Anti-Asian Violence: Origins and Trajectories
Guest Editors: Laura Kang (UC Irvine), Susette Min (UC Davis), Leti Volpp (UC Berkeley)
Publication Date: Fall 2025
Submission Requirements: Scholarly essays: 5,000-6,000 words (not including endnotes); creative works: 1,000-3,000 words; due August 31, 2024.
One predominant narrative of anti-Asian violence posits a unitary historical figure subject to exclusion, drawing a direct line between the historical legal context and the current wave of violence. This elides important differences of gender, class, nationality, sexuality, ethnicity, and geographical location, and posits “Asian Americans” as a singular and homogeneous population, whose victimization and vulnerability can and must be properly documented and enumerated. A consequent policy response is to assume that this violence will end through more surveillance, policing, and the designation of disparate cases as hate crimes. As a result, anti-Asian violence tends to be most legible as a mere effect of individual prejudice, rather than as a condition of structures of systemic racial violence or global conditions of war, racial capitalism, and empire.
This special issue aims to feature innovative scholarship and creative visions about the underexplored and multifaceted genealogies of anti-Asian violence, which go beyond these predominant narratives and problematic responses. How do proposed remedies and solutions to anti-Asian violence both open up new possibilities and also exclude some groups and risk unforeseen harms for others? How could we imagine and enact new modes of scholarship, teaching, and artistic production, which are better attuned to heterogenous Asian American communities as well as to the question of Asian American relationality with other groups? We welcome submissions of scholarly essays from various disciplines as well as creative nonfiction, fiction, poetry, visual and performing arts.
Possible areas of critical inquiry and creative exploration include:
- How to think about “violence” in relation to the category of “Asian American”
- Mapping specific trajectories of anti-Asian violence within and across local, national and transnational scales
- Dominant narratives and contested histories of anti-Asian violence
- How changing transnational and global political-economic conditions shape anti-Asian sentiment in the U.S
- How “anti-Asian violence” obscures complex histories and multiple contemporary forms of intra-Asian violence
- The overlap and/or conflation between anti-Asian violence and anti-Asian hate as political discourse.
- Institutional reforms and reformist-reforms that respond to and/or exemplify anti-Asian violence
- State sanctioned responses that pair “anti-Asian violence” or “Anti-Asian hate” within criminalizing and pro-policing agendas
- Thinking through violence, non-violence, and anti-violence as ways of knowing and being differently
- Documentation and analysis of specific forms of community organizing or campaign building against anti-Asian violence
- Visual arts, multimedia and performance practices that invite embodied engagement and reflexive thinking about anti-Asian violence
- Forging relational critique through abolition feminist, decolonial, anti-carceral, or anti-violence political insights and practices
- Strategies and problematics of healing, care work, and mutual aid practices
- Pedagogical practices and challenges in teaching about anti-Asian violence
- Speculative forms and imagined futures about diverse modes of sustaining livable Asian American communities
Submission Guidelines and Review Process
Please submit your paper at: https://www.editorialmanager.com/ramj/default.aspx. There, you can find author instructions for uploading your submission, which requires a user account.
The guest editors, in consultation with the Amerasia Journal editorial staff and peer reviewers, make decisions on the final essays:
- Initial review of submitted papers by guest editors and Amerasia Journal editorial staff
- Papers approved by editors will undergo blind peer review
- Revision of accepted peer-reviewed papers and final submission
Please contact Arnold Pan, UCLA AASC Press Editor, with any questions regarding your submission: arnoldpan@ucla.edu.
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