This is a session seeking participants.
Hi everyone,
My name is Waiyee Loh, and I'm an Associate Professor at Kanagawa University in Yokohama, Japan. I'm organizing a panel for the 2026 AAS conference, tentatively titled "Port City Print Cultures: Anglophone Publishing in East and Southeast Asia, 1800 to 1945." I'm looking for presenters and a chair/discussant to form a 3 or 4-person panel. I've included a draft of the panel proposal below. If you're interested in joining this panel, please contact me directly at waiyee-loh@kanagawa-u.ac.jp. Thanks very much for your time!
Organized Panel
Session title:
Port City Print Cultures: Anglophone Publishing in East and Southeast Asia, 1800 to 1945
Panel abstract:
Scholars of port cities in Asia have long examined the thriving print culture that flourished in these locations, especially with the proliferation of colonial and treaty ports in the region in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Port cities were, quite literally, entry points for books, periodicals, and other printed materials. They were also major centers for printing, publishing, and distributing such materials. However, many studies of port city print cultures have focused on Asian writers responding to the influx of foreign cultures in their vernacular languages (Lee 1999), or they have looked at English-speaking Asian intellectuals active in anti-colonial movements and the Anglophone press (Frost 2004; Hofmeyr 2008; Lewis 2016). This panel seeks to problematize the categories of "Asia" and "Asian" by approaching Anglophone publishing in East and Southeast Asia as a contact zone that brought together readers, writers, and publishers from different national and ethnic groups; and that cannot be simply reduced to the dichotomies of colonizer/colonized, foreign/local, and Western/Asian. Publishers and retailers such as Kelly and Walsh and the Sino-American Bookstore in Shanghai might not be conventionally thought of as "Asian," but they were nonetheless an integral part of what Robert Bickers and Christian Henriot (2000) have called "imperialism's new communities in East Asia." This panel therefore explores Anglophone print cultures in the colonial and treaty port cities of East and Southeast Asia at the height of European and American imperialism in the long 19th century.
Submission Category: Border Crossing/Inter-Area
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Waiyee Loh
Associate Professor
Kanagawa University
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