This panel examines the material, corporeal, and textual traces of imperial labor, racialized bodies, and violent intimacies in the unconventional archives of Global Asias. Keeping in mind its formations across multiple imperial and transnational networks, we understand Global Asias as a critical lens that foregrounds both geographical crossings and temporal entanglements. Turning to what we call visceral archives – encompassing ornamental objects, corporeal writings, medical memoirs, and fabulative fiction – we show how these sites of embodied and affective relationality both register and reconfigure asymmetrical processes of race-making across Asia, the Americas, Europe, and Africa. We further interrogate the inherent violence of colonial archives, considering how researchers’ own visceral encounters may reshape queer alterities to the archive and open possibilities beyond established genres and periodizations.

We see our orientation towards the archival methodologies as both an extension—and a possible re-evaluation—of recent conversations in Asian American studies. Emerging from American countercultural movements in the 1960s, Asian American studies as a field has historically centered the ideological formation of the United States and its internal racial hierarchies as its default object of critique. However, as Lisa Lowe (2015) argues, grappling with the intimacies of imperial networks requires scholars to attend to their lineages in various local, regional, and transcontinental contexts. By foregrounding violent intimacies, visceral archives, and suppressed transhistorical relationalities, we hope to further problematize the disciplinary naming of “Asia America” and uncover forms of resistance that still remain underdiscussed within the field’s current formation.

The four papers spanning histories and geographies demonstrate our inquiry into how relational racial formation can be approached through visceral materials and from a perspective that moves beyond U.S.-centrism. Yunning Zhang’s paper examines a talavera poblana planter from colonial Mexico to argue that chinoiserie functioned as a racialized aesthetic technology, encoding transpacific regimes of bondage and liminal Afro-Asian intimacies. Vivian Lei’s paper examines Jamaican writer Patricia Powell’s 1998 novel The Pagoda to show how archives are not self-contained, sanitized sites of knowledge production, but are instead permeated by the “sweat” of otherwise erased or silenced subjectivities. Tianyun Hua’s paper examines wartime diaries in the Chinese Labour Corps in World War I to reveal how emotional labor on the battlefield and inter-racial intimacies interrupted the racialized military chain. Cautioning against uncritical celebration of Afro-Asian solidarity in the Global South, Kun Huang’s paper critiques the racialization of African bodies and diseases in the archives of Chinese medical aid missions.