Verge: Studies in Global Asias will be proposing a panel about the operations of forgetting in the Asia-Pacific region for AAS (Association for Asian Studies) in Toronto next year (March 16-19, 2017). For this panel, we solicit scholarship about the myriad forgotten wars—whether military exercises deemed “small wars” or obscured conflicts within “great wars”—that have shaped, as well as shifted, the geopolitical contours of the Asia-Pacific region as we know it today. We are especially interested in the ways in which regional and transpacific skirmishes are erased, neglected, or otherwise rendered illegible. We also encourage interdisciplinary theorization of the possibilities and limits of cultural amnesia as a response to atrocity and conflict; critical attention to the dynamics between individual and social forgetting; and sustained engagement with the ethical and moral implications of forgetting in relation to memory and counter-memory.

The issues addressed in this panel are ones that will be further explored in an upcoming special issue of the journal. For more information about Verge: Studies in Global Asias and Issue 5.2 (Forgetting Wars), please see the journal’s website: https://www.upress.umn.edu/journal-division/journals/verge-studies-in-global-asias/editorial-information

250 word paper abstracts and a brief c.v. due by Friday, 7/29/16 to We Jung Yi (wuy3@psu.edu) and Tina Chen (tina.chen@psu.edu).