Call for Papers: Special Issue: The Chinese Factor: Reorienting Global Imaginaries in American Studies
Edited by Chih-ming Wang (Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan) and Yu-Fang Cho (Miami University, Oxford, Ohio)
The rise of China, both as a palpable geopolitical force and a contested discursive formation, has centrally occupied US global imaginaries in the most recent decade: from the controversies surrounding the Confucius Institute in the United States to the disputes over territories in South China Sea; from the hypervisibility of “Chinese” capital to the heterogeneous diasporas that contest what constitutes Chineseness; and from China’s “One Belt, One Road” master plan that integrates Central Asia and Southeast Asia to the struggles of democracy in Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan. As a geopolitical and discursive factor with global implications, the rise of China poses imminent epistemological and political challenges to American studies and its sense of the world.
The 2017 special issue of American Quarterly, “The Chinese Factor: Reorienting Global Imaginaries in American Studies,” will build on critical transpacific studies by complicating and interrogating existing paradigms for comprehending the rise of China discourse vis-à-vis the place of the United States in the world. As a new iteration of the Yellow Peril discourse, such orientalist imagining persistently reproduces and reifies China as a threatening and monolithic alterity. As such, this dominant discourse often erases and obscures heterogeneous genealogies, critical contestations, and translocal formations within and across China, Asia, the Pacific, and beyond. This special issue seeks to unpack the specific workings of this iteration through simultaneous valuation and devaluation, where Chinese market, labor, capital, language, and culture are alternately posited as vital to securing US global power yet highly suspicious and dispensable. How do we understand America’s schizophrenic imaginings of China and their implications, as China has risen from the ashes of the Cold War to this moment of neoliberal precarity as America’s greatest creditor, supplier, and contender for hegemony? How has America’s premier object of love and hate functioned as a historical, material, and cultural force in the US effort to remake itself in response to the shifting world order? What new archives could be activated to create openings onto alternative routes of knowledge, cultural and social formations, and political affiliations within and beyond the orbits of empires? This special issue welcomes critical practices, analyses, and visions that explore historical and contemporary intimacies of race, gender, sexuality, class, and nation in comparative contexts as ways to facilitate self-reflexive dialogues between American studies, critical ethnic studies, and Asian studies.
Possible topics include but are not limited to the following:
- Migrations, circuits of flexible accumulation of capital and networks of moving bodies, the expansion of US universities, and the emergence of global studies;
- Valuation and devaluation of racialized, gendered, and sexualized bodies and labor in comparative contexts;
- Critiques of and affinities across overlapping settler colonialism, neocolonialism, and neoliberalism in cultural production and social movement;
- Race, queer belonging, and post/Cold War campaigns for democracy; and
- Chinese/Taiwanese American cultural and social formations in spaces such as college campuses, garment sweatshops, chop-suey restaurants, and the Silicon Valley.
American Quarterly publishes one special issue per year each September. Special issues are edited by the guest editors in collaboration with the AQ editors and the AQ Managing Board. They are comprised of a combination of essays that are solicited by the editors and essays that are submitted to a call for papers. The process is subject to editorial but not blind peer review. For more information on special issues and a look back at past special issues, please visit the Special Issues page.
Submissions are due August 1, 2016. Authors must address the guest editors and clearly indicate in a cover letter that the submission is intended for the special issue. Accepted submissions will appear in American Quarterly, volume 69, issue 3 (Fall 2017). Learn more about the submission guidelines.
Future Special Issues
The AQ Managing Board is open to proposals for future special issues, including special issues that include online and hyperlink elements. Please email your special issue proposal directly to aqhawaii@hawaii.edu with subject line: “AQ Special Issue Proposal.”