CFP: Critical Perspectives on Jhumpa Lahiri (ALA 2009)
American Literature Association Conference, May 21-24, 2009, Boston
Standing panel organized by the Circle for Asian American Literary Studies
Proposals due: January 15, 2009

The Circle for Asian American Literary Studies invites papers for a panel on the work of Jhumpa Lahiri, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Interpreter of Maladies (1999), The Namesake (2004) and Unaccustomed Earth (2008). Lahiri has enjoyed widespread critical and popular acclaim for bringing the Indian American immigrant and transnational experiences to the mainstream American literary consciousness. We seek papers on the ways in which Lahiri’s fiction expands the American literary canon and broadens theoretical conceptions of contemporary Asian American subjectivities.  Suggested topics might include (but are not limited to) considerations of Lahiri’s work as: 

• a critical node that connects the distinct but interrelated spaces of Asian American, South Asian, and transnational/postcolonial studies;  

 

• a revision of traditional U.S. immigrant narratives within a transnational framework;

 

• a reflection of the growing “taste” for ethnic narratives in U.S. and/or global literary marketplaces.

 
Please email a one-page abstract and a two-page C.V. by January 15, 2009 to Betsy Huang at bhuang@clarku.edu. 

Note: Presenters on CAALS-sponsored panels must be current members of CAALS.  

For more information on CAALS and the 2009 ALA conference, go to: http://www.calstatela.edu/academic/english/ala2/american_literature_association_2009.htm