Global Asias as Imaginable Ageography

As Edward Said, Naoki Sakai, and others have noted, Asia is a place both real and imagined and its significance often derives from its deployment as a way of indexing relationality and positionality. Exploring the ways in which contemporary Asian/American speculative fictions register the evolving imaginability of the worlds we inhabit, study, and create—and drawing on the possibilities of Asian America as an ageographic concept—I suggest the importance of conceptualizing Global Asias as imaginable ageography and explore the critical and aesthetic implications of such conceptualization.  The talk will first focus on the theoretical possibilities of ageography before elaborating on the ways in which Asian/American speculative fictions offer new means of imagining into being the structural incoherence of Global Asias as both place and concept.

Tina Chen is Associate Professor of English and Asian American Studies at The Pennsylvania State University and author of Double Agency: Acts of Impersonation in Asian American Literature and Culture, which was named a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title. Her national leadership roles include several stints as the co­-Chair of the East of California caucus for the Association for Asian American Studies; serving on the Executive Board of the MLA's Division on Asian American Literature; and being the Founding Editor of Verge: Studies in Global Asias—an award-winning journal published by the University of Minnesota Press.  She is also the Director of the Global Asias Initiative at Penn State.