ACLA Seminar: Disability Aesthetics and Politics in East Asian and Transnational Contexts–Call for Papers (ACLA link: https://www.acla.org/seminar/disability-aesthetics-and-politics-east-asian-and-transnational-contexts).
To further extend disability studies beyond the Euro-American context, this seminar seeks to bring together papers that examine disability representations in East Asian and transnational contexts—paying general attention to their politics, aesthetics, and ethics. These representations can be literary, visual, or draw upon popular culture; all historical periods are welcome. What are the manners in which dominant ideologies such as nationalism and neo-liberalism establish and reinforce the ideology of ableism by casting the disabled body as the Other? How do disability subjectivities help generate new forms of embodied knowledge and collective consciousness? Why does disability figure prominently in our cultural and moral imagination— what purposes does it serve, and at whose cost? How do larger forces such as globalization and colonialism shape the ways in which disability is represented, and what are the historical conditions and political economies in which they are grounded? How do literary and cultural studies of disability contribute to disability justice?
In a collective effort to take on these conceptual and critical questions, this seminar invites papers that address topics such as: technology and disability; disability in new media and online literature; disability in film and visual culture; disability and literary modernism; intersections of disability, gender, race, ethnicity, and class; disability and the discourses of human rights; disability, religion, and morality; and disability in a global and transnational context.
Hangping Xu <hangping@stanford.edu>