Month: February 2023

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.