ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

As a continuation from the 2005 ACLA meeting, this panel invites papers focusing on the Asian Diaspora, which challenges and resists political, ideological, cultural, and national boundaries. The physical mobility of diasporic people, either self-motivated or forced upon them by varied social and historical factors, creates spaces where ideas are exchanged, cultivated, and nourished, through these dynamic movements.
Possible topics of papers include:

• (post-and neo-)colonial landscapes
• choice of languages and textual experiments
• transnationality and identities
• intersections of gender, ethnicity, class and diaspora
• challenge to the notions of nation states, and homogeneity
• (counter-)memories and national history

Although focusing on the contemporary Asian diasporic literature, the seminar aims to discuss every (possible) dimension of Asian transnational writers throughout the world, including those living in the Americas, Asia, and Africa.

Friday, March 24

Michelle Kim, University of Southern California
“Queer Diaspora and (De/Re) generation: Kazumi Stahl’s ‘Por Los Pecados No Cometidos’”
Jordan Smith, University of California, Los Angeles
“Descending from Samurai: Specters of Tradition in Nikkei Peruvian Literature”
Keiko Nakano, John Carroll University
“Crossing Borders and Negotiating as ‘The Other’”
Reiko Tachibana, Pennsylvania State University
“Zainichi Korean writers in Diasporic Landscapes”

Saturday, March 25

Dong-Shin Chang, New York University
“Kunqu in Diaspora: Cultural Identity and Transnationality”
Ying Liang, Purdue University
“Farewell, my Concubine: The Nationalistic Expression and International Audience”
Jennifer Johnson, University of California, Los Angeles
“Narrating the Cultural Revolution from Abroad: The Construction of Overseas Subjectivity in Dai Sijie, Gao Xingjian, and Liu Suola”
Feng Lan, Florida State University
“Revolution and Counterrevolution: Dai Sijie’s Diasporic Representation of Mao’s China”

Sunday, March 26

Chih-ming Wang, University of California, Santa Cruz
“‘Leaving Asia for America’: Translation and Diaspora in Yung Wing’s Autobiography”
Kanchanakesi Warnapala, Michigan State University
Unraced Bodies and Paranthetical Desire” Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family
Kathryn Johnston, Indiana University
“Sleeping with the Enemy: Exogamous Marriage in the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi”