Bridging Work and Global Asias: Stars and Sandbars

Abstract

Proposals for Global Asias as an emerging field that “bridges” Asian studies and Asian American studies should attend to the residual debris of older understandings of global bridging work. This response explores two motifs for speculating about what bridging work in Global Asias could be: stars, as understood in terms of interimperial constellations, and sandbars, as a metaphor for more local, coalitional, and temporary aggregations.