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.