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.

Literature, Ecology, and Ethics

Organizer: Danny Luzon

“The ethics of the ecological thought is to regard beings as people even when they aren’t people.” –Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought In The Ecological Thought, Timothy Morton positions... more

White Supremacy and/as Neoliberal Culture

Organizer: Patricia Ventura

From the French writer Jean Raspail’s infamous 1973 dystopian novel Le Camp des Saints (The Camp of the Saints) to William L. Pierce’s equally infamous 1978 novel of insurrection The Turner Diaries (... more

Climates of Anti-inscription: Allergens, Dirt, and Decay

Organizer: Christopher Walker

How do literary fiction, art, and media explore, dramatize, or meditate on instances of anti-inscription, decomposition, or un-writing as effects of the climate crisis? In contrast to the many... more

Rethinking Heterogeneity: Sinophone Reportage and Beyond

Organizer: Li Guo

This seminar seeks cutting-edge, comparative research on Sinophone reportage in literature, cinema, photography, visual arts, art history, and performance, as well as the intersectionality of race,... more

Ménage à Trois: France, Postcoloniality, Universalism

Organizer: Farid Laroussi

If we agree that postcolonial and then decolonial studies entertain and challenge postulates on power and western modernity, France has amply illustrated how polemical are the theoretical,... more

Race, Caste, and Colorism in Caribbean Cultural Production

Organizer: Emily Maguire

In her book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020), Isabel Wilkerson argues that the United States operates under a caste system, one in which race is merely “the primary tool, and the visible... more

The Cineplastic in Asian Television and Cinema

Organizer: Ignacio Choi

The Cineplastic in Asian Television and Cinema The displacements brought about by the pandemic are beyond imagination. Or, are they? Do the changes it brings about, in form and in path, share the... more

Multilingual, Transregional, Comparative Approaches to South Asian Literature

Organizer: Ulka Anjaria

The concept of South Asian literature is inherently unstable; South Asia is a regional term that covers several countries, some of which are still enemies recovering from shared histories of violence... more

Anti-colonial Aesthetics and the Global Cold War

Organizer: Jini Kim Watson

In recent years, the Cold War has been theorized as a global process that coincided with and intercepted decolonization, resulting in the very creation of the Third World or Global South (Westad 2005... more

Text in and through Space: Transnationality, Translocality, and Transmediality, Sec. 1

Organizer: Yipeng Shen

How are texts produced, circulated and consumed in transnational, translocal, and transmedial spaces? What roles do gender, ethnicity, class, and nation-states play in cross-spatial reception of... more

Island of Shattered Dreams, 15 Years On: Reframing Francophone Oceanian Studies.

Organizer: Nathalie Segeral

2022 marks the 15th anniversary of the publication of Jean Anderson’s English translation of Chantal Spitz’s "L’île des rêves écrasés," a turning point in the reception and production of contemporary... more

Unjust Philologies in the “Modern” University

Organizer: Tanvi Solanki

In this seminar, we wish to examine how people of different positionalities vis a vis the ‘center’ and ‘peripheries’ of modern research universities, practice comparative literary studies within... more

The elusive woman

Organizer: christina kkona

Scholarly interest in portrayals of female errancy has mainly focused on works of previous eras, from Ariosto’s women wanderers to Francisco López de Úbeda’s La picara Justina (1605) to Frances... more

The Cultures of Global Post/Socialisms, Sec. 1

Organizer: Claudia Sadowski-Smith

Our panel seeks work on cultural productions that contribute to comparative assessments of the globality of state socialism and its legacies, which we designate in the term post/socialism (Chari and... more

Mobilizing Creativity in the Humanities

Organizer: Kiene Brillenburg Wurth

Every inventive nature continuously produces one shape from another. Nothing in the entire universe ever perishes, believe me, but things vary and adopt a new form. Ovid, Metamorphoses This... more

Literature and Technology: Reclaiming the Legacy of Fiction?

Organizer: Ana Ilievska

In this panel, we would like to think through the topic of Literature and Technology starting from the following provocative statement: “by claiming complete conceptual and creative novelty in the... more

Ruin and Reenactment: Staging Memory in Literature and Film

Organizer: Nefeli Forni

How is the representation of space as both a means of representation of memory, and, more broadly, of a social imaginary, constructed in literature and film? How does the “staging” of such space,... more

Fantasy and Global Cities, 1830-1930

Organizer: Klaudia Lee

Despite the claims of critics such as Rosemary Jackson and Stephen Prickett that modern fantasy is, in part, a reaction to industrialization, few projects have explored nineteenth- and early-... more

Voice: Enunciation, Meaning, Representation

Organizer: John Un

Voice has been a privileged term for many literary explorations. The term implies subjectivity, a source of discourse, and a particularity to enunciation; voice thus designates not only speech, but... more

World Literature and Moral Injury

Organizer: Renee Randall

The term “moral injury” entered our vocabularies in 1994. Responding to his experience treating US military veterans of the war in Vietnam, psychologist Jonathan Shay nuanced what had until then... more

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