Transimperial Networks: East Asia and the ‘Victorian’ World: Introduction

Traditionally, East Asia has been on the margins of Victorian Studies, eclipsed by sites of formal imperialism such as South Asia. However, the region was deeply intertwined with the “Victorian” world through transimperial networks of trade, migration, and geopolitical competition. Rather than locating East Asia at the margins, this cluster of lesson plans explores the figurative and historical centrality of East Asia to Victorian Studies

Transimperial Networks and East Asia: Timeline

To help instructors and students who may be unfamiliar with the history of East Asia and its transimperial exchanges with the Anglophone world, the creators of the “Transimperial Networks and East Asia” lesson plan cluster built this timeline, which includes some major historical events from the fifteenth to the twentieth century. This timeline comes out of our many discussions about the methodological issues that arise when the field of Victorian Studies seeks to expand its traditional geographical scope. As we quickly realized in the process of creating our cluster, the usual boundaries of the long nineteenth century (the French Revolution to World War I) are too limited and Eurocentric for the transimperial connections our lesson plans examine. Thus, we offer this timeline both to orient instructors and students and to illustrate how centering East Asia calls into question our field’s most basic assumptions

Zoomcast with Menglu Gao, Waiyee Loh, Hyungji Park, Jessica Valdez, and Rae Yan

Sophia Hsu interviews five nineteenth-century scholars (Menglu Gao, Waiyee Loh, Hyungji Park, Jessica Valdez, and Rae X. Yan) to discuss the development of a lesson plan cluster called “Transimperial Networks and East Asia.” This cluster explores the centrality of East Asia to Victorian Studies. A crucial impetus for this cluster, facilitator Sophia Hsu suggests, included finding an effective way to respond to the increase in anti-Asian violence and discrimination during COVID-19. The result became a dual partnership between breaking bread within a female pedagogical community while innovating class lessons that re-“orient” students’ relationship to the global nineteenth century