Panel: Hidden Histories of Migration in Global Asias: Rethinking Sustainable Publics and Envisioning Change

This panel’s interdisciplinary dialogue illuminates the diverse, hidden histories of transnational Asian
migration circuits after WWII. New scholarship across the disciplines has illuminated transnational Asian displacement and migration practices in ways that challenge hegemonic ideas about racialized citizenship, the state, and belonging. Further, a Global Asias approach across the disciplines interrogates conventional geopolitical frames and recasts our received understanding of the borders and boundaries of Asia, Asian America, and the Asian diaspora; this opens up new possibilities, both in the academy as well as in activist praxis, for creating new counterpublics of engagement and resistance toward sustainable change/justice. Anchored in this Global Asias approach, this panel highlights new research that critically engages with the neglected histories, archives, and experiences of transnational Asian migration since WWII. The panel welcomes papers that consider transnational Asian migration and movement in all their complexity, with attention to how a Global Asias approach generates new critical insights about histories (individual, state, and collective), identities, and counterpublics that have otherwise been obscured.

This interdisciplinary engagement with Asian movement and transit, we hope and contend, offers new, aspirational ways to reimagine activism, identity, belonging, and collective struggle today. The five papers in this panel draw upon the Global Asias approach to chase the specter of justice in the midst of raced migration and dispossession. They do so through an eclectic range of sites and scattered geographies: documentary films, photography, murals, literature, and cooking. Gathering scholars from a range of disciplines as well as public and private institutions, this panel is anchored in an intersectional approach that queers the normative boundaries of Asia, Asian America, and the Asian diaspora. Together, these papers uncover hidden circuits of (im)mobility shaped by race, caste, and gender, that traverse China, India, Bahrain, Japan, Canada, UAE, and the United States. Paying special attention to the changing histories of race and gender, and to the politics of caste, as they shape identity, citizenship, conflict, and belonging, this new research explores how Asian/American cultural representations, across media, can play an important role todayin imagining sustainable change, in recasting redress and reparation, in creating inter-racial solidarity, in rethinking race, gender, and caste, and in demanding justice in the face of violence.