Transit Asia Critical Concepts - new open access (free) book
Tuesday, October 13, 2026 at 10:54AM Open Humanities Press is pleased to announce the publication of:
Transit Asia Critical Concepts
edited by Joyce C. H. Liu, Brett Neilson, Karin Oen-Lee and Ned Rossiter
https://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/transit-asia/
Like all Open Humanities Press books, Transit Asia Critical Concepts is available open access ( = it can be downloaded for free).
Concepts hold the world together. But what happens when the world fragments, explodes in war, faces the epistemic collapse wrought by AI, or the ravages of climate spun out of control? Concepts also disintegrate, lose their self-positing status. And yet critique does not simply dissolve in conditions of radical uncertainty. There is a hunger to critique. It finds new forms, partial, provisional, forged from within instability rather than above. Transit Asia Critical Concepts emerges from this conceptual turbulence.
The concepts gathered in this book are not designed to map Asia, to fix its contours, or confirm its coherence. They move across Asian environments, through infrastructures of labour and logistics, inside computational architectures and their human remainders, against the unevenly distributed catastrophes of climate and war in ways that exceed the regional frame they inhabit. That excess is not incidental. It is what thinking from Asia produces, a movement beyond the cultural imaginaries, institutional settings, and lived encounters that give Asia its apparent shape.
Editor Bios
Joyce C. H. Liu is Professor Emerita and Director of the International Center for Cultural Studies, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan. Her work on coloniality, biopolitics, and Inter-Asian infrastructures includes One Divides into Two (2020) and Tianxia and Its Discontents (Routledge, 2026).
Brett Neilson is Professor at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University. He is author, with Sandro Mezzadra, of Border as Method (2013), The Politics of Operations (2019), and The Rest and the West (2024).
Karin Oen-Lee is Assistant Professor of Art History and Museum Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Her work as a curator, editor, and art historian focuses on diasporic, transdisciplinary, and interlocal creative practices as part of global Asia.
Ned Rossiter is Director of Research at the Institute for Culture and Society, and Professor of Communication, School of Arts, Western Sydney University. His current book projects include The Logistical Episteme and (with Soenke Zehle) Entropological Materialism: Ordering Disorder in the Cybnernetic Century (2027).
Series
Transit Asia Critical Concepts is published as part of the Low Latencies series, edited by Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter:
https://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/series/low-latencies/