Seminars

Please select a seminar for which you would like to propose a paper. Current ACLA guidelines specify that each ACLA member may submit only ONE PAPER for consideration. Abstracts must be received by Sunday, October 31, 2021 at 11:59 p.m. PST.

Asian-Indigenous Relations

Organizer: Yan Lu

Connections between Asians and Indigenous communities have long been formed through Asian migration around the world. Asian diaspora, from indentured labourers to new immigrants, have centuries of... more

Poetics of Authenticity

Organizer: Ron Ben-Tovim

What does “authenticity” denote in the study literature? Is there a way of writing authentically, reading authentically, or is authenticity just the effect of certain kinds of literary tension or... more

Ruined Hope: Experiments in Negation, Nihilism, and Possibility

Organizer: Erin Prior

The critical (re)turn to negation has provoked unprecedented attention to hope and hopelessness as key terms of contemporary living and dying. In her monograph on ecological crisis and political... more

Ideology and Science in the Multinaturalist Conjuncture

Organizer: Pietro Bianchi

In the 1960s the synthesis of structuralism, psychoanalysis, and Marxist theory could be expressed as an opposition between ideology and science. Ideology was the process for the production and... more

Diasporic Avant-Gardes: East Asian Transitions in Form and Genre

Organizer: Barrett Watten

This seminar continues the work of Diasporic Avant-Gardes: Experimental Poetics and Cultural Displacement (ed. Barrett Watten and Carrie Noland; Palgrave, 2009)—a collection of essays addressing the... more

Troubling the Burden of Representation: Transhemispheric Aesthetics in Asian Cinema

Organizer: Haerin Shin

The past two years under the reign of the Pandemic effectively shattered the scant remainders of the post-racial illusion, shedding harsh yet most timely light on the persevering presence of binary... more

Refugee Nations and Unimagined Cartographies: Migration, Displacement and Homelessness in Contemporary Geopolitics, Sec. 1

Organizer: Mohammad Asim Siddiqui

The widespread phenomenon of migration and displacement in the contemporary geo-political climate exhibited by the notions of mobility, borderlessness, protracted displacement, statelessness, penal... more

Make it Big: Mapping Out Perspectives on Collectivity

Organizer: Mi Jeong Lee

We live in an era demanding collectives, whether it be on the level of the local, in communities, neighborhoods, or gatherings, or on the level of the global, in trans- or supra-national... more

Oceanic Writing: The Asia-Pacific in Global Literature

Organizer: Ryan Johnson

This seminar welcomes papers on the relationship between the Southern Hemisphere and East Asia in modern and contemporary literature. East Asia has become increasingly important to the study of World... more

Writing with the Mind: The Virtual Essence of Global Magical Realism

Organizer: Eugene Arva

This comparative literature panel will be founded on Eva Aldea’s Deleuzian treatment of magical realism, according to which “the Deleuzian ontological model of actual and virtual as two sides of One... more

Recent Pasts, New Cities, Old Territories: Breaks and Transformations in Early Modern Anatolian Literature

Organizer: Oscar Aguirre Mandujano

From the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, Anatolian and the Middle Eastern cities and territories changed hands: the Ottomans expanded their dominions into the Balkans, south and eastern... more

Puppetry in Literature

Organizer: Deniz Başar

The puppet has a long history of being wielded in literature as a symbol for manipulation/manipulated, a play thing lacking consciousness, a referent pointing to younthful/more innocent days. Puppets... more

Critical Race Theory: Bridging the Gap Between the Classroom and the Community”

Organizer: Claire van den Broek

Following a series of high-profile deaths of African Americans at the hands of policemen, the birth of BLM, and rapid growth of white supremacist hate groups in America (SPLC), American conservatives... more

Rethinking Description in the Long 18th Century

Organizer: Cynthia Vialle-Giancotti

Description has long been considered little more than a prolix rhetorical device: confused with ekphrasis, deprived of an autonomous status, it has been the subaltern of “narrative”. Yet descriptive... more

Je est un author: (Re-)Appearances of the Authorial Subject in Literature and Theory

Organizer: Sebastian Brass

In Mithu Sanyal’s novel Identitti, shortlisted for the German Book Prize 2021, a fictional professor of Postcolonial Studies who identifies as a PoC causes a scandal when it turns out she is actually... more

Post-Violence: The Telling and the Told, Sec. 1

Organizer: Yiru Lim

When we hear, read, or watch a narrative of a violent or traumatic event, we are often fixated on its representation. We hang on to details about location; we want to find out who the perpetrators... more

Anthologies, Zines, and Magazines: The Collaborative Avant-garde

Organizer: Stephanie Anderson

The avant-garde has often been defined by its asserted antagonism towards existing norms, and, in turn, critiqued for its ultimate co-option or complicity in those norms. Building on this rich... more

From Lifeworld to Social World: Productive (Mis)understandings and Future (Mis)uses of the Phenomenological Method Across Disciplines

Organizer: Bellamy Mitchell

There seems to be a contradiction between the proliferation of contemporary usages of phenomenology across disciplines in the literary humanities and social sciences, and its relative distress and... more

Taiwan as Island Borders: Nature, Natives, and Virus in Relational Comparisons

Organizer: Liang I-ping

In recent years, borders have emerged as a critical terrain of power struggles and epistemic crises for engaging and rethinking the Post-Pandemic questions of race and multiculturalism,... more

Literature After Rights

Organizer: Arielle Stambler

For over a decade now, the interdisciplinary study of human rights and literature has offered a generative lens for thinking about questions of citizenship, the nation-state, and narrative form.... more

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