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).