Crossing Oceans of Time and Space in Transpacific Asian American Literature

Dear Colleagues,

Dedicated to transpacific Asian American literature, this Special Issue of Humanities welcomes contributions that encourage conversations across Asian American and Pacific Islander, as well as Asian, studies, including countries across Southeast Asia. Past scholarship has investigated shared legacies of imperialism, decolonial rhetorics, and indigenous resiliency. On the variegated aesthetic canvas of fiction, past areas have also included the intersectionality of race, gender, and sexuality formations; complicated constructions of the inscrutable Asian American body; home, persecution, and migration; the travel narrative, ecology, and human ecology; food studies and the trope of consumption; and literature as historiography and critical geography. Studies have thematized the violence and grief of silenced colonial histories and the promise of communal participation, collective wisdom, and social justice. Recent subjects extend the discourse of the racialized body to include emotional poetics and the sensory, as well as the speculative, including Asian American specters, i.e., ghost stories of the displaced and dispossessed, as well as the repossessed. Topics have also included cross-racial and ethnic solidarity, political representation and positionality, as well as resistance and sovereignty. However, other areas of study likewise consider the importance of authorial intention, narrative perspective, and audience reception in cross-genre works of Asian American literature.

Even though these foci may seem exhaustive, as one may be tempted to ask, “What more is there to say?”, these only scratch the surface, and the true question is “What more can be said?” Continuing the scholarship of the past fifty or more years of Asian American (including North and South American), Pacific Islander, and Asian studies, this Special Issue of Humanities invites essays and articles that not only extend this work but also explore new terrains, creating a bridge across these studies by utilizing a transpacific framework, diasporic and migratory in nature. (That said, U.S.-centric articles, discussing territorial rule and settler claims, as well as overseas occupations, are welcome, as they reflect the how and the why of the United States as it is today in the world of nations and global economy.) Analyzed works of literature can cross genres, including the performance arts, young adult literature, and literature for children. Even though author interviews and book reviews cannot be accepted, excerpts of interviews and book reviews can be incorporated into one’s intended contribution. Essays that discuss philosophical, religious, and theoretical approaches, as well as Indigenous cosmologies or the pedagogy of transpacific Asian American literature, including the importance of interdisciplinarity, are welcome.

A tentative timeline:

ABSTRACT DEADLINE: 31 December 2025

NOTIFICATION OF ACCEPTED ABSTRACTS: 31 January 2026

Dr. Marie-Therese C. Sulit
Guest Editor

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• Asian American literature
• Pacific Islander
• young adult literature