About

Co-Editors-in-Chief

Li-Chun Hsiao (蕭立君), Waseda University, Japan

Hung-chiung Li (李鴻瓊), National Taiwan University, Taiwan

Editorial Board

Oscar V. Campomanes, Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines

Hsiao-hung Chang (張小虹), National Taiwan University, Taiwan

Chun-Mei Chuang (張君玫), Soochow University, Taiwan

David Theo Goldberg, University of California, Irvine, USA

Woosung Kang (강우성), Seoul National University, South Korea

Alex Taek-Gwang Lee (이택광), Kyung Hee University, South Korea

Kwai-Cheung Lo (羅貴祥), Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong

Nobutaka Otobe (乙部延剛), Osaka University, Japan

Vincenz Serrano, Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines

Akiko Shimizu (清水晶子), University of Tokyo, Japan

Description​

Critical Asia Archives: Events and Theories is an online platform of blog publications, created in 2020 by Asia Theories Network to curate and archive contributions from committed scholars and intellectuals from various Asian and related societies. The publication is semi-annual, with each issue consisting of several independent (or interdependent when deemed fit) sets of blogs. The contents discuss important socio-political, intellectual, and cultural events which demand engagements from the perspectives of critical theoretical thought. By featuring “archives” as well as “events” prominently in the platform title, we nevertheless envision something more than the compilation and documentation of events in Asia by like-minded scholars who share a common interest in critical theory. Critical theory, it could be argued, inhabits at once the institutionalized spaces of academia and the messy terrains of political and social practices outside its gated communities, the latter of which is the source of theory’s renewable vitality but tends to be disavowed at the expense of professionalization. To many of us, it is this keen awareness and the discontent with critical theory’s status as “just another specialty” that brought us together and formed Asia Theories Network in the first place. For, on more than etymological grounds, the term “theoria” involves multiple connotations—from the usual sense of contemplation and reflection, to witnessing in a public setting, to invocation and supplication, and by extension, response and intervention. It is in the senses of witnessing, of critical thought being invoked in our responses to the events from which we cannot extricate ourselves, that we establish this online platform, which aspires to generate a “history of the present” that is both timely and untimely.