Weihsin Gui @ MLA Commons

For the 2024 Modern Language Association in Philadelphia (January 4 to 7), the Southeast Asian and Southeast Asian Diasporic Forum is organizing or co-organizing four sessions / panels.

Please click on the links below to see the full CFPs and submission deadlines.

1) Postcolonial Southeast Asia?: Limits and Possibilities
https://bit.ly/40NR1Wo

2) Southeast Asia and Queer of Color Critique: Intersections and Interventions
https://bit.ly/3jLibwg

3) Speculative Fiction from Southeast Asia in the Twenty-first Century (co-organized with Speculative Fiction Forum)
https://bit.ly/3DYR87G

4) South Asian Representations in Twenty-First Century Southeast Asia (official collaboration with South Asia Forum)
https://bit.ly/3xwIzgV

CFP: Postcolonial Southeast Asia?: Limits and Possibilities (MLA 2024)

The CLCS Southeast Asian and Southeast Asian Diasporic Forum invites submissions for a panel at the Modern Language Association Annual Convention on January 4–7, 2024 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania:

Postcolonial Southeast Asia?: Limits and Possibilities

An academic field that emerged in the 1970s–1980s to tackle Western colonization and its aftermath (especially following post–World War II formal decolonization), postcolonial studies have since untethered themselves from their initial historical point of reference to include yet other contexts of power and to problematize the location of colonialism in the past. This was due in part to the field’s taking root in literary criticism, where it drew on and interrogated other paradigms— notably, Marxism, psychoanalysis, New Historicism, and deconstruction—to become a seminal intellectual development of the late twentieth century. Referring not only to a subject (colonialism, cultures of de/colonization, the modern world, power) but also to an approach to this subject based on the methodologies of literary studies, postcolonial studies have tended to critique essentialism, valorize difference, and underscore political/aesthetic representation while expanding the Western academy through the thought and experiences of the colonized.

Pointing to the absence of Southeast Asia in this academic development, Chua Beng Huat, in the introduction to a special issue of Postcolonial Studies (11.3, 2008), writes that postcolonial studies have “bypassed one of the most colonized regions of the world” (231). To some extent due to postcolonial studies’ indebtedness to early-twentieth-century anticolonial thought from South Asia and Africa, thus to the field’s early emphasis on those regions, this gap between the field and the area, Chua argues, is more significantly rooted in the peculiarity of post-WWII independence in Southeast Asia, which was followed by the Cold War, which was not “cold” in Asia (232). This postwar history “created ambivalence in [Southeast Asia] regarding colonialism as [its] oppressive history […] was displaced by the anticipation and fear of ‘totalitarian oppression’ of communism” (232), not to mention by the preoccupation with the nation-building projects—characterized by democracy/authoritarianism, multiracial politics, and subnationalist armed conflicts—that came on the heels of the civil wars between communists and anti-communists (233). “By the mid-1960s, [… when] the communists had been largely defeated” “except in the Indochina peninsula,” “the nations in island Southeast Asia” embarked on capitalist “modernization” (233)—a process hardly at odds with Western colonial history.

What does this history of the gap between postcolonial and Southeast Asian studies reveal? In what ways does Southeast Asia constitute the limit of postcolonial studies? What are the limits of postcolonial studies’ tenets and methods, as illustrated in Southeast Asia? Are there exceptions to the absence of Southeast Asia in postcolonial studies, and if so what does the exception intimate about the region? Have the methods of postcolonial studies in fact long been practiced on Southeast Asia, but in other fields (e.g., Filipino American studies)? Given postcolonial studies’ untethering from its historical point of reference or narrowly defined subject (British and French colonialism), how might postcolonial studies be critical to the analysis of longstanding Southeast Asian topics (e.g., modernization, authoritarianism, racial conflict)—which are also postcolonial topics?

This panel seeks proposals that explore the gap between Southeast Asian and postcolonial studies, and the ways that this gap may reveal possibilities for both, including intersectionally. Send a 250- word abstract with your CV to Ryan Ku (Swarthmore College rku1@swarthmore.edu) and Alden Sajor Marte-Wood (Rice University asmw@rice.edu) no later than March 10, 2023. Please note that all accepted speakers will be asked to provide a 100-word bio and must be MLA members by April 7, 2023.

CFP: Southeast Asia and Queer of Color Critique: Intersections and Interventions (MLA 2024)

We invite papers for a guaranteed session organized by the Southeast Asia and Southeast Asia Diasporic Forum for the January 2024 Modern Language Association’s conference in Philadelphia. Our session builds on existing scholarship on queer Asian and Southeast Asian identities and narratives, such as the special journal issues of Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific (2015, ed. Brian Curtin) and Culture, Theory, and Society (2017, eds. Howard Chiang and Alvin K. Wong); Arnika Fuhrmann’s Ghostly Desires: Queer Sexuality and Vernacular Buddhism in Contemporary Thai Cinema (2016); and the essay collection Queer Southeast Asia (2023, eds. Shawna Tang and Hendri Yulius Wijaya).

Queer of color critique’s emphasis on “subjectless critique” that is “organized around difference” (Ferguson), i.e. its skepticism towards narratives of authenticity rooted only in one particular identity category, is especially amenable to a discussion of gender and sexuality in Southeast Asia. This is a region that has historically been and still is the intersection of multiple linguistic, demographic, economic, and cultural flows from many different parts of the world. It is also a terrain upon which exist intersecting regimes of national, (post- and neo-)colonial, and imperial power that regulate or manage gender and sexuality on local and regional socio-political registers. Our session investigates a productive overlap between a queer of color critique of liberalism’s violences and the contradictions of nation-state formation with an inter-Asia understanding of Southeast Asia as a heterogeneous region that rejects the “geo-colonial, Orientalising impulse of area studies” (Tang and Wijaya).

As an intellectual area and a critical framework, queer of color critique has a distinct origin in the USA and work in the field often centers North American subjects and cultures. Yet as Roderick A. Ferguson and other scholars such as Jasbir Puar, Martin Manalansan, and Gayatri Gopinath have shown, there is untapped potential for turning queer of color critique towards investigating liberalism’s complicities with practices of exclusion and domination in non-Western, non-White settings, particularly those not physically proximate to North America. Our session intends to open up ways of connecting queer of color critique with Southeast Asian queer social, cultural, and political formations and subjectivities that go beyond marking the visibility of these formations and subjectivities. We are also interested in how local, Southeast Asian discourses and cultural productions can intervene in or challenge queer of color critique and constitute their own critical frameworks and methodologies.

We welcome papers on queer of color critique and Southeast Asia that address any of the following (non-exhaustive) areas:

– decoloniality / postcoloniality

– state power and biopower

– indigeneity

– class and labor

– migration and diaspora

– aesthetics and politics

Please send 250-word abstracts and CV, as well as any questions, to Jasmine An (anjasmin@umich.edu) and Weihsin Gui (weihsing@ucr.edu) by March 10, 2023. Please note that speakers whose papers are accepted for this session will need to become members of the Modern Language Association by April 7, 2023 in order to participate in the conference itself.

CFP: Speculative Fiction from Southeast Asia in the Twenty-first Century (MLA 2024)

We invite paper proposals for a non-guaranteed special session / panel jointly organized by the MLA Southeast Asia and Speculative Fiction Forums for the January 2024 Modern Language Association conference in Philadelphia. We seek papers about speculative fiction (broadly understood) by Southeast Asian authors, especially works published after 2000. Given Southeast Asia’s linguistic diversity, we welcome papers about speculative fiction in languages other than English.

While Southeast Asian speculative fiction has witnessed a boom in the past two decades, academic scholarship has not kept pace with the vast output of creative writing from the region that falls under this literary umbrella. Journals such as LONTAR (2013-2018; ed. Jason Erik Lundberg), short-fiction anthologies such as Alternative Alamat: Stories Inspired by Philippine Mythology (2011; ed. Paolo Chikiamco), Cyberpunk: Malaysia (2015; ed. Zen Cho) and Singa-Pura-Pura: Malay Speculative Fiction from Singapore (2021; ed. Nazry Bahrawi), and single-author novels such as Nuraliah Norasid’s The Gatekeeper (2016) and Joshua Kam’s How the Man in Green Saved Pahang, and Possibly the World (2020) are evidence of the rich and varied speculative fiction written in Southeast Asia. Moreover, speculative comics such as Budjette Tan and Kajo Baldisimo’s Trese (2005-) and Arnold Arre’s The Mythology Class (1999) have obtained North American imprints, thus increasing their circulation outside Southeast Asia.

Our panel stresses the critical potential of speculative, non-mimetic narratives to create technoscientific or magical-fantastic worlds that represent and challenge social inequalities, prevailing cultural attitudes, and dominant power structures in Southeast Asia, whether in one country or in the larger region. As Sherryl Vint argues, speculative fiction “encourages examination of the irrational and affective dimensions of experience as well as logical extrapolation” from our current state of affairs; it “rethinks the discourses by which we understand commonplace reality” (Science Fiction: A Guide to the Perplexed 90). We hope this panel’s attention to speculative cultural productions from Southeast Asia will illuminate alternative genealogies and sites for understanding speculative fiction beyond the Anglo-American frameworks in which this genre is often situated. With this in mind, we invite papers that critically discuss Southeast Asian speculative fiction in relation to any topics on the following (non-exhaustive) list:

– decoloniality / postcoloniality

– race and ethnonationalism

– gender and sexuality

– myth, spirituality, and religion

– class, labor, and wealth

– local, regional, and global politics

– migration and diaspora

– language, translation, and storytelling

– visual media and cross-media adaptation

Please send 250-word abstracts and current CV, as well as any questions, to Weihsin Gui (weihsing@ucr.edu) and Frances Tran (ftran@fsu.edu) by March 13, 2023. Please note that speakers whose papers are accepted for this session will need to become members of the Modern Language Association by April 7, 2023 in order to participate in the conference itself.

CFP: South Asian Representations in Twenty-First Century Southeast Asia (MLA 2024)

We invite paper proposals for a collaborative session between the South Asia and Southeast Asia Forums for the January 2024 Modern Language Association conference in Philadelphia. We welcome papers exploring how South Asia (as countries or cultures) or South Asians (as migrant, diasporic, or ethnic subjects) are represented in contemporary literature or film / visual media by authors and creators in twenty-first century Southeast Asia.

Our session extends and expands the work of earlier scholarship on South Asian diasporic literature, including groundbreaking monographs such as Yasmin Husssain’s Writing Diaspora: South Asian Women, Culture and Ethnicity (2005) and Vijay Mishra’s Literature of the Indian Diaspora: Theorizing the Diasporic Imaginary (2007). Recent special journal issues of Asiatic (2017) and South Asian Diaspora (2021) have included essays on a wider range of South Asian diasporic authors outside of Britain and the USA. However, with the exception of a few authors such as K. S. Maniam, Edwin Thumboo, and Preeta Samarasan, Southeast Asian authors of South Asian descent have not received much critical attention, especially those producing work in the past two decades. We are thus especially interested in papers that focus on literary or visual / filmic narratives by new or emerging authors and cultural producers.

Possible topics for discussion include (but are not limited to):

– cultural identities (migrant, diasporic, ethnic)

– class and labor

– gender and sexuality

– caste and religion

– critiques of racism and ethnonationalism

Please send 250-word abstracts and 100-word speaker bios, as well as any questions, to Weihsin Gui (weihsing@ucr.edu) and Umme Al-Wazedi (ummeal-wazedi@augustana.edu) by March 13, 2023. Please note that speakers whose papers are accepted for this session will need to become members of the Modern Language Association by April 7, 2023 in order to participate in the conference itself.

Gaze Back: A Poetry Reading by Marylyn Tan

Tuesday November 8 at 4:30 PM

INTS1111 CHASS Interdisciplinary Round Lab

University of California-Riverside

Queer, female, and Chinese, Marylyn Tan is a linguistics graduate, poet, and artist who has been performing and disappointing since 2014. Her work trades in the conventionally vulgar, radically pleasurable, and unsanctioned, striving to emancipate and restore the alienated, endangered body. Tan is Poetry Editor at Singapore Unbound’s SUSPECT Journal, founder of multidisciplinary arts collective DIS/CONTENT (hellodiscontent.carrd.com), and can be found in her habitat on instagram (@marylyn.orificial) and twitter (@grinchfucker). Her poetry collection, Gaze Back, was published by Ethos Books in 2018 and by Georgia Review in 2022. She lives in Singapore.

This event is co-sponsored by the University of California-Riverside’s Departments of English, Creative Writing, Gender & Sexuality Studies, Media & Cultural Studies, and SEATRiP and Center for Ideas and Society.

Questions? Please contact Weihsin Gui at weihsing@ucr.edu.

Southeast Asian History in Literature Part II: Contesting Nations in Fictional Pasts

Modern Language Association Convention. San Francisco, Jan. 2023

Sponsored by the MLA Southeast Asian and Southeast Asian Diasporic Forum

Description: This session is paired with Southeast Asian History in Literature Part I on general topic of history in literature proposed by the Southeast Asian and Southeast Asian Diasporic Forum. This session’s speakers examine how nationalism and national identity are negotiated and contested through literary representations of key or formative historical periods and figures in a particular country’s past. The range of Southeast Asian texts considered goes beyond historical fiction to include works written in different languages and genres. Our paired sessions expand the scholarship on Southeast Asian literature, which often occupies a minor place in established formations of postcolonial and global Anglophone literatures. In Nationalism and Southeast Asia (2004) Nicholas Tarling observes that “nation-, state- and regimebuilders share a desire to use the past” to establish their new postcolonial countries, and “a comparative regional approach” (239) is needed to analyze nationalist uses of history and highlight how cultural producers employ history and historiography to critique the often ethnocentric narratives and processes of nation-building. 

Our session examines how history is represented in comparative, regional, and transnational ways by Southeast Asian and Southeast Asian diasporic writers. Although Benedict Anderson’s references Southeast Asian fiction in his groundbreaking conceptualization of nations as Imagined Communities (1983), our speakers depart from Anderson’s emphasis on seriality and print culture, instead focusing on histories as contested narratives in Southeast Asian writing. Pheng Cheah’s Spectral Nationality (2003) also looks at some Southeast Asian texts to make the philosophical case that nationalism is a spectral rather than a vivifying concept. Our speakers take a different approach by examining formal elements of literary language, style, and narrative perspective that, taken together, envision alternative ways of constituting a nation and other modes of belonging beyond state-centered patriotism in Southeast Asia and its diasporas.

Jasmine An’s “Crafting/Contesting Thainess: Polyvocality in Contemporary Thai Fiction” examines contemporary Thai novels grappling with Thailand’s unique political history, where literary production is sometimes associated with the unimpeachability of the Thai monarchy. Veeraporn Nitiprapha’s The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth (trans. Kong Rithdee 2015), Pitchaya Sudbanthad’s Bangkok Wakes to Rain (2019), and Sunisa Manning’s A Good True Thai (2020) all contain multiple narrators and recount key political moments in Thailand’s history such as student protest movements and subsequent government repression. The polyvocality of these texts dramatizes the ongoing negotiations and contestations of defining Thainess that are obscured by the hegemonic narrative of Thailand’s three pillars: nation, religion, and monarchy.

William Arighi’s “Coasts and Waves: Baybayin, Wave Theory, and Canonicity in Ilustrado Thought” looks at late-nineteenth-century Filipino nationalist intellectuals who wished to recuperate a precolonial past through baybayin, a script derived from a Sulawesi script based on Sanskrit that was used to transcribe Tagalog before the Spanish arrival. Baybayin’s presumed association with Southeast Asian backwardness ultimately thwarted the Ilustrados’ desire for a medium for grounding their nascent national consciousness. The Ilustrados’ reflections on orthography in this period oriented Philippine intellectuals away from Southeast Asia and promoted a “literariness” inherited from Europeans based on ideas of universalism, permanence, and transparency.

Eunice Ying Ci Lim’s “Intuiting Shōnan-tō through Technologies of (Il)literacy” analyzes Jing-Jing Lee’s How We Disappeared (2019) as intergenerational and self-reflexive historical fiction. Shifting between Singapore during its World War II Japanese military occupation and its postcolonial present, Lee’s novel shows how the remembrance of imperialist history and the repurposing of a foregone modernity (represented by the short-lived vision of a Pan-Asian Shōnan-tō) is complicit in Singapore’s present-day modernizing and nationalizing agendas. Through linguistic illiteracy and narrative incoherence, the novel confronts and resists the implicit demands of national literary canonization and the global literary marketplace.

Hannah Ho Ming Yit and Rommel Curaming’s “Fictive Historical Identities of Enrique de Malacca in Novels” looks at a range of multilingual fiction about Enrique de Malacca, who was Ferdinand Magellan’s slave of Malay origin. Harun Aminurrashid’s Panglima Awang (1958), Carla M. Pacis’ Enrique El Negro (2002), and Danny Jalil’s Enrique the Black (2021) offer fictional biographies of Enrique that contribute to nationalist imaginations and contestations in Malaysia and the Philippines. While the earliest novel consolidates state discourses of Malay/sian identity, subsequent novels reconstruct Enrique’s identity apart from state-sponsored understandings, dispute and critique dominant discourses of gendered Malay identity and neocolonial power structures, and envision a culturally inclusive national body.

Participants:

* Weihsin Gui. University of California-Riverside (presider)

* Jasmine An. University of Michigan. “Crafting/Contesting Thainess: Polyvocality in Contemporary Thai Fiction”

* William Arighi. Springfield College. “Coasts and Waves: Baybayin, Wave Theory, and Canonicity in Ilustrado Thought”

* Eunice Ying Ci Lim. Penn State University. “Intuiting Shōnan-tō through Technologies of (Il)literacy”

* Hannah Ming Yit Ho and Rommel Curaming. Universiti Brunei Darussalam. “Fictive Historical Identities of Enrique de Malacca in Novels”

Questions? Contact Weihsin Gui (weihsing@ucr.edu) or Ryan Ku (aleryando@gmail.com)

Southeast Asian History in Literature Part I: Transnationalism, Immigration, Diaspora

Modern Language Association Convention. San Franciso, Jan. 2023

Sponsored by the MLA Southeast Asian and Southeast Asian Diasporic Forum

Description: In traditional terms the part of the world between China and India, Southeast Asia lies at a global crossroads where its powerful neighbors, the giants of the continent, have historically spread their influence and where the East met the West in the European scramble for “the (East) Indies.”

This intermediary position has led the region to be conceived, even prior to post–World War II globalization, as a transnational contact zone, thereby to be defined in reference to or from the perspective of external actors—whether South or East Asia or European colonizers. Given this not only geographical but also geopolitical overdetermination, this session (the first of two) seeks to tell the history of Southeast Asia from the literature of subjects who come from the region. How might an autonomous history of Southeast Asia be told? How has this history been told in literature from the region and its diaspora, given literature and history’s shared narrative structure and incommensurability? How do transnationalism, (post)coloniality, im/migration, displacement, gender, and sexuality complicate the relation between history and literature and give rise to alternatives to the discourse of the “motherland” written by the “fathers” of Southeast Asian nations?

Against hegemonic Western or Asian accounts, this session’s participants extract different aspects of Southeast Asian history from regional or diasporic literary texts that tend to be ignored or illegible in the West or that adopt Western forms to subvert them. 

Against the “global Malaysian novel”—a contentious category of successful novels often set in British Malaya but written in the U.S., Britain, or Australia—Brandon K. Liew focuses on Chin Kee Onn’s Ma-rai-ee and Lee Kok Liang’s London Does Not Belong to Me to foreground the ways in which colonial Malayan authors drew on a transnational readership to publicise local counter-discursive histories. Ying Xin Show reevaluates the significance of Sinophone literature in the history of Malayan independence through the work of Jin Zhimang, who practiced “literature as revolution” while also transcending revolutionary doctrine to write “good stories.” This dialectic between politics and aesthetics in Jin’s work is rooted, Show argues, in Jin’s part in the establishment of Mahua (Chinese Malayan) consciousness based on the rejection of diasporic ties to China in favor of building a new nation (Malaya) in which women and indigenous tribes were included. Turning to the King of Siam Rama VI’s translation of Gilbert and Sullivan’s opera The Mikado, Jakapat Koohapremkit examines the ways in which Rama VI represented Chinese immigrants in Siam antisemitically to distinguish the “civilized” Siamese from the “yellow peril” in America. Rama VI does this, Koohapremkit argues, with a wink, satirizing the idea of the modern woman and calling out European civilization for its antisemitism to suggest that Chinese immigrants can assimilate into Siamese society as long as they contribute to Rama VI’s nation-building project. Against the patriarchal depiction of Indo (Eurasian) women in Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s This Earth of Mankind, Jennifer Goodlander highlights the way in which Nh. Dini’s Departures portrays Indo women to offer an alternative narrative for subaltern hybridity in the context of transnationalism and postcoloniality. Christos Kalli reads the toxic substances (e.g., isopropyl acetate and tetrachloroethylene) that permeate contemporary Vietnamese American poems—specifically, Ocean Vuong’s “The Gift,” Cathy Linh Che’s “Dress-up,” and Paul Tran’s “Dry Clean”—as traces of the Vietnam War in the psyche of those who lived through it as well as of their descendants. Presented as unwashable, eminently harmful, and assaulting, these toxic substances, Kalli argues, reinscribe the traumatic histories of the war as well as the diasporic condition to which it gave rise.

These panelists not only focus on a variety of areas and literary genres but also employ a diverse, if also related, set of critical strategies in an attempt to unearth and interrogate history as it informs, seeps into, or is (re)imagined in literature. The diversity of the region itself, however, made us unable to represent all nations in the region in a single session; thus we are also organizing a second session (Southeast Asian History in Literature Part II). Our session would be of interest to MLA attendees working on area, postcolonial, diasporic, race, comparative, gender and sexuality, and interdisciplinary studies, not to mention on historicism and Southeast Asian literature. 

Participants:

* Ryan Ku. Swarthmore College (presider)

* Brandon Liew. University of Melbourne. “Global Markets, Local Stories: A History of Malayan Literature as a Literature of Malayan History”

* Ying Xin Show. Australian National University. “Reassessing a failed revolution: Revolutionary Sinophone literature in Malaya”

* Jakapat Koohapremkit. University of Texas at Austin. “Performing Orientalism: Rama VI’s Rewriting of Siamese History”

* Jennifer Goodlander. Indiana U, Bloomington. “Transnational Identities: Rethinking Indo Women Literatures as Subaltern Histories about the Birth of the Indonesian Nation”

* Christos Kalli. University of Texas at Austin. “ ‘tetrachloroethylene launches on to the stain’: Chemicals and the Aftermaths of the Vietnam War in Contemporary Vietnamese American Poetry”

Questions? Contact Weihsin Gui (weihsing@ucr.edu) or Ryan Ku (aleryando@gmail.com)

Art, Authoritarianism, Activism in Contemporary Southeast Asia: A Symposium

Tuesday 8th March, 3:00 PM US Pacific time

On Zoom — register at https://bit.ly/3Bh44Dg

Speakers (click here for talk abstracts and speaker bios):

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Organized by the Art, Activism, Authoritarianism in Contemporary Southeast Asia Interdisciplinary Working Group

Sponsored by the University of California-Riverside’s Center for Ideas and Society (CIS)

Questions? Please contact Weihsin Gui at weihsing@ucr.edu

View the event recording on Youtube: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjUzzwC9Zhs
(Note: the documentary “LISTEN” on Chaw Ei Thein that was shown during the event has been omitted from the recording.)

“Art & Power: A Diaspora Dialogue on Myanmar/Burma”
Wednesday 10 March at 9:30-11:00 AM US Pacific Time on Zoom

Organized by Southeast Asia: Text, Ritual, Performance (SEATRiP) at the University of California-Riverside. Co-sponsored by UCR SEATRiP and the Performing Difference Faculty Commons. Special thanks to Professor Tammy Ho for designing the flyer.

Chaw Ei Thein

Chaw Ei Thein is highly regarded and internationally acclaimed as a painter and a conceptual as well as a performance artist. Her feminist approach to her art is both gracious and candid and has earned her accolades and recognition as one of the most important contemporary artists to emerge from Burma. Her numerous achievements include exhibiting the installation, “September Sweetness,” a collaboration with artist Richard Streitmatter Tran in the 2008 Singapore Biennial, and presenting “The Burmese Performance Art Scene: Challenges Faced by Burmese Artists” at the Asia House Gallery, London in 2007. She was awarded an Asian Cultural Council fellowship from 2009-2010, an Art Omi and Gardarev Center fellow in 2012, and held a Sea Change Residency by GAEA. (Image credit: Arts Initiative Tokyo)

Links:

Video profile of Chaw Ei Thein and her work (Free Dimension Project)

Asian Art Archive: Interview with Chaw Ei Thein

 

Mandy Moe Pwint Tu

Mandy Moe Pwint Tu is a writer and a poet from Yangon, Myanmar. She has been published in the journal of the Society of Classical Poets, Long Leaf Review, Santa Ana River River, Tint Journal, and Ample Remains. She has featured at the Perth Poetry Club and has represented Myanmar in the Perth Poetry Festival’s segment, Asian Connexions. She co-founded the Yangon Literary Magazine, which was featured in the BBC Radio 4 documentary Yangon Renaissance: Poets, Punks, and Painters. She is currently studying English and Women and Gender Studies at Sewanee: the University of the South. (Image credit: Sewanee University of the South)

Links:

“Language” (poem) in Santa Ana River Review

“Mother and the Moon” (poem) in Tint Journal

Interview with Tint Journal

Questions? Contact Weihsin Gui at weihsing “at” ucr.edu

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Related links for donations and lending support:

• Mutual Aid Myanmar:
  https://www.mutualaidmyanmar.org/

• I Support Myanmar:
  https://www.isupportmyanmar.com/

• CDM in Shan State:
  https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-civil-disobedience-in-shan-state-burma

• Kachin Alliance:
  https://www.kachinalliance.org/?give_forms=2287