Global Asia

This book is a collaborative project by students in Global Asia, an interdisciplinary course in Anthropology, Asian Studies, and Gender Women & Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington in Spring 2024. Each entry traces the genealogies of meaning and social-political lives of a particular keyword (concept, site, or object) across time and space. This method of exploring global entanglement opens the possibility of noticing unexpected connections and new worlds in the making, which challenge conventional understandings of Asia and processes of globalization. The authors explore keywords as zones of cultural encounter, thereby reflecting on multiple understandings and trajectories of the term whose histories, usages, and political trajectories they chart.

The motion of each keyword, and possible networks of connection between them, might be likened to that of the ants released in Yukinori Yanagi's The World Ant Farm. The artwork consists of 180 plastic boxes linked by plastic tubes. Each box is filled with colored gardening sand to create the pattern of a national flag. As the ants move through the boxes, they create tunnels through the sand and carry the colors from one to another.