The term “Asian Century” has more than one origin story. Narrators
are multiple, located in both Asia and the West. In a 1988 summit,
China’s Deng Xiaoping, alongside Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, may
have coined the phrase by calling it into question: “In recent years,
people have been saying that the next century will be the century of
Asia and the Pacific, as if that were sure to be the case. I disagree
with this view.” For Deng, skepticism about the inevitability of Asia’s
rise was going to be crucial to the India-China partnership against the
“developed” world; his skepticism hasn’t aged well. In the wake of the
2008 financial crisis, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared a
“pivot to Asia” in “America’s Pacific Century.” Clinton’s emphatic
recapitulation of the “Asian Century” revived Western tropes of Asian
ascendancy that predated Asia’s contemporary economic rise by more than a
hundred years, while betraying American anxieties about the decline of
US hegemony. In fact, both Deng and Clinton were responding to a process
that had been underway since at least the early-1970s: the “long
downturn” or tendential decline in profitability of Western economies
that ran alongside the “economic miracles” of many Asian economies,
including Japan’s Cold War-era boom and India’s and China’s eventual
liberalization. For some, the Asian Century was, or is, a solution. Now,
in an era of mounting deglobalization, its contradictions are just as
sharply felt as its curious staying power.
What distinguishes the current round of Asian Century discourse is
perhaps its mutual construction by “Asians” and “Westerners” alike. When
the Asian Century came into wide currency in the 1990s, replacing a
then-regnant “Pacific Rim” and “Pacific Century” rhetoric, it remediated
a long history of similarly totalizing visions that issued not least
from the “Asians” themselves: from Japan’s monstrous pursuit of the
Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere and Ferdinand Marcos’s
dictatorial imposition of neoliberal programs in the Philippines, to the
advertisement of the “Singapore model” and even China’s “century of
humiliation,” which continues to vouchsafe its nationalist ressentiment.
As Wang Hui’s analysis of the politics of imagining Asia has shown,
visions of the Asian Century betray contradictory regionalist and
nationalist ambitions that are held in focus by the apparatuses of the
state and the culture industries. Thus Asian Century discourse is
typically inflected by a nation or speaker’s position vis-a-vis key
market and state brokers. Given that the meaning of “Asia” looks
different depending on the vantage of Taiwan, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, or for
that matter Saudi Arabia, what is the role of pan-Asian alliances and
inter-Asian competition in constituting the Asian Century? Is Asia
“one”—or only in the eyes of the West?
This special issue invites critical perspectives from scholars
working in and across multiple languages and disciplines. We seek
submissions that explore the Asian Century as idea, method, and media,
and that examine its genealogies and itineraries from a range of
contexts and histories, including of labor, empire, capital, war,
technology, pandemics, dispossession, modernization, culture, and
aesthetics. With “idea, method, and media,” we intend to inspire, but
not circumscribe, the possible range of disciplinary approaches and
primary sources that might be enlisted in responding to this call.
Indeed, the idea of the Asian Century may very well be predicated on
counter-articulations of its impossibility. While the Asian Century may
appear at first as periodizing marker or geopolitical diagnostic, we
propose that it can also be read across media and cultural forms, as an
affective relation to the past, present, and future, as a structure of
feeling, and as a visual and sensorial regime. Finally, in proposing the
Asian Century as method, we seek to revisit and reimagine the
interdisciplinary stakes of the longstanding conversation on “Asia as
method.”
For example, what humanistic and social scientific methods can best
track the concept’s intellectual and institutional emergence,
circulation, and mediation, including well before the 21st century? How
might regional Asian rivalries shape the supply chains and the capital
flows of emerging trade blocs like the Regional Comprehensive Economic
Partnership (RCEP) and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)? How have
cultural production and intellectual exchange furnished the cognitive
and affective frameworks for these blocs, and for Asian visions of
global expansion like China’s “Belt and Road” initiative, South Korea’s
cultural exports, and Taiwan’s advanced semiconductor industry? Given
the increasing salience of the Asian Century as a concept for
periodizing the contradictions of neoliberal capitalism, how might we
trace its effects and iterations in and beyond political economy? What
was the Asian Century, understood as visions and projections of Asia’s
rise promoted by those who stood to benefit from such characterizations?
What of the legacy and future of Third World decolonization and
Indigenous struggles when Asian peripheries become, or have threatened
to become, global powers? Rather than take for granted the rise of Asia
as such, we seek to understand how and why Asia’s ostensible ascendance
has seen not a lessening but rather a retrenchment of the conditions of
planetary inequality.
Essay Submissions
Essays (between 6,000–10,000 words) and abstracts (125 words) should be submitted electronically through this submission form by May 1, 2024 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.
Please direct all inquiries to verge@psu.edu.
