Global Asias is a conceptual framework generated out of the frequently incompatible institutional structures that organize the academic knowledge production of Asia and its multiple diasporas. Bringing Asian Studies, Asian American Studies, and Asian Diaspora Studies into nonaligned relation, this chapter acknowledges the structural incoherence of Global Asias as both object and approach and proposes the concept of imaginable ageography. The chapter draws attention to the ways in which key conceptual topographies such as the Orient, Asian America, the transpacific, and Global Asias bring into visibility specific geographic features and characteristics (and acknowledge geopolitical structures) but develop conceptual realities that simultaneously reference, exceed, and remake such topographies imaginatively. The chapter illustrates the theoretical possibilities of ageography by treating contemporary Asian/American works of speculative vision - including Ruth Ozeki’s novel A Tale for the Time Being (2013), the literary anthology The SEA is Ours: Tales of Steampunk Southeast Asia (2015), and the digital photographic collages of Yang Yongliang’s From the New World (2016). In drawing out the ageographic dimensions of conceptual topographies, the chapter argues for the critical potential of discordance in theorizing Global Asias.

This chapter seeks to better understand the formation of literary-geographical identities and imaginaries by examining the publications and cultural afterlife of Captain John Smith, the explorer, promoter, author, soldier, and self-made knight so closely associated with the beginning of English involvement in North America, and particularly with the original colony of Virginia. The chapter provides a brief overview of the longstanding tendency to see Smith and his works as belonging to, and even a point of origin for, the literature and character of America and the U.S. South, and how this has made him a political and historical lightning rod in highly contentious constructions of North/South identity. To account for this contentious afterlife, but to also move beyond it, the chapter surveys critical approaches that have since better situated Smith’s place in the literature and culture of Renaissance England. Looking at examples from his major works, the chapter attempts to show some of Smith’s experimental structuring and shaping of oppositional and antithetical literary-geographical imaginaries, which he employed to address economic and geographical challenges for the English nation state in the modern colonial and plantation context.