CfP: Verge 13.2: “Things That Matter: Materiality and the Making of Global Asias”6.2.2026 {en}
Verge 13.2: “THINGS THAT MATTER: MATERIALITY AND THE MAKING OF GLOBAL ASIAS”
Essays—May 1, 2026
Edited by Neelima Jeychandran, Monica Merlin , and Tina Chen
On the Theme
Global networks and transcultural exchanges in the Asiatic world were in the making from pre-modern times, with the overland Silk Roads and the maritime seaborne Indian Ocean trade routes connecting vast geographies. Luxury commodities, raw materials, cultural items, and wearable objects—myriad things have moved along the sea lanes. As the contents of the Beilitung and Cirebon shipwrecks demonstrate, a connected world was established through an advanced system of exchange that catered to a need and desire for international goods. As Empires, traders, people, missionaries, and travelers moved a range of things, material objects actively linked the Asian, Mediterranean, Arabian, and African worlds. Within the modern and contemporary world, as things continued to be traded, carried, and transacted, many objects became legitimate representatives of a culture, place, or identity. In other instances, things became treasured heirlooms passed on from person to person and from generation to generation as they not only yoked the past with the present but also produced personal and community narratives on shared histories.
Given this, we invite contributors to think with things to understand and/or map Global Asias world-making by looking at actant objects to discuss how Asians and non-Asians socially encountered, conceptualized, imagined, and sensed distant places, people, and cultures. By focusing on things to anchor intellectual histories, discourses, and affective knowledges on what constitutes Global Asias, we aim to examine the many ways of knowing, adapting, curating, and reinventing Asia and its cultural idioms. Further, as the objects carried and exchanged were diverse, they contributed to distinct modern and contemporary visions of Global Asias directly or indirectly and indexed the plural ways in which mobile and immobile populations visually and aesthetically rendered and reassembled their ideas of Global Asias.
In this special issue, we are especially interested in how things as a source shape narratives on Global Asias and how they assist in reviewing connected practices and spaces (local and trans-local). Instead of privileging the movement of people in the study of Global Asias, we pay attention to objects in motion to bring together proximal and far-removed places as relational and affective geographies. We ask: How do things contribute to pre-modern, modern, and contemporary Global Asias world-making, and how did Asians (and also non-Asians) through their object worlds perceive and mediate (distant and non-distant) places and cultures? How were or are things active in aiding the production and reinforcement of Asian identities in and outside of Asia? How do objects serve as envoys of a culture or work as representatives that create collective memories and shared consciousness and practices? Finally, how can we investigate things asa method for studying Global Asias?
We welcome diverse contributions exploring different methods and approaches from various disciplines to consider how Global Asias get created, reformatted, and repossessed–historically and in contemporary times–through things that matter. As a necessary provocation, here things are conceived beyond those celebrated categories in the dominant narratives of Silk Roads and the oceanic histories of circulation, such as objects of power or with powers, sonorous/aural objects, forbidden items, objects of labor, quotidian itinerant objects, animate and inanimate objects that make spaces, and things that substitute other things. We encourage submissions that consider this call as an opportunity to expand the epistemic potential of Global Asias studies to further discussions on unexpected, hidden, and voiceless stories and probe historical paradoxes that explore how things archive and congeal experiences and collective stories of people, movements, and migrations.
Essay Submissions
Essays (between 6,000-10,000 words) and abstracts (125 words) should be submitted electronically through this submission form (https://bit.ly/43zTyHC) by May 1, 2026 and prepared according to the author-date + bibliography format of the Chicago Manual of Style. See section 2.38 of the University of Minnesota Press style guide or chapter15 of the Chicago Manual of Style Online for additional formatting information. Authors’ names should not appear on manuscripts; instead, please include a separate document with the author’s name, address, institutional affiliations, and the title of the article with your electronic submission. Authors should not refer to themselves in the first person in the submitted text or notes if such references would identify them; any necessary references to the author’s previous work, for example, should be in the third person.
Further information: https://sites.psu.edu/vergeglobalasias/2025/04/09/call-for-papers-for-verge-issue-13-2-things-that-matter-materiality-and-the-making-of-global-asias/.
Source: Verge 13.2: “THINGS THAT MATTER: MATERIALITY AND THE MAKING OF GLOBAL ASIAS”, H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 US.
