New World Orders and the Geopolitics of the Transpacific

Since the Cold War ended in Europe in the early 1990s, world order has been a crucial subject in American politics and media. From Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man to Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and Remaking of World Order, from Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire to Giovanni Arrighi’s Adam Smith in Beijing, political scientists, sociologists, economists, and historians have engaged the debate on the US-centered world order and explored the changing geopolitics in the twenty-first century. In 2009, literary theorist Eric Hayot provocatively interpreted the changing geopolitics and the transnational movement in literary studies in terms of “the Asian turn” in its historical and economic essence. Indeed, with the emergence of China as the second largest economy in the world and the Chinese State’s initiative on “One Belt, One Road,” the Trump administration has responded by escalating the trade war with China and launching a new Cold War that aims to slow down China’s economic development and block its global influences. What are the significance of Cold War II in formation? How will it impact the US-centered global order in relation to the Asia-Pacific? How do we understand the meanings of democracy and human rights in the Asia-Pacific in the twenty-first century? Why is it important to revisit the US encounters with the Asia-Pacific historically and geopolitically?

This panel not only aims to historicize the US encounters with Asia geopolitically, but it also seeks to move beyond the East Asia-centric approach by highlighting and triangulating the role of Southeast Asia in the traditional studies of US-Asia relations. As literary and cultural studies scholars and theorists, the participants will approach world order and the changing geopolitics of the transpacific from their own unique perspectives and inter-disciplinary interests.

The new geography of the Asia-Pacific: engaging postcolonial theory and geography studies, Tina Chen explores the political and aesthetic implications of the reconceptualization of global Asias in term of what she articulates as “imaginary ageographies.” As she examines contemporary Asian/American speculative fictions, she not only focuses on the theoretical possibilities of ageography but also offers new means of imagining the structural incoherence of Global Asias as both place and concept.

The new and old imperial imagination of the border: from Chen’s ageographies, Brian Roberts moves to imagination and management of what he calls “water border.” He investigates how imperial imagination of border may expand and shape the nation-state in both land and water in the contexts of Indonesia and the US Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands. He articulates the sense of water border as a partial function of the geological and hydrological aqueous and terraqueous materialities and considers them as processes to which governmentality has tended to affix water-based and water-dependent borders.

The legacy and casualty of the US military intervention in Southeast Asia: Cathy Schlund-Vials examines how US military intervention affects the subjectivities of refugees in Southeast Asia, which are necessarily situated in catastrophic environs formed in the troubling aftermaths of war, natural disaster, and economic crisis. Invoking the concept of “prosthetic ecologies,” she argues for a new way of seeing “America’s Asia” through the ruinous dimensions and catastrophic registers of past and present U.S. militarization and empire.

Cold War II between the US and China and its implication for Chinese and Chinese Americans in the US: Engaging and moving beyond Schlund-Vials’ critique of U.S. imperialism, Yuan Shu reads a recent speculative novel, Ghost Fleet, and examines the ways in which the Third World War is imagined and fought in a post-American world and Chinese and Chinese Americans continue to be racialized in a transpacific context. He argues that the representation of Chinese and Chinese Americans has experienced a paradigm shift from “cheap labor” to “high-tech spies” as China rises as a global power vis-à-vis the declining United States.

As part of the intellectual movement in the Asia-Pacific known as "the global Asias," Chen calls attention to the new geopolitics of the transpacific and articulates the divergence and convergence of the movement in re-imagining Asia as a collective in terms of its postcolonial status and as different geopolitical entities with their own interests, identities, and sensibilities.

While Yuan Shu and Donald Pease propose a paradigm shift from the transatlantic to the transpacific and give a new emphasis to indigenous epistemology in transnational American studies, Brian Roberts revamps transnational American studies by highlighting its archipelagic dimension and the connection between the transpacific and Caribbean histories and cultures.

As a Cambodian American scholar, Cathy Schlund-Vials intervenes in transnational American studies, global Asian Studies, and Southeast Asian studies by introducing disability studies and eco-critical studies. To her, what defines the Asia-Pacific finally should not just be technology, economic developments, or global power struggle but our humanities and environments, which sustain all forms of life and all modes of existence.

The panel begins with a 5-minute introduction, is followed by four 10-15 minute presentations, and ends with a 15-minute session of Q and A.