Positions ─ Twenty Years After

To celebrate the twentieth anniversary of positions, this special issue grapples with the journal’s origins in the critique of Cold War area studies and its ongoing role in providing openings for theoretically engaged scholarship. Essays, interviews, and visual art allow contributors to explore how positions has encouraged alternative analytical modes for the study of politics, engaged literary theory, queer theory, and economic, religious, and artistic cultures through the lens of Asia. The issue speculates on how future scholarship will negotiate the transformations wrought by the declining hegemony of US-dominated Asian studies in the academic world. Consistent with the journal’s core mission, the issue combines current assessments of broad scholarly disciplines, such as Marxism, cultural studies, and queer studies, with illustrative case studies on topics ranging from Korean real estate markets to the border-crossing experiences of migrant laborers to early twentieth-century advertising in China. A collection of contemporary Asian visual art presented throughout the issue offers a challenge and testament to the political and interpretive scope of positions’ past and future.

Contributors: Tani E. Barlow, Tina Mai Chen, Harry Harootunian, Rebecca Karl, Thomas LaMarre, Boreth Ly, Rosalind C. Morris, Claudia Pozzana, Christophe Robert, Lisa Rofel, Alessandro Russo, Naoki Sakai, Jesook Song, Norman A. Spencer, Rolando B. Tolentino, Wang Hui, Angela Zito

Tani E. Barlow is the T. T. and W. F. Chao Professor of Asian History and the Director of the Chao Center for Asian Studies at Rice University. She is the author of The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism and New Asian Marxisms, both also published by Duke University Press.