The avowed purpose of that inaugural vol /n 1 issue was to 'problematize' Asia. Alongside the first of Sun Ge's two-part 'How Does Asia Mean?' together with several other scholarly texts from Korea, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia, I published my own essay, 'Alternative Frames: Questions for Comparative Research in the Third World'.

Nearly twenty years later, after years of thinking alongside one another, and living with the promise of ‘Asia as method’, can we say we have fully explored the potential of ‘alternative frames of reference’? Does the idea point to directions that Inter-Asia research may still take, or do we need to re-think its founding premises?

Reading:

Tejaswini Niranjana (2000) 'Alternative frames? Questions for Comparative Research in the Third World, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 1:1, 97-108 (download here)
Introduction to Niranjana, Tejaswini, Xiaoming Wang, and Nitya Vasudevan.Genealogies of the Asian Present: Situating Inter-Asia Cultural Studies. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2015 (download here)