Project MUSE®: Verge: Studies in Global Asias - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/804
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Verge: Studies in Global Asias.daily12026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1 (2015) through current issueLatest Articles: Verge: Studies in Global AsiasTWOProject MUSE®Verge: Studies in Global Asias2373-50662373-5058Latest articles in Verge: Studies in Global Asias. Feed provided by Project MUSE®The Persistent Trade in Humans Across Global Asias: Commerce, Labor, Kinship, and War
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984881
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the trade in humans is a vast and age-old engine of migration between regions within Asia, and since the sixteenth century, between Asia, the Americas, Africa, and Europe. Scholars have long documented widespread trades in people in Asia and via circuits that connect Asia to the wider world, formulating a Global Asian present. Some firmly identify portions of this traffic as a slave trade.1 Other scholars decline the terminology of enslavement in favor of a range of alternatives.2 This special issue probes both the ubiquity of the trade in Asian people and its particularities across time and space. Indispensable to both Asian and Western polities and economies, to imperialism, nation-building, militarism, and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/804/image/coversmallThe Persistent Trade in Humans Across Global Asias: Commerce, Labor, Kinship, and War2026-03-10text/htmlen-USThe Persistent Trade in Humans Across Global Asias: Commerce, Labor, Kinship, and War2026-03-102026TWOProject MUSE®331092026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-03-10“Pleasure Women” Meet “Women in Ugly Trade”: Access, Stigmas, and Relation-Making in a Digital Open Educational Resource for Global Asias
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984882
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Kiyū is the daughter of So-and-So Ōta, a town doctor in Tokyo. At a young age, Kiyū fell into the life of a yūjo [prostitute] at her parents’ discretion. She then drifted into (a brothel called) Gankirō in Yokohama where she reached her golden age.When an exposition took place in Portland, a well-known prostitute abductor in Yokohama known as Yoshida sent a prostitute candidate to Vancouver. This crippled beauty, named Michi Kawada, was in the Yokohama area and was extremely well-trained in sewing. Tempted by Yoshida’s sweet-talk, she migrated to this country (Canada) at a young age before she turned twenty, and was immediately transferred from Vancouver to Hayashi’s cave in Nelson.1the above are excerpts from our
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/804/image/coversmall“Pleasure Women” Meet “Women in Ugly Trade”: Access, Stigmas, and Relation-Making in a Digital Open Educational Resource for Global Asias2026-03-10text/htmlen-US“Pleasure Women” Meet “Women in Ugly Trade”: Access, Stigmas, and Relation-Making in a Digital Open Educational Resource for Global Asias2026-03-102026TWOProject MUSE®869612026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-03-10Translating Memory, Contesting Empire: Kim Tae Soo’s Sub-Imperial Poetry on South Korea’s Violence in the Vietnam War
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984883
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Here’s the list of massacre victims, from oldest to youngest.This is my mother’s name, but there’s a typo.This one is my aunt’s name.Here’s my sister’s name—she was born in 1956, so she was eleven at the time.[. . .]Everything I’ve told you is true, the truth[. . .]But why won’t the South Korean government acknowledge what happened?Why won’t the South Korean veterans admit the truth?“what could an eight-year-old girl possibly remember?” Since Nguyen Thi Thanh first filed suit against the South Korean government in 2020 over the 1968 Phong Nhi and Phong Nhat massacres, this has been the state’s refrain. Government attorneys tried to unravel her testimony piece by piece—specifically, her claim that South Korean
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/804/image/coversmallTranslating Memory, Contesting Empire: Kim Tae Soo’s Sub-Imperial Poetry on South Korea’s Violence in the Vietnam War2026-03-10text/htmlen-USTranslating Memory, Contesting Empire: Kim Tae Soo’s Sub-Imperial Poetry on South Korea’s Violence in the Vietnam War2026-03-102026TWOProject MUSE®634022026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-03-10Contingent Captivity: Resettling Japanese Men, Women, and Children 1941–1945
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984884
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in 1941, people of Japanese descent lived in many countries and colonies under Allied control. Soon after the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada declared war on Japan, belligerents—sometimes operating under international law, and at other times concerned only with local conditions and security considerations—determined that some Japanese subjects and those of Japanese ancestry had to be interned, incarcerated, or deported to Japan.1 Their uprooting is now one of the more notorious examples of forced migration, especially in the US. The experience of displacement and captivity was incredibly varied and played out differently in countries and colonies all over the world. In the US, approximately
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/804/image/coversmallContingent Captivity: Resettling Japanese Men, Women, and Children 1941–19452026-03-10text/htmlen-USContingent Captivity: Resettling Japanese Men, Women, and Children 1941–19452026-03-102026TWOProject MUSE®1262322026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-03-10Moving Spectacles: Madwomen and Human Trafficking in Noh’s Peripheries
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984885
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in the climactic scene of the noh play Sumida River (Sumidagawa) by Kanze Motomasa (?−1432), a group of travelers sits in rapt attention as the ferryman steering their boat recounts a tragedy. The tragedy, the man recalls, occurred on the banks of this very river—the play’s eponymous river in present-day Tokyo—on a spring day exactly a year prior.A merchant of people passing through on his way from Kyoto far up north to Ōshū had bought a boy of twelve or thirteen. Perhaps because he was unaccustomed to the strain of such a long journey, the child fell gravely ill. Unable to take another step, he collapsed on the banks of the river. And how heartless the people of this world can be! The trader abandoned the child on
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/804/image/coversmallMoving Spectacles: Madwomen and Human Trafficking in Noh’s Peripheries2026-03-10text/htmlen-USMoving Spectacles: Madwomen and Human Trafficking in Noh’s Peripheries2026-03-102026TWOProject MUSE®981702026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-03-10Legacies of Asian Indenture, Expressions of Caribbean Nationalism
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984886
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We suffer from insufficient nourishment, excessive labour enforced night and day, flogging and chaining in the day, and imprisonment and confinement in the stocks at night, so that many have died directly of their sufferings, or have tried to escape and met death outside.Since my contract term was completed, I have still been a victim of wrong. My discontent is great, and I desire to depart, it matters not where. Any locality is better than this island. The injustice has become unendurable and death is preferable.it was not until 1873, twenty-six years into the infamous “coolie trade,”1 that the Qing government finally accepted a proposal put forth by ministers from Russia, Britain, France, Germany, and the United
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/804/image/coversmallLegacies of Asian Indenture, Expressions of Caribbean Nationalism2026-03-10text/htmlen-USLegacies of Asian Indenture, Expressions of Caribbean Nationalism2026-03-102026TWOProject MUSE®945832026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-03-10Textual Traces of Transwar “Comfort Women”: A Feminist Critique of Lee Man-hee’s Seven Female POWs
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984887
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“would our child be mixed-blood (honhyŏl) if we ever had one?” (Ch’u and Han 1964, 17) asks a South Korean woman prisoner of war to a North Korean military general in the screenplay of Lee Man-hee’s (Yi Manhŭi, 1931–75) Korean War film Seven Female POWs.1 If they had met under different circumstances, she would have dated him, she confesses, allowing herself to wonder further whether their child would need to learn two languages. Earlier, before this conversation, she had “serviced” a commander of the Communist Chinese detachment that intercepted the North Korean soldiers. Prior to her capture alongside six other women by the North Korean infantry, she had been a yanggongju (lit. “Western princess”), a derogatory
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/804/image/coversmallTextual Traces of Transwar “Comfort Women”: A Feminist Critique of Lee Man-hee’s Seven Female POWs2026-03-10text/htmlen-USTextual Traces of Transwar “Comfort Women”: A Feminist Critique of Lee Man-hee’s Seven Female POWs2026-03-102026TWOProject MUSE®1052412026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-03-10Returning Home: Captured Women and Human Markets in Early Qing China, 1642–1656
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984888
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In 1644, the Manchu-ruled Qing state took over the Ming capital and relocated its imperial court from Mukden to the new capital, Beijing. Most soldiers of the Eight Banners, a Qing military and social organization, crossed the Shanhai (山海) Pass and resettled in Beijing and other provincial garrisons. Following their enslavers, banner slaves moved to China proper and many of them ran away from the banner households after the relocation (Wei 1982, 145–49; Hu 2011, 2012, 2020).1 In order to prevent the flight of banner slaves, the early Qing state announced a fugitive law, dispatched runners to track down escapees, and launched legal cases concerning those who were recaptured. Among those recorded in the fugitive
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/804/image/coversmallReturning Home: Captured Women and Human Markets in Early Qing China, 1642–16562026-03-10text/htmlen-USReturning Home: Captured Women and Human Markets in Early Qing China, 1642–16562026-03-102026TWOProject MUSE®1143532026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-03-10Singmo Sallim and Rethinking Kinship in Twentieth-Century Korea
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984889
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After the Korean War, my grandpa was afraid that another war may start and took our family into hiding in the forest. We became slash-and-burn farmers. Going to school was impossible and everyone in our village struggled to eat. So everyone had to go to Seoul as adoptees. All of them were, in reality, singmo (domestic servants).during our oral history interview, Yu Yŏngja (a pseudonym) shared that everyone in her village “had to go to Seoul as adoptees” when “all of them were, in reality, singmo (domestic servants).” In the 1960s and 1970s, hundreds of thousands of poor young girls migrated from the countryside to Seoul after the Korean War (1950–1953) in search of employment (T. Kwŏn 1975). By narrating how her
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/804/image/coversmallSingmo Sallim and Rethinking Kinship in Twentieth-Century Korea2026-03-10text/htmlen-USSingmo Sallim and Rethinking Kinship in Twentieth-Century Korea2026-03-102026TWOProject MUSE®969442026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-03-10