From the Editor
This is my last issue of ATJ and provides my opportunity to thank all the people (other ATJ editors and of course authors) who made editing a pleasure and allowed me to learn about many aspects of Asian performance that I might otherwise have never encountered. When the journal began with James R. Brandon as the initiating editor, I was like many of our ATJ "emerging scholars" today, just getting my first dose of the peer review process and seeing it helped me hone ideas. When I received the invitation to edit from Samuel Leiter in 2003, I was honored, but only dimly understood the job.
Now I know: it is to work with smart people whose research pulls me into all parts of Asia across centuries of time. I have had the privilege of working with wonderful associate editors, Claudia Orenstein and Carol Sorgenfrei, and sharp area editors including Matthew Isaac Cohen, Laurence Kominz, Siyuan Liu, Shayoni Mitra, Chan Park, Farley Richmond, and of course Elizabeth Wichmann-Walczak who herself was co-editor with James Brandon when ATJ began. I have seen others who took on a guest editor issue/section and made it happen (Matthew Cohen, David Jortner, Alexa Joubin, Julie Iezzi, Siyuan Liu, Arya Madhavan, and Jonah Salz). I have pulled in too many other members of Association for Asian Performance to mention when there was a need for particular expertise. And beyond all these efforts there are many hands at the University of Hawai'i Press and their contractors, correcting and improving the manuscript until it finally arrives in a mailbox or on the web. I would especially like to thank Lori Paximadis, Karen Curry, Cindy Chun, and Alicia Upano. I thank all the authors present in this and in all past issues for their patience and good will. I end my stint rather as I began it, including a section of articles that highlight puppets, movement, and mask. As I hand ATJ over to Siyuan Liu as editor and David Jortner as book review editor, I know that they [End Page v] will be enlisting many to comment, critique, and correct. I hope that you will be as generous in saying "yes" as you were with me.
A journal I now know is more than the "publish or perish" lifeboat that I imagined as a graduate student. To make this journal worth reading is the work of many hands and heads around the globe. It requires all the expertise that we as a community of Asian Theatre practitioners and scholars can muster—the years that you, as readers-doers-authors, have spent studying Asian dance, music, movement, text, puppets, language, costumes, staging—they are here. So is expertise you have developed in understanding a culture (your own or someone else's), the many months you have spent in the archives, the long hours you have watched performances in halls, houses, fields, and temples. This journal is a living community of scholars and artists responding via reporting on arts practice to a changing world. Continue to grow our scholarship by reading, submitting articles, revising, reviewing … Use these pages to find common concerns and make us all smarter. ATJ remains a place to argue the new, rethink the old, support or unmask. Move us as a community toward what we all long for—a more artful, critical, understood world. As we grow our discipline, so we grow ourselves.
