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.

The American Comparative Literature Association

Organizer: Jamie Buster

The White-Hat Savior: Red Dead Redemption 2 and the White Savior Complex For the past 100 years the story of the white hat cowboy riding into the sunset has dominated the American Western... more

After Race, Three: New Alignments in Comparative Racialization, Multiracialism, and Post-Racialism

Organizer: Rafael Perez-Torres

This seminar proposes to collectively evaluate and schematize the field of comparative race studies: the tools, methods, and concepts used to compare and contrast the experiences of different racial... more

Archipelagic Asia

Organizer: Nicolai Volland

The study of literature of/in Asia remains fragmented, along the lines of nations, histories, ethnicities, languages, and disciplines—all concepts that are rooted, epistemologically and pragmatically... more

Land and private property: 21st century onto-material remnants

Organizer: pedro gabriel soares daher

Fredric Jameson has affirmed that “postmodern politics is essentially a matter of land-grabs, on a local as well as global scale”, and thus the capitalist mode of production which begins with various... more

Stories of Memory in the 21st Century

Organizer: Chia-Chieh Mavis Tseng

Memory remains a popular topic among contemporary literature, TV series, and movies (Memento, The Bourne Identity, Remainder, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Girl on the Train, Total... more

Comparative Archipelagoes

Organizer: Chih-Chien Hsieh

The recent disciplinary formations of island and archipelago studies revolve around an epistemological shifting. In his 1994 essay “Our Sea of Islands,” Tongan and Fijian anthropologist Epeli Hau’ofa... more

Contrapuntal China, Sec. 1

Organizer: Kyle Shernuk

Edward Said posits “contrapuntal reading” as a postcolonial intervention into the master narrative of imperialism by considering the voices, narratives, and perspectives of the colonized and the... more

Transnationalizing Queer Theory across Asia

Organizer: Grace En-Yi Ting

This panel calls for new creative thinking, methodologies, literary/visual archives, and intellectual genealogies that transnationalize queer theory. Namely, we draw inspiration from Shu-mei Shih and... more

Political Ecology of Silences

Organizer: Can Bilir

This seminar will gather a community of researchers with multidisciplinary focuses working within and beyond literature, film, music, and sound studies to examine the Anthropocentric detrimental... more

Queer Asia in Crisis

Organizer: Miguel Antonio Lizada

The notion of “Queer Asia,” whether implied or stated directly, is a paradox. On the one hand, it refers to the ways in which queer Asian subjects are positioned within the grid of geopolitical... more

The Bodies don’t lie

Organizer: Ananya Roy

What is the eerie similarity that has graced the historical receptacle of violent and traumatic acts committed by men? It has always been women-her physicality, sexuality and spiritual self that has... more

Anthropomorphism, Metamorphism, Transmorphism, Sec. 1

Organizer: Keijiro Suga

Anthropomorphism begins with the accidental finding of a face. We humans perceive faces everywhere. If we see two dots and a short line, a face emerges. Once the outlines appear, the face becomes... more

Reading Democracy

Organizer: Alessandro Giammei

21st century international politics and media have been dominated by the notion that “democracy” can (and should) be conceived as an absolute object, transportable and adaptable across cultural and... more

Narrative Mapping and the Interdisciplinary Study of Home and Homeland, Sec. 1

Organizer: Kyunghee Pyun

Ideas of home are a fundamental part of the ideological formations of the self and the stories we tell of our times—each one unique. This fluid, two-way process of affiliation is local and global;... more

Animal Connections: Literature and Film between Animal Studies and Environmental Humanities

Organizer: Ursula Heise

The environmental humanities and critical animal studies/human-animal studies have both established themselves as crucial areas of interdisciplinary studies in literature and culture over the last 30... more

Ethics of Postcolonial Translation: Exploring New Modes of Power and Resistance in Transcultural Exchanges

Organizer: Anum Aziz

The goal of this seminar proposal is to provide a platform to locate the fast-evolving theoretical precepts in translation from a postcolonial and cultural studies perspective. Taking an in depth... more

Comparative Perspectives on the Nobel Complex

Organizer: Michael Ka-chi Cheuk

The Nobel Prize in literature is the world’s most prestigious and recognized literary prize. Observers have coined the term “Nobel complex” to describe the sustained efforts and emotional investments... more

Multiculturalism, Literature and Translation in East Asia

Organizer: Tzu-yu Lin

This seminar invites papers exploring a broad spectrum of theoretical, methodological and empirical questions about multilingualism, literary translation and meaning making in East Asia. As claimed... more

Anthologies: the making of canons and beyond

Organizer: Gaultier Roux

The notion of anthology is little, or even not studied, by literary theory. Largely ignored by researchers in both a theoretical and a comparative perspectives, anthologies are mostly taken in... more

The Philology of Affect: Comparative Perspectives

Organizer: Claudio Sansone

In the first of what we hope will be a series of world-philological seminars—bringing together experts working on disparate cultures and languages—we want to explore the relation between philology... more

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