Asia, the Middle East, and the Caribbean
Description
This seminar engages in comparative analysis of literary and cultural productions that connect Asia to the Middle East and to the Caribbean. Through Arab-Asian comparisons, and projects bringing together Middle Eastern and East Asian Studies and South Asian Studies, we will address questions related to disciplinarily marginal approaches to comparative literature and comparison of literature from the global margins. How should we read the differences between direct and indirect (mediated, for instance, by translation) exchanges? What analytic approaches are necessary to unpack the complex power dynamics at play in such exchanges, or between scholars and archives in the Global South? What are the challenges, both theoretical and logistic, that accompany comparative projects in this geographic frame? What conversations between disciplinary tools are necessary to further comparative literature’s move away from Eurocentrism; what approaches can be revitalized, and which need to be left behind? What roles do translation and multilingualism play, both in this archive and in its analysis?Turning to the Caribbean, We will analyze how Asian-Caribbean relationalities have impacted both the Caribbean’s nation-building processes and the formation of diasporic Asian identities. How might Asian experiences—from the period of indenture to the present, and shaped by intersecting social positions such as race, gender, sexuality, religion, and class—refashion our understanding of Caribbean nationalism and diaspora? At the same time, how might Caribbean realities—in which racial and cultural mixing is common but colonial legacies, linguistic practices, sociopolitical climates, and power dynamics vary across the islands—offer another (trans)national site for studying Asian migrations and diasporas?
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Peiyu Yang is currently an instructional assistant professor of Arabic at George Mason University. Her monograph Triangular Translation: Gender, Politics, and the Making of the Postcolonial World between China, Europe, and the Middle East, 1880-1940 (2024, Legenda Press) investigates how intellectuals during the Nahda turned their attention to Chinese culture and its own anti-colonial struggle, constitutional revolution, and women’s rights.
Speaker Bio
Elizabeth M. Holt is an Associate Professor in the Division of Languages and Literature at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, where she teaches courses on Arabic language and literature, literary theory, translation, carbon, and solar aesthetics, and creative nonfiction and poetry. She is author of Fictitious Capital: Silk, Cotton, and the Rise of the Arabic Novel (Fordham UP 2017), and is completing a monograph on Arabic literature and the cold war.
Speaker Bio
Joanna Suwen Lee-Brown is a PhD candidate in modern Chinese literature and comparative literature at Columbia University. Her dissertation explores the relationship between Islam and global emancipatory left-wing politics in the People's Republic of China (PRC) from the 1950s to the present. She traces how Chinese Muslims have historically sought to articulate connections between Islam, anti-imperialism, and socialism through translingual writing and media practices.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Khairillah Irwan is a graduate student in New York University's Comparative Literature department. He is interested in comparative paradigms that bring together the literary-political worlds of the Middle East and Muslim Southeast Asia. The latter animates his interest in how literary thinking emerges from the peripheral spaces of an already peripheral postcolonial world. He is drawn to how one can cognitively map literary-political possibilities through seemingly minor literary forms.
Speaker Bio
Yei Won Lim earned her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Oregon. Her research traces transpacific circuits of US-allied internationalism, investigating the ‘post’ Cold War contours of Asian regionalism. Scrutinizing the cultural politics of reviving liberal forms that extend colonial policies and Cold War sensibilities, her research investigates the terms of the secular in abstracting the violent conditions of securing nation, labor, and secular postcolonial time.
Speaker Bio
Amal Zaman is a PhD candidate in Fordham's English department. Her research focuses on feminine forms in South Asian and Black diasporic literature and she has published articles in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Joyce Studies Annual, Herald Magazine, and The Massachusetts Review.
Speaker Bio
Crystal Xinjie Wang is a PhD student in the School of Chinese at the University of Hong Kong. Her research lies at the intersection of film studies, Sinophone studies, and feminist and queer theory, with particular interests in transnational Chinese cinemas, documentary practices, female performance, and transmedial cultural production. Her current work explores how affect, embodiment, and media form mediate identity, memory, and mobility within contemporary Sinophone film and visual cultures.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Xu Peng is currently completing his PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Connecticut. His dissertation examines the Chinese representation in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Dominican literatures. He has two essay related to this topic forthcoming in Cuban Studies and Verge, respectively.
Speaker Bio
Kyungjin Jung is a second-year Ph.D. student in English at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research spans Caribbean literature, transnational visual and screen culture and literature. Drawing on interdisciplinary approaches from postcolonial theory and media studies, Jung is interested in exploring how the aesthetics and forms of literature provide valuable insights into the richness that emerges from the (re)negotiation of boundaries.
Speaker Bio
Scott Ting-A-Kee is a Lecturer of the University of Guyana whose major research interest is the Chinese-Caribbean experience within the disciplines of history and literature. Ting-A-Kee was also a writer-in-residence at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine in 2020. His debut novella, Red Hibiscus was published in 2018 and was shortlisted for the 2022 Guyana Prize for Literature Best First Book in Fiction.
Speaker Bio
Dr. Haiqing Sun is Professor of Spanish at Texas Southern University. Her research focuses on Hispanic American narratives, with publications on Borges, Vargas Llosa, Roa Bastos, and Latin American cultures.