The diasporic turn in Asian history has produced critical insights regarding the role of human migration in the making of nation states and empires, transborder nationalisms and diasporic identities across continents, and shifting geopolitical ecologies of the twentieth century. This roundtable discussion explores a variety of new approaches to studying diasporas across multiple “Asias.” Our panel includes historians whose work transcends the geographical, linguistic, and conceptual boundaries of transnational and transoceanic diasporas across Asia, the Americas, the Middle East, and the Pacific Rim. Facilitated by Mae Ngai, Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies and Professor of History, and Co-Director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University, this roundtable session invites the AHA audience to join our conversation to explore new directions for the diasporic framework that bridge area studies and ethnic studies.

Alyssa Park’s discussion focuses on mobility within Northeast Asia, where the borders of multiple empires and states intersected. By reading imperial and national archives against the grain, Park’s work turns conventionally viewed “minority” peoples into “major” actors in borderland history. It also inserts continental Asia into the global history of migration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Fredy Gonzalez uses the sworn brotherhood the Chee Kung Tong to illustrate the ways in which Cantonese migrants circulated people, material goods, resources, and ideas across their diaspora. After settling around the Pacific Rim and beyond, Cantonese migrants maintained connections with their counterparts around the world, while also making material contributions to political change in China. In doing so, they forged a collective identity and a diasporic consciousness, while challenging our established ideas about Chinese migrant networks.

Stacy Fahrenthold’s research on the Syrian and Lebanese diasporas builds from “informal” archival records: print cultural items, society records, and family papers originating outside government archives. These documents have travel itineraries of their own: as moveable texts, they can be read as artifacts of the journey, or as evidence of life histories. Fahrenthold focuses on how critical studies of informal archives are shaping Middle East studies, and how grappling with these materials serves to challenge iconic narratives about the Syrian diaspora.

Michael Jin employs a diasporic framework to explore the lives of Iranian migrants whose journey to America was routed through their sojourn to South Korea after the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Drawing attention to the multiple linguistic, cultural, and sociopolitical worlds traversed by these transnational individuals whose experiences complicate notions about migrant identities, transnational families, and racial ideologies across North America, East Asia, and West Asia.