Call for Abstracts - Amerasia Journal Special Issue on “Marxism and Asian American Studies”
Guest Editors: Calvin Cheung-Miaw (Duke University), Cynthia Yuan Gao (Middlebury College), Colleen Lye (UC Berkeley)
Submission Requirements: 500-word abstracts due June 15, 2025; essays selected for peer review (5000-6000 words not including endnotes) due November 15, 2025.
A common perception of Asian American studies is that, in emphasizing the centrality of race and rejecting class reductionism, its mission has been to go “beyond” Marxism. This special issue begins from a different premise: Though it is certainly the case that many scholars working in Asian American studies today do not identify as Marxist, we understand the histories of Asian American studies and Marxism in the U.S. to have been deeply and organically interconnected. Demands for Asian American studies were first raised during a “Third Worldist” moment in U.S. radical activism. And during the 1970s, Third World Marxism, especially Maoism, was influential among the Asian American activists who created, led, and taught in the Asian American studies wing of ethnic studies. How did Marxism leave its imprint on Asian American studies as it gained institutional permanence? How did Asian American studies’ evolution of its methodologies continue to be informed by the internationalist and anticapitalist ethos of its founding moment, and by the broad geopolitical transformations that marked the passing of a world revolutionary age—particularly the decline of revolutionary Third Worldist projects, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the adaptation of the Chinese Communist Party to the capitalist world system, the changing class and ideological composition of Asian American populations, the arrival of Asian exiles and refugees with direct experience of the injustices of Asian revolutionary projects?
The current moment calls for a reassessment of the relationship between Asian American studies and Marxism. The longstanding assumption of Asian American studies as a critical practice, beyond its identity as an academic field, has been that Asian Americanists are tasked with developing the intellectual resources for an emergent, radical, internationalist political subject, imagined as an Asian American collectivity. This assumption is ever more up for contestation. Within Asian American communities, class contradictions now form a crucial political dynamic affecting struggles around issues ranging from police brutality and incarceration to housing, educational access, hate crime legislation, queer and trans liberation, and the terms of diasporic identities. While the power of authoritarian regimes is on the ascent, including in the U.S. and Asia, pointing toward forever wars, genocide, and climate catastrophe, antiimperialist politics and labor movements today remain mired in twentieth-century paradigms, and internationalist solidarity needs organized infrastructure. Within the academy, the convergence of crises of neoliberalism and the Black Lives Matter movement has generated greater interest in theories of racial capitalism, but we do not yet have a full understanding of where Asian Americans fit within those theories.
Our wager is that a better appreciation of the relationship between Asian American studies and Marxism will provide a crucial basis for thinking through the questions preoccupying Asian Americanists today. We seek articles that recover the conjoined development of Asian American studies and Marxism in history, or push their entanglement in new theoretical
directions. Especially desired are articles that reflect on questions of theory and method even when examining concrete case studies or historical examples of social movement activity.
We are (but not only) interested in contributions that take up any of the following prompts from different disciplinary approaches: e.g., historical, sociological and ethnographic, theoretical or philosophical, literary and cultural.
What is the relationship to Marxism of any of the key frameworks that have prevailed and/or are newly ascendant in Asian American studies: e.g., racial formation theory and relational racialization, Asian Americanist cultural critique, Asian settler colonialism, abolition, critical refugee studies? What are their contributions to the development of Marxist theory since the moment of peak Third Worldism?
What organizational histories of activist groups or campaigns might we reconstruct to discover the continuation or afterlife of the Asian American Movement after 1980?
How might new contextualizations by critical political economy (or a critique of political economy) lead to a reassessment of (any aspect of) Asian American politics since the 1960s-70s or at other key historical moments?
How might the relationship of Asian American studies to such fields as area studies, ethnic studies, and Black studies be better understood through a materialist lens?
What works of Asian American literature, art, performance and/or visual culture might be considered Marxist or Marxist-adjacent? How do such works illustrate the purchase of cultural materialist claims for Asian American culture?
What would a materialist approach to contemporary Asian American racialization look like? How can contemporary Asian American community antagonisms be understood in terms of class conflict?
What have been the points of contact between theory and practice—including but not restricted to academia and activism—that indicate the aspirations to a U.S. Asian Left since 1980? This special issue will consider first-person reflections on the relationship between Asian American studies and movement organizing. We invite activists who have been involved in Asian American-identified, multiracial, and/or left-progressive organizing to submit critical reflections on how Asian American studies has (or has not) informed their political practice.
Submission Guidelines and Review Process
Please email 500-word abstracts as Word attachments to Arnold Pan, UCLA AASC Press Editor, at arnoldpan@ucla.edu, by June 15, 2025.
Initial review of abstracts by editorial staff
Papers approved by editors for consideration will undergo blind peer review; editors will
provide further instructions on how to prepare the manuscript
Revision of accepted peer-reviewed papers and final submission
Authors of abstracts selected for full papers to be considered for publication will be notified by June 30, 2025 and asked to submit their essays for peer review by November 15, 2025. Authors of essays under consideration will be invited to UC Berkeley for a public symposium and manuscript workshop hosted by the Asian American Research Center (AARC) at UC Berkeley on December 5-6, 2025.
Source: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kmGQuEO9QpLdsQGUYA4j0NwMtf8GJCU7/view?mc_cid=5e392f8643&mc_eid=c264f82e09
