This last issue of 2020 begins with Prasenjit Duara's Presidential Address, “The Art of Convergent Comparison: Case Studies from China and India.” In this essay, Duara develops a methodology that he calls “convergent comparison” that allows him to study the “sensorial modes of vernacularization” often overlooked in the historiography. Through a study of visual culture in China and India, he opens new directions for considering the similarities and divergences in historical processes for a study of the senses. But his argument can be expanded to include aural and olfactory culture as well. More generally, Duara's contribution suggests new directions for China-India comparisons, which have a long history in the pages of the JAS, while adding to the debates on the methods of comparative studies in Asia more generally.
In their article, Brian Lander, Mindi Schneider, and Katherine Brunson provide an interdisciplinary approach to studying the history of pigs in China by turning to the methods of history, zooarchaeology, and developmental sociology. They examine the long history of the relationship between humans and pigs and the impact of the domestication of pigs on the society, economy, and environment of China. Jina E. Kim considers the idea of “broadcasting solidarity” that connected the histories of South Korea and the United States, focusing on a legal case in which an individual was incorrectly convicted of a major crime in the 1970s. Kim studies a radio docudrama and a novel based on the legal case as a way to rethink the intersections between Asian studies and Asian American studies.
The issue ends with a forum examining the influence and impact of Judith Butler's pathbreaking book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity on the thirtieth anniversary of its publication. The forum considers the importance of Butler's ideas about gender and sexuality in the many disciplines in which her work has played a foundational role, including gender and sexuality studies, women's studies, feminist studies, philosophy, critical theory, literary studies, history, and anthropology. The forum also features discussions of the multiple ways in which scholars of Asia have expanded and diverged in their studies of gender and sexuality, not always anticipated when Gender Trouble was first published in 1990. The contributors to the forum are Gail Hershatter, Tamara Loos, and Geeta Patel. To conclude the forum, Judith Butler provides an important personal reflection on Gender Trouble and responds to the critiques of the contributors.
This forum was organized for the Annual Conference of the Association for Asian Studies that was to be held in Boston on March 19, 2020, but, as JAS readers will know, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the entire conference was canceled. I appreciate the patience and efforts of Gail Hershatter, Tamara Loos, Geeta Patel, and Judith Butler in completing their essays on tight production deadlines during a difficult and challenging time amid the global crisis.
—Vinayak Chaturvedi
