[Gregory Fenton]

I’m co-organizing a seminar on Asian American and Asian Canadian topics for next year’s ACLA meeting in Utrecht. I’m sure that the conversations we are envisioning would be of interest to members of this forum! My apologies for a last minute posting, but if you have an abstract ready to submit, the ACLA website will accept proposals to our seminar until 11:59pm (PST) this evening. Here is a link to the CFP: http://acla.org/node/12381

The seminar abstract follows, below:

“Fresh Off What Boat?: New Directions in Reading Asian America and Asian Canada”

Fresh Off the Boat actress Constance Wu proclaimed in a June 2016 interview with Vulture, “We don’t even have the same language, you and I. But white America has grouped us all together, so therefore we are like, ‘Okay, you guys are the higher people. You said we’re all together, so I guess we are.’” This seminar wades into the midst of conversations around Asian American and Asian Canadian (or, together, Asian North American) identities, politics, and cultural production in order to explore the competing urgencies of coming together and coming undone. These generative movements away and apart reflect the globalization of capital (economic and cultural), the rise of Asian languages in Western academic environments, and the pertinence of the diasporic turn in literary and cultural studies, but they also present challenges to reflect cultural specificity and contend with dissent across generational, class-based, and gendered differences. The adaptation of the Asian American sitcom Fresh Off the Boat’s title into a question challenges notions of arrival, departure, and migration while acknowledging the placement of this question in our current moment. As such, this seminar reflects upon Lisa Lowe’s recent insistence that modern liberalism must be challenged with “new narratives of affirmation and presence” through the investigation of “the intimacies of four continents” (The Intimacies of Four Continents 40), among other recent turns to perspectives beyond or post-national. Mobility and migration – whether as labourer or as what Aihwa Ong has termed the subject of “flexible citizenship” (Flexible Citizenship 6) – has redefined home, family, work, and identity; it is pertinent to consider paradigms of diaspora and transnationalism as part and parcel of everyday life and of modern circuits of capital, culture, and society. The situating of this seminar in Utrecht, a locale far removed from the boundaries of Asian North America, underscores that displacement is often central to these conversations and their terms of engagement, but does not negate the fruitfulness of a “decentered” methodology or the recognition of global complicity in histories of colonization and empire. Comparative reflections on cultural and political formations in literary studies, cultural studies, comparative literatures, translation studies, and globalization studies demand nuance and careful contextualization in order to acknowledge the complexity of the shifts in how “Asian America” and “Asian Canada” are both represented and lived. Papers submitted to this seminar should reflect on the urgency of this analysis and questions concerning the construction/deconstruction/destruction of collectivity within and against the realities of hybridity, multiculturalism, transnationalism, and multi-racial and multi-lingual identities.

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