the editors with questions or inquiries:
Sean Metzger, Coeditor at smetzger@tft.ucla.edu
Margherita Laera, Online Editor at m.laera@kent.ac.uk