Abstract
Field Trip 39 In Archipelagic American Studies, edited by Brian Russell Roberts and Michelle Ann Stephens, 1– 54. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Segal, Rafi, and Yonatan Cohen. 2013. “Territorial Map of the World.” Open Democracy, October 7. https://www.opendemocracy.net/rafi -segal-yonatan-cohen/territorial-map-of-world. Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea. 1983. The Law of the Sea: Official Text of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea with Annexes and Index. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Tinsley, Omise’eke Natasha. 2008. “Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic: Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage.” GLQ 14, no. 2– 3: 191– 215. The Imaginable Ageography of Global Asias Tina Chen According to the map, the Inner Union of Lamchungkung is a confederation of provinces that roughly section the country into five regional districts.1 Lamchungkung is geographically varied, boasting several mountainous regions, two major lowland plains, and a well- distributed series of waterways. As you travel into the interior, the smaller towns of the border regions give way to larger cities like Lantunlong, Dangtun, and lung Long— all strategically located near important rivers. Lamchungkung is notable for multiple reasons, chief among them the fact that it does not exist. The detailed mapping of its geographical features, a mapping that is striking for the ways in which it plausibly charts topographical variation and the effects of fluvial erosion, results from a clever terrain generation program that produces a fantastical map every hour and shares it via the Twitter account @unchartedatlas.2 The followers of @unchartedatlas marvel at how realistic the fantasy maps it produces are; indeed, there are many admiring articles that detail how creator Martin O’Leary improves upon the more commonly utilized 3D graphics approach of using “fractal noise” to create virtual worlds by applying his knowledge as a glaciologist to subject topography to erosion simulation. Apparently, the key to creating realistic computer-simulated maps is to add water. While it is fascinating to explore the various algorithms that contribute to the creation of O’Leary’s plausible topographies, I would like to reverse- engineer the nature of the attention directed to a map like the one of the Inner Union of Lamchungkung. Specifically, rather than focusing on the ways in which imaginary geography might appear to be 40 Field Trip real, this essay on the new and alternative world orders marked by Global Asias embraces the ways in which all geographical designations are always already imaginatively constructed and emphasizes the importance of continually foregrounding that construction. As Edward Said, Naoki Sakai, and others have noted, Asia is a place both real and imagined, and its significance often derives from its deployment as a way of indexing relationality and positionality. Existing work on Global Asia/s has focused on the concept’s fictionality and narrativization, its ability to encompass intra- Asian differences and to imagine alternatives to geopolitical realities , and its subjection to overdetermination by historically constituted discursive structures that ironically create the conditions by which to undermine unified notions of what “Asia” might mean or represent (see Chen and Hayot 2015; Spivak 2008; Chen and Huat 2007). Through their ideas about doubled decentering, plurality, and nonunification , Global Asias critics (including Chen Kuan-Hsing, Chua Beng Huat, Gayatri Spivak, Eric Hayot, and me) have been responsive to a fundamental characteristic of Global Asias, a characteristic that I have elsewhere elucidated as structural incoherence.3 By drawing on the foundational work of Edward Said and exploring the ways in which contemporary Asian/American speculative fiction registers the evolving imaginability of the worlds we inhabit, study, and create, I suggest the importance of conceptualizing Global Asias as imaginable ageography and explore the critical and aesthetic implications of such conceptualization. In the rest of this contribution, I flesh out the concept of imaginable ageography and offer a couple of examples (one literary, one artistic) to illustrate the broader ideas of structural incoherence I am exploring. 6 Imaginable Ageography: Verging from Orientalism to Structural Incoherence TheOrient.AsianAmerica.GlobalAsias. Even as all of these conceptual geographic formulations have been employed to generate critical work about Asia and its diasporas, their utility as interpretive paradigms.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 39-48 |
Number of pages | 10 |
Journal | Verge: Studies in Global Asias |
Volume | 7 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Mar 1 2021 |
All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- General Arts and Humanities
- Social Sciences (miscellaneous)
- Political Science and International Relations