05/31/2026
T he Cultural Labor of Internationalism: Reorienting Solidarities in Times of Struggle
Edited by Yawen Li, Ajay Bhardwaj, Anup Grewal, and Nicolai Volland.
Deadlines | [email protected]
Convergence proposals: September 30, 2026
Essays: May 15, 2027
On the Theme
As militarism, authoritarianism, and chauvinistic nationalism ascend globally, and “Asia” becomes a contested site in geopolitical rivalries, the need to imagine alternative forms of solidarity, including forms of grassroots internationalism, becomes ever more urgent. Across Asia and its global diasporas, movements for liberation and justice against connected forms of oppression have continued to emerge under conditions of external and internal state violence, displacement, precarious labor, and ecological crisis.
In representation and scholarship, internationalism tends to connote top-down, state sponsored initiatives such as Cold War cultural diplomacy or government-affiliated fronts, whereas solidarity is usually understood as grassroots, bottom-up organizing among and between individuals, communities, and movements. In practice, however, internationalism has often served as the organizational principle that animates people’s practices of connection across borders, even, and perhaps especially, when those practices operate at a distance from, in critical relationship to, or in tension with nation-state structures or allegiances. This special issue proposes that internationalism and solidarity be held together in a productive tension: between organizational form and lived practice, and between the scale of aspiration and the difficulty of its achievement.
To make this conjunction concrete, we invite contributors to think through the concept of cultural labor, that is, the intellectual, affective, and creative work of making and sustaining solidarities. Cultural labor encompasses both the making of cultural artefacts (literature, performance, film, translation, music, visual art documentation) and the less legible practices through which political connection is forged, such as the grief work of mourning comrades across borders, the recontextualization of slogans and imagery from one struggle to another, and the circulation of zines. Such practices are often spontaneous, unpaid, unaffiliated with institutions, and not confined to any conventional cultural form, yet they remain crucial to forging internationalist alliances from the margins in the face of co-optation, disillusionment, and repression.
Cultural labor tends to operate across multiple registers. Consider, for example, the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA), founded in 1943 to mobilize folk forms and street performance in the service of the anticolonial Indian independence struggle. Its cultural practice anticipates what Frantz Fanon would later theorize as the making of a “national culture” within a global struggle against capitalism and imperialism (Prakash 2023). We may also consider the 1970 self-immolation of Korean labor activist Chun Tae-il, whose biography traveled across East and Southeast Asia and later became a “must-read text” for Chinese labor organizers (Jeong 2021). The varied history of Asian feminist internationalism likewise shows that solidarity is not simply the discovery of pre-existing unity, but the labor of building connections across asymmetrical positions and in the face of powerful forms of co-optation and misidentification. For example, the pages of Triple Jeopardy, the journal of the 1970s U.S.-based Third World Women’s Alliance, reveal a feminist internationalist “ethos of multiplicity, heterogeneity, and juxtaposition” that resisted, in practice, the logic of undifferentiated commonality the Alliance often projected rhetorically (Hong 2018, 27). More recently, diasporic Iranian feminist artists have, with a sense of urgency and crisis, created a body of performative, visual, and digital art in solidarity with the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in Iran (Ebrahemi 2022). This diasporic feminist cultural labor emerges through a set of tensions, caught between resisting state repression in Iran and resisting co-optation into Islamophobic discourses and American imperial agendas. Together, these examples suggest that cultural labor may function as an infrastructure for solidarity through translation, shared images, exchanges, and networks that enable connection; as an archive of otherwise unrecorded internationalist practices that outlive their moment; and as a terrain of struggle where the limits of solidarity become visible in moments of disidentification, appropriation, or the exhaustion of activist energy.
We invite papers that explore the cultural labor of internationalism as a form of solidarity from the vantage point of broadly conceived Global Asias, including intersectional migrant, diasporic, Black, Indigenous, q***r positionalities. Archival or ethnographic engagements with activist histories that reimagine internationalism beyond the nation-state are welcome, as are Asian anticolonial, Third Worldist, and postcolonial traditions revisited in light of contemporary struggles. We are especially interested in aesthetic and formal experiments, unexpected sites or media through which solidarity is imagined and mediated.
Convergence Feature Proposal
One of Verge: Studies in Global Asias’ distinctive features is an opening section called Convergence, where we curate a rotating series of rubrics that emphasize collaborative intellectual engagement and exchange. Each issue features several of the following rubrics: A&Q, a responsive dialogue, either in interview or roundtable format, inspired by a set of questions; Codex, a collaborative discussion and assessment of books, films, and events; Translation, for texts, primary or secondary, not yet available in English; Field Trip, reports from various subfields of disciplines; Portfolio, commentaries on visual images; Interface, texts exploring the resources of the print-digital world; and our newest feature, Cross Talk, a multi-faceted conversation about a text of shared interest that employs dialogue and annotation as critical genres of scholarly engagement. We welcome those interested in these features to submit a Convergence proposal for the issue.
Proposals should be 1-2 pages in length and indicate what kind of feature is being proposed; demonstrate an awareness of the formats utilized by the journal; include an abstract and, if collaborative, a list of proposed contributors; and include a short (2 pg) cv.
The Convergence proposals deadline is September 30, 2026; however, we encourage those interested in submitting a proposal to contact the editors about their ideas in advance of this date. Please direct all inquiries and submissions to [email protected].
Essay Submissions
Essays (between 6,000-10,000 words) and abstracts (125 words) should be submitted electronically through this submission form (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdC26o0rLVw4YEH_uJQLdpAjCncEF_qbSrSRZ_-PxRibwSQ4w/viewform) by May 15, 2027, and prepared according to the author-date + bibliography format of the Chicago Manual of Style. See section 2.38 of the University of Minnesota Press style guide or chapter 15 of the Chicago Manual of Style Online for additional formatting information.
Authors' names should not appear on manuscripts; instead, please include a separate document with the author's name, address, institutional affiliations, and the title of the article with your electronic submission. Authors should not refer to themselves in the first person in the submitted text or notes if such references would identify them; any necessary references to the author's previous work, for example, should be in the third person.
Contact Email
[email protected]
URL
https://sites.psu.edu/vergeglobalasias/2026/05/04/verge-14-2-call-for-papers/
Verge 14.2 Call For Papers – Global Asias Initiative
4May Verge 14.2 Call For Papers 4 May 2026 tab6460 Issue 14.2: The Cultural Labor of Internationalism: Reorienting Solidarities in Times of Struggle Edited by Yawen Li, Ajay Bhardwaj, Anup Grewal, and Nicolai Volland. Deadlines | [email protected] Convergence proposals: September 30, 2026 Essays: May 15...
06/02/2026
06/02/2026
06/02/2026
06/01/2026
05/31/2026
05/31/2026