Circle for Asian American Literary Studies

“Margins Within the Margins: Underrepresentation in Asian American Literary Criticism”
American Literature Association 2009 – Boston, MA – May 21-24, 2009

The Circle for Asian American Literary Studies (CAALS) is sponsoring a panel at the American Literature Association (ALA) conference in Boston on texts that remain understudied in Asian American literary criticism. This panel aims to draw attention to texts that were perhaps overlooked or ignored during their time of publication. (The “failure” and subsequent revival of John Okada’s No-No Boy serves as an example.) This panel also seeks work on experiences that remain underrepresented in Asian American literary production. (Some examples could include work by Southeast Asian American writers, Pacific Islander American writers, etc.) Papers submitted for this panel should consider what paradigmatic challenges such texts pose for Asian American literary criticism. How do these texts engage with models of citizenship, assimilation and subjectivity? What idea of “America” do these texts imagine? How do these texts work in dialogue with notions of diaspora? Please send 1-page abstracts & 2-page CVs by Friday, January 9 to Catherine Fung via email: cmfung@ucdavis.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

If you are selected and agree to present your work on this panel, you will need to become a member of CAALS. Membership requires a $10 fee and is open to all. Please see the following website for details: http://caals.org/

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