American Literature Association Conference, San Francisco, May 27-30, 2010

Circle for Asian American Literary Studies–Pedagogy Roundtable

Proposal deadline: January 15, 2010

As specialists in Asian American literature working in contemporary configurations of English studies, we often teach courses that are not organized around nor focused solely on Asian American literature as a body of work. At the same time, scholars and teachers of other categories of literature often turn to Asian American texts in their courses. In both of these instances, we place Asian American texts in conversation with other texts, but perhaps more importantly, we suggest the importance of Asian Americanist critique for courses and texts beyond the standard body of works we consider in the field. This roundtable panel focuses on pedagogical practices we use for such situations, especially as they reveal our investments in Asian Americanist critique as a kind of knowing that queries the contours of literary studies and the classroom as a site of learning.

To make our discussion more concrete, this call for ten-minute presentations asks for reflections on paper assignments, discussion activities, creative projects, or other concrete examples of what you do in the classroom to teach particular Asian American texts in these courses. Which texts have worked best for you? What activities or teaching strategies have helped to encourage students to read Asian American texts in critical ways without the benefit of a full quarter or semester to explore Asian Americanist issues, backgrounds, and contexts? Alternately, how has teaching particular Asian American texts transformed readings and discussions of non-Asian American texts in those courses?

Please submit a brief description (250-words) of an assignment that you want to share on the panel in the body of an email message to plai2@stthomas.edu. Please mention any technological needs for your presentation on your abstract. Also, please note that if your abstract is selected and you agree to present on this panel, you will need to become a member of CAALS before presenting.  For more information, please visit our website at http://caals.org/

Chair: Timothy Yu, University of Wisconsin

American Literature Association Conference, May 27-30, 2010, San Francisco
Standing panel organized by the Circle for Asian American Literary Studies
Proposals due: January 1, 2010

Since her death in 1982, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s work has moved from avant-garde obscurity to canonical status within Asian American literature.  Her bookDictée is now a classroom staple and has inspired a growing body of critical literature.  But critics’ focus on Dictée, and on that book’s more narrative elements, has left unexplored the full complexity of Cha’s work across genres and media, from autobiography and poetry to performance art, film, and artist’s books.  This panel will seek to build on more recent work that places Dictée in the context of Cha’s wider body of art.  Papers are welcomed that examine the less-frequently-discussed later sections of Dictée, which incorporate more visual and abstract materials and complicate the narratives of exile and migration that dominate the book’s earlier sections.  Papers that focus on Cha’s work beyond Dictée, such as her visual and video art or her critical writings, are also encouraged.  Cha’s archive of work, held by the Berkeley Art Museum and accessible through the Online Archive of California, provides a rich trove of materials that we hope papers for this panel will draw on, and we also hope that the conference’s location in San Francisco will allow us to view a sampling of Cha’s work in conjunction with the panel.  Send 1-page abstract and CV by email to Timothy Yu (tpyu@wisc.edu) by January 1, 2010.

Chair: Trevor Lee, City University of New York (CUNY)

“It is from those who have suffered the sentence of history – subjugation, domination, diaspora, displacement – that we learn our most enduring lessons for living and thinking.” – Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture

Salman Rushdie identifies the diasporic subject as “fantasist” who “build[s] imaginary countries and tr[ies] to impose them on the ones that exist.”  Focusing on the role of literature as a medium by which migrants both understand themselves and relate to society, The Circle for Asian American Literary Studies (CAALS) invites papers that explore the literary connections between African and Asian diasporic communities.  What might we learn by looking at the texts of African and Asian migrants comparatively?  We welcome papers that particularly compare and/or contrast ways in which the experiences of both African and Asian diasporic peoples open new textual possibilities.  Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

* Transnational modes of literary production and circulation

* Fictive depictions of the African and Asian homelands

* New technologies as a literary medium of expression and communication for migrants

* Diasporic science fictions, literary utopias/dystopias, or alternative worlds

* John Ogbu’s distinction between “immigrant minorities” and “involuntary minorities”

* Cosmopolitanism in Asian and African diasporic literature

* Relations between immigrants and host communities

* Intersecting racial political movements of Asian and African migrants and/or settlers

* Literary criticism, canonization, and global literature

* The various re/incarnations of hip-hop in diasporic communities

* Literary depictions of conflicts among migrant peoples

* Intersecting strands of magical realism in diasporic literature

Please send a 1-page abstract by December 18 to Trevor Lee via email: tjlee101@gmail.com.  Please mention any technological needs for your presentation on your abstract. Also, please note that if your abstract is selected and you agree to present on this panel, you will need to become a member of CAALS before presenting.  For more information, please visit our website at http://caals.org/

Chair: Merton Lee, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

American Literature Association Conference, May 27-30, 2010, San Francisco
Standing panel organized by the Circle for Asian American Literary Studies
Proposals due: January 1, 2010

The Circle for Asian American Literary Studies invites papers for a panel on critical reevaluations of Asian American literature before 1970.  According to Kandice Chuh, Asian American studies initially relied on claiming America as a nation to contest racist essentialism.  But more recently, shifts in Asian American studies towards transnational analyses demand more complex responses to early Asian American texts.  For example, literature previously dismissed as Orientalist might be recuperated as complex responses to both subnational and transnational affiliations.  Or canonical texts of Asian American literature might be re-situated in the context of a more open genealogy of precursors.  Additionally, reperiodization, different conceptions of time and the question of American neo-imperialism might all justify new approaches to how Asian American texts should be understood as literary history.  Topics might include understudied early 20th century American writers of Asian descent, writers of various ethnicities that are important to Asian American studies, or possibly corrective readings of well-known figures.  Please submit CVs and 250-350 word abstracts to mlee53@illinois.edu.

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

<a href=”http://americanliterature.org”> http://americanliterature.org </a>

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 ($5 for students and community members) and is open to all. Please see the following website for details: http://caals.org/

Thursday, May 21, 2009
1:30 – 2:50pm
“Margins within the Margins: Underrepresentation in Asian American Literary Criticism”
Chair: Catherine Fung, UC Davis
1. “Linh Dinh’s ‘The Most Beautiful Word’ as Vietnam War Poetry,” Merton Lee, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
2. “The Homeland in Hmong American Literature,” Trevor Lee, Queens College
3. “Patricia Chao’s Monkey King: Subverting Incest and Race,” Amy Manning, University of New Hampshire
4. “Remapping Allegiances: Christianity, Confession, and the Existential Turn in Richard Kim’s The Martyred,” Sueyeun Juliette Lee, Temple University

Friday, May 22, 2009
8:00 – 9:20 am
“Hemispheric Approaches to Asian American Literature”
Chair: Timothy Yu, University of Toronto
1. “Bharati Mukherjee and North American Immigrant Subjectivities,” Walter S. H. Lim, National University of Singapore
2. “An American Ideal and A Canadian Imaginary: Tracing the North-South Axis from Aiiieeeee! to Inalienable Rice,” Yvonne Wong, McMaster University
3. “Going Native?: Japanese Internment Narratives and the Politics of Cross-racial Identification,” Iyko Day, Mount Holyoke College

Friday, May 22, 2009
12:30 – 1:50 pm
“Critical Perspectives on Jhumpa Lahiri”
Chair: Betsy Huang, Clark University 
Respondent: Rani Neutill, Harvard University
1. “Adultery and Interracial Sex in the Stories of Jhumpa Lahiri,” Stephanie Li, University of Rochester
2. “Nothingness at the Center of the Wheel: Reading Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake,” Joonok Huh, University of Northern Colorado
3. “A Space of One’s Own: Jhumpa Lahiri, Arundhati Roy, and the Value of Borders,” Pranav Jani, The Ohio State University

Friday, May 22, 2009
3:30 – 4:50 pm
Round Table Discussion 1
“New Directions in Asian American Literature and Criticism”
Moderator: Nicky Schildkraut, University of Southern California
1. Catherine Fung, UC Davis
2. Qian Hua Ge, University of Rochester
3. Betsy Huang, Clark University
4. Greta Aiyu Niu, University of Rochester
5. Caroline Yang, Wesleyan University
6. Timothy Yu, University of Toronto

For more information about the American Literature Association conference, please visit their web site: http://americanliterature.org.

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/

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

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).

“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.

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.