"In the erudite essay that opens this forum, Prasenjit Duara turns to both indigenous thinkers and the premodern past for tools with which to think about Asia in a global age. Contemporary modalities of regional exchange – ‘weakly bounded, network-oriented, pluralistic, multitemporal’ – chime with earlier patterns of cultural circulation without state domination, giving rise to a prophetic vision of ‘Asia Redux’. This attempt to capture the contours of a (re)-emergent region was calculated to provide. And what a debate it kicks off. Wang Hui resolutely reframe imagining Asia as a political project on a world-historical canvas. Tansen Sen greatly complicates the map of intra-Asian commercial exchange in earlier times; Amitav Acharya outlines five competing conceptions of Asia in the domain of international relations alone.; Barbara Watson Andaya teases out the paradoxical way in which regional religions make clashing claims about Asian unity; and Rudolf Mrazek asks, what of the Asia that bleeds? what of exploitation and its spawn, the inglorious ‘built-ends’ of the global economy?