What happens when cosmopolitanism no longer promises the world but reveals its limits?

Cosmopolitanism has long been associated with mobility, openness, translation, and coexistence across difference. In Asian literary and cinematic contexts, it has often been linked to port cities, diasporic networks, colonial encounters, and transregional circulation. Yet this cosmopolitan promise has never been equally available to all.

As Mariano Siskind argues in Cosmopolitan Desires, cosmopolitanism is structured by a desire for the world that is always unevenly distributed and historically conditioned, enabling global imaginaries even as it reveals their limits. It also contains the possibility of crisis within itself, since the very forces that drive cosmopolitan promise—such as technological advancement, migration, and economic growth—may, over time, become sources of instability, exclusion, and fracture.

This panel understands cosmopolitan promise as the historical and aesthetic articulation of openness, mobility, and world-oriented desire, and cosmopolitan crisis as the moment in which these aspirations become fractured—through exclusion, precarity, constrained circulation, or the breakdown of global imaginaries. Rather than treating crisis as external to cosmopolitanism, we ask how it emerges from within its very conditions of possibility.

We also invite attention to the historical stratification of cosmopolitan formations in Chinese and broader Asian contexts, from late Qing and early Republican treaty-port cosmopolitanisms, to Cold War and socialist internationalisms, to postsocialist and global capitalist configurations, and their contemporary reconfigurations under conditions of pandemic, geopolitical tension, and climate crisis.

This panel invites papers that examine how Asian literary, cinematic, and cultural forms register, mediate, and reconfigure the transformation from cosmopolitan promise to cosmopolitan crisis. How do narratives, films, media cultures, and transnational texts register the tension between openness and exclusion, circulation and containment, mobility and precarity? How do different genres, media, and aesthetic strategies render visible—or obscure—the uneven conditions of global belonging?

We especially welcome papers that engage Asian and Asian diasporic materials through comparative, transregional, or cross-media approaches.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Asian and Asian diasporic literature, cinema, and media

• Colonial and postcolonial port cities in literary and filmic imagination

• Diaspora, exile, migration, and transregional belonging

• Memory, heritage, and the politics of visibility

• Cosmopolitanism and its discontents in Asian modernity

• Film and visual culture as sites of global fantasy and crisis

• Translation, circulation, and uneven legibility across languages and regions

• War, pandemic, climate crisis, and geopolitical conflict in Asian cultural production

• Gender, race, class, and the limits of cosmopolitan inclusion

• Comparative approaches across East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Asian diasporas

• Literary and critical theory on cosmopolitanism, crisis, and globalization

Submission Guidelines

Please submit a single PDF including:

• a 250–300 word abstract (with title)

• a short bio (100–250 words)

Deadline: April 15, 2026

Please send submissions to:

• Michaela Mengxue Wu: mengxuew@asu.edu

• Wendy Sun: sunxiaox@grinnell.edu