Amerasia Journal: On the Twenty-fifth Anniversary of Asian Settler Colonial Critique

Guest Editors: Katherine Achacoso (Dartmouth College), Josephine Ong (UCLA/Dartmouth College), Beenash Jafri (UC Davis), and Candace Fujikane (UH Mānoa)

Publication Date: Planned for Summer 2025

Submission Requirements: Scholarly essays: 5,000-6,000 words (not including endnotes), due February 29, 2024

It has been over twenty years since the 2000 publication of Haunani Kay Trask’s essay, “Settlers of Color and Immigrant Hegemony” in Amerasia Journal. At the time, there were few critical engagements in the field of Asian American studies foregrounding Asian settlers’ responsibilities to Indigenous sovereignty, and little language to map the intersections between Asian diasporic experiences and Indigenous experiences of dispossession and sovereignty. As some scholars have sought to find alternative terms to “Asian settler,” others have worked to map the relationship between Asian diasporic experiences of migration and settlement and the experience of dispossession on Indigenous lands in Turtle Island and the Pacific. In our move from ethnic studies to critical ethnic studies, we are thinking more about relationalities and intersectionalities.

With the creation of the Asian Settler Colonialism Caucus as part of the Association of Asian American Studies in 2018, in addition to the frequency of references to “Asian-Indigenous relationalities,” an analytic of Asian settler colonialism extends to consider relationalities between different kinds of Asian settlers and Indigenous peoples in Asia. This approach has helped to reexamine different forms of intersectionalities, like that of caste in the operations of Asian settler colonialism. Liberatory scholarship and pedagogy at the intersections of Asian American and Indigenous studies open more capacious engagements of decolonization, ones rooted in Indigenous land-based struggles and futurities beyond the confines of settler states like Canada and the U.S.

In this special issue, we invite scholars, activists, and community organizers working on these intersections to contribute essays, creative work, and interviews reflecting the shifting conversations and debates in the field. For example, Asian American studies has evolved beyond the political borders and imaginaries of the United States to take up place-based genealogies in engaging different racial/settler geographies of Indigeneity, while discussions of Asian migration have broadened engagements on the intersections between Asian American and Indigenous studies. From critical settler colonial critiques in Tkaronto to Guåhan to Coast Salish Territories, new scholarship has expansively engaged interdisciplinary theories and methods from fields like Black studies, Indigenous feminisms, women of color feminisms and queer of color critique, eco-criticism, critical refugee studies, Dalit studies, critical militarization studies, disability studies, and critical ethnic studies to form what we now describe as a subfield of “Asian settler colonial critique.”

Learn more about this opportunity here.