Circle for Asian American Literary Studies

Hemispheric Approaches to Asian American Literature
American Literature Association Conference
May 21-24, 2009, Boston

In her recent essay “Of Hemispheres and Other Spheres,” Kandice Chuh suggests that Asian Americanists explore “that complementary space between Asian American studies, conceived as a ‘national perspective’ that seeks to understand the link between the national and the global, and hemispheric studies, understood as paradigmatically concerned with the relationship of the Americas to the local or national.” How does Asian American literature change when viewed in a hemispheric perspective? What would it mean to interpret the “America” in Asian American literature far more broadly? What might be the effects of adding the north-south axis of hemispheric studies to the traditional east-west focus of transnational Asian American studies? How might hemispheric studies open up new connections between texts inside and outside the conventional purview of the Asian American? Topics might include comparisons of Asian American and Asian Canadian writers (such as Joy Kogawa, Kerri Sakamoto, Fred Wah), Asian American engagements with the Caribbean or Latin America (such as Karen Tei Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rainforest), or writing that crosses borders within the Americas (such as Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange or Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine). Send 1-page abstract and c.v. by January 15, 2009 via email to Timothy Yu (tim.yu@utoronto.ca).

American Literature Association 2009 – Boston, MA – May 21-24, 2009

“Asian American Transgressive Texts”

The Circle for Asian American Literary Studies (CAALS) is sponsoring a panel at the American Literature Association (ALA) conference in Boston on “transgressive texts”—writings in which the author’s identity does not match the identity of the text in question. For literary critic Shelly Fisher Fishkin, transgressive texts are those “in which black writers create serious white protagonists, and white writers black ones” (“Desegregating” 121), but the CAALS wants to open up Fishkin’s definition to interrogate the differences that emerge when thinking about the category of “Asian American writing” and the “Asian American writer,” particularly when there is a disjunction between the creative writer and the created subject.

Examples of questions and topics to consider:

*Interrogating the Chinese-Cuban diaspora in Cuban American writer Cristina Garcia’s Monkey Hunting
*Considering the Italian American narrative voice in Chang-rae Lee’s Aloft
*Examining the theme of the short story cycle and the community of Vietnamese American exiles in Robert Olen Butler’s A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain
*Exploring both the “American” as well as “Asian” aesthetics in American Indian writer Gerald Vizenor’s Griever: An American Monkey King in China

Please send 1-page abstracts & 2-page cvs by Monday, January 5 to Jennifer Ho via email: jho@email.unc.edu

For information on the American Literature Association conference, please go to the following website:

http://www.calstatela.edu/academic/english/ala2/american_literature_association_2009.htm

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

CFP: Latina/o Literature and Culture Society of the American Literature Association, 2009
Westin Copley Place—Boston, MA

The Latina/o Literature and Culture Society of the American Literature Association seeks proposals for several panels at the American Literature Association’s 20th annual conference at the Westin Copley Place in Boston on May 21-24, 2009. We are particularly interested in seeking out papers that address the following topics:

• Latina/o Writers and Canon(s). Chair: Roberto Oscar Lopez. rolopez@csun.edu
• Spoken-Word Poetry. Chair: Elizabeth Jacobs. elj@aber.ac.uk
• Any aspect of the work of Junot Díaz. Chair: Alisa Braithwaite. akb1@mit.edu
• Latina/o Children’s Literature Chair: Tiffany Lopez. tiffany.lopez@ucr.edu
• Ambiguous Authors and Transgressive Texts (joint panel with the Circle for Asian American Literary Studies). Chair: Jennifer Ho. jho@email.unc.edu

Those interested in submitting a paper should send a one-page abstract with your name, position, affiliation, and contact information to the appropriate panel chair.

For proposals on any other aspect of Latina/o Literature and Culture, please send them along with your name, position, affiliation and contact information to Eliza Rodriguez y Gibson at eliza_rodriguezygibson@redlands.edu.

Final Deadline for Proposals: January 5, 2009.

For information about the Latina/o Literature and Culture Society, visit us online at http://www.latinorolodex.com or contact Latina/o Literature and Culture Society president Eliza Rodriguez y Gibson at eliza_rodriguezygibson@redlands.edu.

For more information about the ALA and the conference, go to http://www.americanliterature.org.