FW: A Call For Paper: "Asian Diaspora and Mobility in Arts and Visual Culture"
Wulan Dirgantoro
CFP: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/arts/special_issues/1G25L13QCJ
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Dear Colleagues,
Much has been written about Asian arts in the diaspora around the world, particularly in the Western hemisphere [1]. However, research and study on the arts that centers around Asia as the site of Asian diasporic migration has yet been written about and thus merits exploration [2]. This Special Issue examines how arts and visual culture that engage with lived experiences of the Asian diaspora within Asia are broadly and loosely defined. Historically, Asia has been the origin of over 40% of the world’s migrants. This is not surprising given its scale and the diverse peoples, cultures, and customs that comprise the immense continent. Just under half of the migration occurred between Asian nations, suggesting an important and understudied area of research that undercuts not only continent-specific identities as found in pluralistic populations such as in the United States and Canada that resulted from histories as complex settler colonies, but also academic discourse that emerges primarily from Western institutions.
Furthermore, the other 60% of Asian migrants left the continent of Asia to settle on other continents, thus suggesting that the “Asian diaspora” is one that cannot be given any single definition [3]. As Joan Kee bluntly suggests, “Thinking about the difficulties posed by the term diaspora prompts reflection on models of belonging not governed by dispersion.” [4] Asian diasporas certainly resist the notion of a fixed homeland, whether imaginary or otherwise. Even more so, it also resists any singular idea of diasporic community, reflecting instead on complex, interconnected and yet vastly disparate identities and experiences of Asians not only scattered around the world but also in perpetual motion between and across nations, continents, cities, and areas.
This Special Issue aims to interrogate how art and visual culture might offer a unique lens into the expansive potential as well as the narrow limitations of the term “diaspora.” How does the term hold salience as location, as theory, and as lived experience? How does “Asia” also present a particularly complex locus for the negotiation of the migration of humans which existed long before the establishment of nation-states? What potential does “diaspora” hold in negotiating the lived experiences and diasporic identities of people who have not moved or migrated, but have had borders cross over their communities, as powers fight and push imaginary yet very politically real borders? How has climate change contributed to human migration exacerbating refugee numbers and expanding the definitions of “refugee?” Diasporic identities and communities challenge a diaspora/homeland dichotomy, forging economic, cultural, and social connections across and despite national borders and boundaries even as they challenge notions of stasis and fixity and thus, belonging.
We solicit papers that contribute to our understanding of how arts and visual culture engage with the theme of diasporas in Asia as geopolitical spaces and places of belonging and unbelonging. Approaches to this topic might consider the following: labor and migration, safe space for dissident artists, climate refugees, diasporic temporalities, digital communities, and more. We welcome papers that examine all arts and media, especially material cultures, film, space and architecture history and the built environment as well as modern and contemporary art.
[1] To name just a couple, see: Kobena Mercer, ed., Exiles, Diasporas & Strangers (London: Gardners VI Books AMS006): 6-27 and Saloni Mathur, “Mapping Migration” in The Migrant’s Time: Rethinking Art History and Diaspora (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000): vii-xix.
[2] Kuan-Hsing Chen, Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010):1-17.
[3] International Organization for Migration, World Migration Report 2024: Chapter 3, “Migration and Migrants: Regional Dimensions and Developments — Asia”, accessed January 27, 2026, https://worldmigrationreport.iom.int/what-we-do/world-migration-report-2024-chapter-3/asia
[4] Joan Kee, “Why Afro Asia,” October 186 (Fall 2023): 137.
Dr. Boreth Ly
Dr. Michelle Yee
Guest Editors
Dr Wulan Dirgantoro | Lecturer in Contemporary Art |
(dia/she/her)
School of Culture and Communication | Faculty of Arts
John Medley Building, East Tower, E362
The University of Melbourne, Victoria 3010 Australia
T: +61 3 8344 5671 E: wdirg...@unimelb.edu.au