CFP: America's Asia, Asia's America

The 2007 Texas Tech Comparative Literature Symposium on "America's Asia, Asia's America"

April 13-14, 2007 at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas

Texas Tech University houses the largest Vietnam Archive in the United States, and West Texas has been home to thousands of Vietnamese/Asian Americans. Late spring in Lubbock is usually mild and sunny.

Keynote Speakers:

Sheldon Xiao-peng Lu, Comparative Literature Program, UC-Davis;
Rob Wilson, Department of Literature, UC-Santa Cruz;
Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, Asian American Studies Program, UC-Berkeley

Proposal Submission Deadline: January 12, 2007

With great progress in technological innovation and economic development in China, India, and other Asian countries in recent decades, the twenty-first century has increasingly been identified and envisioned as "the Asian-Pacific century" or "the Chinese century" in the global media. What political and cultural implications does this new construction of Asia generate? How will these revitalized Asian nation-states articulate their own desires and reposition themselves in the context of the U.S.-centered global order? How will the United States redefine itself in relation to the rise of this new Asia? What lessons has the United States drawn in its political, economic, cultural, and military encounters with these Asian nation-states since the late nineteenth century?

This symposium looks for papers that will engage these challenging questions and theorize their complexity and historicity in both the Asian and North American contexts. We not only welcome proposals that examine the construction of Asia in terms of space production and reconsider Asian America as a process of racial formation, but we also encourage projects that investigate ways in which information technology, trans-Pacific movements, as well as Asian language communication may impact the futures of both Asia and North America.

Possible topics may include but are not restricted to the following:

--Modernism and the Literary Representation of Asia

--The Cold War and the Cultural Imagination of Asia

--Cold War Legacy and National Division

--Cyberpunk Fiction and the Reinvention of Asia

--Orientalism Revisited

--Postcolonial Asian Literatures and Cultures

--Trash Aesthetics and the Hong Kong Kung Fu Cinema

--Sex, Violence, and Fantasy in the Japanese Manga and Anime

--From Hollywood to Bollywood

--Asians and Asian Americans in Hollywood Cinema and American Popular Culture

--Transnational Asian American Literature

--Globalization and Asian American Popular Culture

--Asian American Studies and Latino/a Studies

--Asian American Studies and African American Studies

--The Discourse of "Human Rights" and the Re-construction of Asia

--SARS, Avian Flu, and the New "Yellow Peril"

--Technology, Espionage, and Asian American Communities

--Blogging and New Asian Nationalisms

--Vietnam War Literature and Culture

--War, Empire, and the Global Market

Please send your one-page proposal and one-page C.V. by January 15, 2007:

Dr. Yuan Shu
Department of English
P.O. Box 43091
Texas Tech University
Lubbock, TX 79409-3091

You may email your inquiry, proposal, and C.V. to Dr. Yuan Shu at (yuan.shu [at] ttu.edu).

Yuan Shu
Associate Professor of English
Director of the Comparative Literature Program
Texas Tech University
Box 43091
Lubbock, TX 79409-3091
E-mail: yuan.shu [at] ttu.edu
V-mail: 806-742-2500x240
Fax: 806-742-0989

(via CFP list)