CfP: Verge 15.218.10.2026 {en}

Issue 15.2: Cold War Realignments in Global Asias

Edited by Shuang Shen and Jooyeon Rhee

Deadlines | verge[at]psu.edu

Convergence proposals: September 30, 2027

Essays: May 1, 2028

On the Theme

Privileging Manichean divisions and territorial boundaries, the Cold War’s cartographic imagination limits us from exploring the complicated trajectories of alignment and interconnectivity spanning Global Asias. With the aim of generating constructive new approaches to Cold War arrangements and orientations, this special issue proposes a radical shift in imagining borders, boundaries, and movements across Asia and its multiple diasporas. It centers non-mainstream geopolitical players (including ethnic minorities, migrant populations, prisoners of wars, female soldiers, war orphans, and others) and cultural forms (such as popular literature, youth subcultures, music, and visual media) in an effort to track engagements across political, cultural, economic, or emotional divides.

The issue’s goal of tracing new geographies and understudied entanglements is animated by theorizing realignment. In centering realignment, we draw attention to the figuration of new geopolitical alliances and faultlines in the movement of the gendered and itinerate bodies across the borders. Foregrounding their loyalties and viewpoints, we identify new positions from which to undertake Cold War critique while diverting the exclusive focus on how individual nation-states are aligned geopolitics. We are especially interested in the dynamics between intimacy and conflict, understanding these not as oppositional but instead mutually imbricated. This engagement with realignment ultimately taps into the neglected sites of articulation between the hitherto under-studied empires with new imperialisms and superpowers of the Cold War.

We invite papers that attend to the how understudied archives or neglected genres or materials bring out new perspectives on the geographies and realignment of the Cold War in post-imperial, inter-imperial, postcolonial, and postwar Global Asias. We particularly welcome projects that explore popular cultural forms such as pulp fiction, detective or spy films, diary or memoir, comics, translation or imaginative retelling of canonical or Western narratives, pop music, etc. We are interested in exploring how these non-canonical, non-elite cultural productions reconfigure the scales of the personal, the national, and the political. And we hope to explore how inter-media adaptation, intercultural referencing, and inter-ethnic or interlingual exchange engender different modes of Cold War realignment in terms of genre, media form, or national culture.

Convergence Feature Proposals

One of Verge: Studies in Global Asias’ distinctive features is an opening section called Convergence, where we curate a rotating series of rubrics that emphasize collaborative intellectual engagement and exchange. Each issue features several of the following rubrics: A&Q, a responsive dialogue, either in interview or roundtable format, inspired by a set of questions; Codex, a collaborative discussion and assessment of books, films, and events; Translation, for texts, primary or secondary, not yet available in English; Field Trip, reports from various subfields of disciplines; Portfolio, commentaries on visual images; Interface, texts exploring the resources of the print-digital world; and our newest feature, Cross Talk, a multi-faceted conversation about a text of shared interest that employs dialogue and annotation as critical genres of scholarly engagement. We welcome those interested in these features to submit a Convergence proposal for the issue.

Proposals should be 1-2 pages in length and indicate what kind of feature is being proposed; demonstrate an awareness of the formats utilized by the journal; include an abstract and, if collaborative, a list of proposed contributors; and include a short (2 pg) cv. The Convergence proposals deadline is September 30, 2027; however, we encourage those interested in submitting a proposal to contact the editors about their ideas in advance of this date. Please direct all inquiries and submissions to verge[at]psu.edu.

Essay Submissions

Essays (between 6,000-10,000 words) and abstracts (125 words) should be submitted electronically through this submission form (https://forms.gle/MSnmwohWNZWTcZgQ8) by May 1, 2028 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 chapter 15 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 at https://sites.psu.edu/vergeglobalasias/2026/09/30/verge-15-2-call-for-papers/.

Source: Verge 15.2 Call for Papers, H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online „CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.“