Despite its connections with Western imperial cartography and orientalist philology, “Asia” has played an essential role in the articulation of a wide range of national and regional identities in modern Asia itself. Indeed, far from becoming antiquated, appeals to “Asia” have, if anything, intensified in current political discourses, even as historians pay ever more attention to past forms of intra-Asian connections and aspirations to solidarity. This seminar aims to bring into dialogue with one another some of these diverse—indeed often contradictory—forms, histories, and uses of “Asia” as a metageographic category.

Topics might include cultural pan-Asianisms of the early twentieth century; Soviet constructions of “the East”; collaboration with and/or permutations of pan-Asianism in the Japanese Empire; the place of Asia in Cold War-era non-allied movements; connections and/or comparisons of Pan-Asianism with other pan- movements; the afterlives of Takeuchi Yoshimi’s “Asia as Method”; and Asia” in contemporary anti-Western nationalisms.

We are especially interested in counter-intuitive or unexpected appropriations and reappropriations of Asia, both within the continent (however conceived) and beyond. How do discourses of “solidarity” sit with many Asianisms’ connections to imperialism? Do appeals to Asia represent an alternative to the nation-state, or empower it?  What do histories and theories “Asia” suggest about the geographic imaginary of literary studies more generally? How might the diversity of these Asias and their uses inform ongoing debates about world literature and the contemporary cultural politics of deglobalization?