CAALS is pleased to announce CFPs for ALA 2024!
May 23-26, 2024, Chicago, IL
Panel #1:
Asian American Carceral Structures: Dispossession and Relocation
We invite papers that consider how Asian American literary texts illuminate, challenge, or reimagine Asian American relationships to carceral structures. We ask, how might a deeper awareness of the Asian American subject’s implication in carceral structures allow for more interethnic coalition building?
Japanese American incarceration during World War II belongs to an important historical trajectory which he traces, from the Chinese Exclusion Act and mass detention of immigrants on Angel Island to the ongoing detainment of suspected enemy combatants in Guantanamo; racial and ethnic identities in the United States have always been indelibly bound to legal, and therefore, carceral structures. Memory work, often at the heart of contemporary Japanese American literature on wartime incarceration by descendant writers, is also central to the concerns of many artists and writers who engage with large-scale mass displacement, warfare and related genocidal violence from U.S.-backed military conflicts in Asia; AAPI artists having to negotiate personal and collective trauma, its afterlife, or both abound in recent works of Asian American literature, from wars experienced in the Philippines, Korea, and Vietnam, as well as related Cold-War era brutalities in Cambodia, Laos, and Indonesia, while most recently joined by writers from Pakistan and Afghanistan impacted by War on Terror.
This panel explores, what it means to represent histories of mass incarceration, and attending experiences of dispossession, family separations, and forced relocations, through Asian American poetry, drama, fiction, graphic novel, or other particular modes of literary and cultural expression.
Please email an abstract (max. 250 words) and a brief CV (max. 1-page) to Rei Magosaki at magosaki@chapman.edu and Christine Kitano at christine.kitano@stonybrook.edu by January 23rd, 2024. Please be sure to mention any technological needs for your presentation.
Panel #2
Game Changers: Asian Americans and Gaming Culture
This panel explores how Asian American identity is formulated through the socio-political structures of game playing. Looking at both the narrative construction of video games and the representations of game playing throughout various literary and media forms, we will consider how Asian Americans have been placed and place themselves in worlds governed by the logics of competition and play. We also invite examinations of interactive gaming communities and/or role-playing narratives that create alternative possibilities and timelines through console, mobile, and computer-based online gaming.
Potential papers could follow the groundbreaking work of Tara Fickle who shows how Asian American cultural positions, in both domestic and global spaces, have been circumscribed by ideas of gambling and games of chance. Examining how games and game theory shape the fictions about race upon which nations rely on could help us understand how and why virtual spaces, augmented realities, and metaverses are deployed in cultural texts and ideological discourse. We are particularly interested in submissions that show how game playing and/or video games are not culturally detached activities but key texts in the construction of Asian/Asian American race and ethnicity.
If interested, please email an abstract (max. 250 words) and a brief CV (max. 1-page) to Nayoung Yang nayoung.yang@stonybrook.edu by January 23rd, 2024. Please be sure to mention any technological needs for your presentation.
Panel #3
Open Call: New Directions in Asian American Literary Studies
We welcome proposals on current debates regarding Asian American literature. Our aim is to provide a forum for new and innovative work in Asian American literary studies.
Please email your proposal (max. 250 words) and a brief CV (max. 1-page) to Timothy K. August at timothy.august@stonybrook.edu by January 23rd, 2024. Please be sure to mention any technological needs for your presentation.