CFP: Postwar Asian Management and its Mediated Forms, seminar for the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) annual meeting (Taipei, June 15–18, 2022)
Organized by Hannah Airriess and Lawrence Zi-Qiao Yang
Submit an abstract: https://www.acla.org/postwar-asian-management-and-its-mediated-forms
Deadline: October 31, 2021

This seminar is interested in postwar media forms in the context of the period’s management theory as it became implemented as corporate practice in East Asia, during an era often said to be defined first by Japanese postwar reconstruction and then by Asian Tiger developmentalism. We wish to explore literary and visual narratives across media that take up questions regarding management in Asia since the end of World War II, with a particular eye toward understanding the way in which managerial organizational logics become manifest as aesthetic practices. To this end, we aim for an examination of both the textual articulation of managerial logics in aesthetic practices and forms as well as the organizational structures of systems and institutions that produce such media. In some cases, these practices revolve around emergent genre forms, as in white collar cinematic narratives produced during Japan’s high-growth era. In other cases, we are more interested in the material cultures that surround cultural products, like the propagandistic newsreels that were produced in Taiwan during the booming 1970s that would be played in theaters before feature films. Continue reading Postwar Asian Management and Its Mediated Form–cfp →

Sixth Tone China Writing Contest – Theme: “Generations”
Deadline: 11:59 pm (GMT), April 30, 2022

Each generation has a story to tell. Sixth Tone invites authors from across the globe to submit China-related nonfiction stories centering on the theme of “GENERATIONS.” An all-star panel of international judges including Fuchsia Dunlop, Howard W. French, Peter Hessler, Qian Jianan, Tabitha Speelman, Wu Qi, Xiang Biao, and Zhou Yijun will evaluate the finalists.

Deadline: 11:59 pm (GMT), April 30, 2022. Word limit: 1,000-5,000 words. Entry fee: none. CASH PRIZES: 10 prizes ranging from 3,000 to 50,000 yuan. Quality entries will also be considered for publication on Sixth Tone’s website or podcast. For more details: https://interaction.sixthtone.com/feature/2021/Writing-Contest/index.html

Posted by: Ting Wu fubm@sixthtone.com

CFP: Archipelagic Asia, seminar for the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) annual meeting (Taipei, June 15–18, 2022)

Leo Ching (Duke) and myself have proposed a seminar called “Archipelagic Asia” for the American Comparative Literature Association annual meeting in Taipei, June 15–18, 2022 (with contingency plans for an online conference if needed). Please consider submitting a paper; the deadline for all submissions is this Sunday, October 31: https://www.acla.org/node/add/paper.

The seminar description/CFP is here (https://www.acla.org/archipelagic-asia) and below:

Archipelagic Asia
Organizer: Nicolai Volland <nmv10@psu.edu>
Co-Organizer: Leo Ching

The study of literature of/in Asia remains fragmented, along the lines of nations, histories, ethnicities, languages, and disciplines—all concepts that are rooted, epistemologically and pragmatically, on terra firma, on the supposedly sound conceptual ground of a continental Enlightenment tradition. What happens, however, when we shift our point of view, and instead adopt an oceanic perspective on literatures from the Western Pacific region?

Groundbreaking work from oceanic studies, archipelagic studies, and the “blue humanities” has inserted critical acumen to literary metaregions such as the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, and the Indian Ocean, but is only beginning to be perceived in Asian literary studies. Oceans connect as much as they separate; they provide space for movement and mobility, in the physical and the metaphorical sense, and for comparison and relational thinking; and they challenge rigidly drawn disciplinary boundaries. The oceanic and the archipelagic, as critics such as Epeli Hau‘ofa, Édouard Glissant, and Françoise Lionnet have pointed out, harbor the potential to create alternative spaces for thought, push back against dominant epistemologies, and celebrate the minor, peripheral, and marginal. Continue reading Archipelagic Asia seminar–cfp →

CFP: ACLA Seminar on Contrapuntal China
https://www.acla.org/contrapuntal-china
Organized by Hangping Xu and Kyle Shernuk

Edward Said posits “contrapuntal reading” as a postcolonial intervention into the master narrative of imperialism by considering the voices, narratives, and perspectives of the colonized and the marginalized. Contrapuntal analysis thus helps us deconstruct a text’s often insidious power apparatus and opens it up for multiple and sometimes oppositional interpretations. Taking a cue from Said’s effort to raise our “awareness both of the metropolitan history that is narrated and of those other histories against which (and together with which) the dominating discourse acts” (51), this seminar coins the term “contrapuntal China” to highlight the various rhythms of life from around the world that collectively and actively reshape the possible meanings of Chineseness. Building upon Said’s postcolonial framework, this seminar proposes the idea of the contrapuntal as a means for recognizing and validating heterogeneous ways of performing China and Chineseness. We resist essentialist accounts of “Chineseness” and instead understand it to be a contingent and historically informed category shaped by the forces of (anti-)globalization, emigration, diaspora, and multiculturalism, to name but a few. In short, we read Chineseness contrapuntally. How do expressions of ethnic identity complicate Han-centric narratives of what it means to be Chinese? What does it mean to write China from a position of national, linguistic, and cultural exile? What can and does Chineseness look like in non-Chinese national and cultural contexts? Is it possible to express Chineseness in non-Sinitic linguistic forms? When we think beyond the limits of China and Sinophone Studies, what new vistas of Chineseness can we discover? The seminar is open to different approaches, periods, and geographic orientations; we also welcome papers that anchor their contrapuntal reading of “Chineseness” around (Sinitic or non-Sinitic) literary, filmic, and cultural texts.

Accepted papers may have the opportunity to be published in an edited volume included in the Routledge Studies in Chinese Comparative Literature and Culture.

Posted by: Kyle Shernuk k.shernuk@qmul.ac.uk