ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

Centuries of territorial conflict, shared tradition, and economic exchange between the nations of East and South Asia have produced a wide-range of hybrid cultural expressions influenced by the identity politics of both regions. The evolution of Tibetan representations of the Indian-born Buddha over the centuries, for example, displays Tibet’s ongoing attempts to integrate South Asian tradition into the hegemonic Chinese culture dominating its territory. A plethora of travel writings, for example by eighteenth-century British writers George Bogle and Samuel Turner and modern-day Indian writer Vikram Seth, illustrate the various cultural lenses, colonial, Western and postcolonial, non-Western, that have speculated on the interpolation of East and South Asian cultures.

This panel explores how the social, political, economic, and religious interactions between East and South Asia have influenced and produced a wide-range of subjectivities framed by those regions, as expressed through literary and cultural productions from the ancient through modern times. Paper topics may address themes pertaining, but not limited, to: Reading and Representing the “Subject”; Literature and Human Rights; Language and the Human; Translation and Metamorphosis; Western Readings of Orientalism and Otherness; Media and the Human; The Human and the Natural World; Philosophy, Literature, and the Human; Gender and Transformation; Religion and Globalism; Terrorism and Tradition; Monsters and Angels; and Temporal and Spatial Expressions of Identity.

Friday, March 24

Anastasia Salter, Corcoran College, Georgetown University
“Avatara: The Linguistics of the Avatar in Virtual and Mythic Space”
VG Julie Rajan, Rutgers University
“Reflections of Home: Exploring Indian Subjectivity Through the Chinese Imaginary in Vikram Seth’s From Heaven Lake”
Dorothy Figueira, University of Georgia
“Barbarian Monsters and Angelic Christians in 15th Century Travel Narratives”
Angel Lu, Hong Kong Institute of Education
“Abstract Colonialism, Concrete desires: Representations/Southeast Asian Women in the Works of Three Shanghai Writers”

Saturday, March 25

Alexandria Schultheis, University of North Carolina, Greensboro
“Subjectivity Politics in Sorrow Mountain: Transnational Feminism and Tibetan (Auto)biography”
Arshiya Lokandawalla, Cornell University
“Devi Darshan: A Gift of Love?”
Helen Asquine Fazio, Rutgers University
“The Illusory Nature of Female Empowerment in Tibetan Tantric Buddhism and Hindu Bhakti: Mandarava and Mirabai”
Ronita Battacharya, University of Georgia
“Metamorphosis of ‘Hindu’ Gods”