Report on the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association Annual Conference
October 8-12, 2014
By Christopher Lupke
The RMMLA Annual Conference met in Boise, Idaho on October 9-11, 2015 and the presence of Chinese scholars and East Asian comparatists was once again overwhelming and enthusiastic. Over 40 papers on Chinese literature, cinema, performance studies, and East Asian comparative literature and culture were presented. The keynote speaker for the whole conference was Victor Mair, one of the most prominent members of our field. Below is a list of sessions and presentations.
Next year’s conference will be held on October 8-10, 2015 in the gorgeous town of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Calls for papers will be distributed soon on the MCLC listserv, various Facebook sites, and through other media. RMMLA has established itself as perhaps the most welcoming and supportive conference for Chinese literature and culture in North America. I strongly urge newcomers to submit an abstract proposal for one of the sessions and I encourage veterans of the conference to come again. Established sessions include the following: Chinese Literature before 1900; Chinese Literature and Culture after 1900; Asian Comparative Literature and Culture; and Chinese Poetry. Chinese theatre and performance will once again be organized as well. Other permanent sessions having to do with film studies, language teaching, gender studies, literary theory, and a host of other themes exist too.
Importantly, all sessions are publicized through open calls for papers. Every effort will be made to support the proposals of colleagues who are seriously interested in coming to RMMLA. We are an inclusive organization. I believe that a wide array of colleagues in our field will testify as to the supportive and positive atmosphere of this conference. I sincerely encourage my colleagues at all points in their careers to attend and present their research.
RMMLA 2014 Sessions and Presentations:
Chinese Drama and Performance-Session I: Crossing Boundaries and Confronting Heritage
Megan Ammirati, University of California, Davis, Chair
Ellen Gerdes, UCLA. “Collaboration and Tangibility in Hong Kong: Danny Yung’s Experimental Kunqu.”
Wei Zhang, University of Hawai‘i at Manoa. “How Long to Wait? The Reception of Beckett’s Drama in China.”
Megan Ammirati, University of California Davis. “Between Female Impersonators and Actresses: Hong Shen and the Institutionalization of Gender-Appropriate Casting.”
Stephen H. West, Arizona State University. “Sound, Smell, and Sights in Ming Demon Plays.”
Chinese Drama and Performance-Session II: Politics and Self-Referential Theater
Megan Ammirati, University of California, Davis, Chair
Man He, Williams College. “Dramatizing the ‘Left-Wing’/ Canonizing the ‘Back-Stage’: Annals of the Theatre (1943) and the Politics of Making Drama History in 1930s Shanghai and 1940s Chongqing.”
Tarryn Li-Min Chun, Harvard University. “Monumental Theater: Remediation and Commemoration in Tian Han’s Guan Hanqing (1958).”
Emily E. Wilcox, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. “Resistance by Form: Technique as a Site of Anti-Imperialism in Modern Chinese Dance.”
Chinese Literature and Film since 1900-Session I: Sinophone Literature and the Specter of History
Frederik H. Green, San Francisco State University, Chair
Kate Foster, University College London. “My past, my story: childhood as history in late-twentieth-century Chinese fiction.”
Mark Levine, Morehouse College. “Dehistoricizing Chinese Literature: The Child in the May 4th Imaginary.”
Haomin Gong, Case Western Reserve University. “Humanity, Historicity, and Existential Resistance: Literary Representation of the Great Famine.”
Yanhong Zhu, Washington and Lee University. “The Memory of Hunger: Exploring the Untold History of the Great Famine in the Folk Memory Project.”
Chinese Literature and Film since 1900-Session II: Rewriting History: Past, Present, Future
Wei Yang, University of San Francisco, Chair
Xiaowen Xu, University of Toronto. “Fantasizing History: The Literary Quality of Qi 奇 in Red Sorghum and My Life as Emperor.”
Frederik H. Green, San Francisco State University. “The Twelve Chinese Zodiacs: Jackie Chan, Ai Weiwei & the Aesthetics of Revisiting a National Wound.”
Hua Li, Montana State University. “Rewriting History through Chinese Science Fiction: Another Historical Possibility.”
Gladys Mac, University of Southern California. “Jin Yong’s Novels: Historical and Wuxia Fiction from Hong Kong.”
Chinese Literature and Film since 1900-Session III: History as Linear, Non-linear, & Divided Vision
Hua Li, Montana State University, Chair
Wei Yang, University of San Francisco. “Ruined Cities: History and the Non-linear Spatial ideology in Jia Zhangke’s Cinema.”
Amanda D. Weiss, University of Tokyo. “Masculinity, Memory, and Nationalism in Chinese Combat Films.”
Philip F. Williams, Montana State University. “Historically Divided Visions of Rural Migrant Workers in Chinese Literary Narrative.”
Asian Comparative Literature and Film-Session I: Ethnic Landscape and Geographical Justice
Géraldine A. Fiss, University of Southern California, Chair
Xinmin Liu, Washington State University. “Accessory or Autonomous? The Enigmatic Landscape in China’s Recent Ethnicity Films.”
Mark A. Bender, The Ohio State University. “Landscape and Being in the Miao / Hmong King of Yalu Epic.”
Alan Johnson, Idaho State University. “The Outlaw in Indian and American Film and Literature.”
Russell J. Stephens, University of British Columbia. “Environmental Activism in the Art and Imagery of Ravi Agarwal.”
Asian Comparative Literature and Film-Session II: Landscape in Modern Chinese Poetry and Theater
Xinmin Liu, Washington State University, Chair
Thomas Moran, Middlebury College. “The Meanings of Nature in Gao Xingjian’s Wild Man and The Story of the Classic of Mountains and Seas.”
Donghui He, Whitman College. “Ecoing the River: Personal Narrative of Fringe Theatre.”
Christopher Tong, Washington University in St. Louis. “Modern Chinese Landscape Poetry: The Case of Wen Yiduo.”
Géraldine A. Fiss, University of Southern California. “Engaging the Past to Address the Present: Hua Hai’s Ecopoetic Interventions.”
Conference Keynote Address
Victor Mair, University of Pennsylvania.
“The Impact of Information Technology on the Study of Language and Literature.”
Asian Comparative Literature and Film-Session III: Interventionist Topography in Taiwan, Korea and Japan
Mark A. Bender, The Ohio State University, Chair
Peter Tillack, Montana State University. “Random Dislocation: Goto Meisei’s ‘The Report that Could Not Be Written.’”
Shannon M. Cannella, Winona State University. “Listen! The Rocks are Speaking: The Ecocritical Philosophy of Wang Xin.”
Robert Winstanley-Chesters, University of Leeds. “Producing Political Landscape on the Korean Peninsula: Divided Visions, United Vista.”
Kota Inoue, Washington State University. “Kenji Miyazawa’s Anthropomorphism and the Domination of Nature.”
Chinese Poetry: Translating Chinese Poetry
Paul Manfredi, Pacific Lutheran University, Chair
Monica E M Zikpi, University of Oregon. “Allegory, Treachery.”
Christopher Lupke, Washington State University. “Translating Contemporary Chinese Poetry in a Post-Representational Era: Xiao Kaiyu, Avant-Garde, Experimentalism, and Expressionism.”
Andrea Lingenfelter, Independent Scholar. “Reconfigurations: Translating the ‘Untranslatable’.”
Chinese Literature Before 1900-Session I: Revisiting the Subject in Bygone Scenes
Li Guo, Utah State University, Chair
Ke Ren, Indiana University South Bend. “‘The Traveler Who Thrice Sailed the Raft Comes Home’: Civilizational Longings and Cosmopolitan Aspirations at the End of Empire in the Poetry of Chen Jitong (1852-1907).”
Kimberly Harui, Arizona State University. “Elucidations of Desire, Formations of Identity: Rereading The Journey to the West.”
Christopher Lupke, Washington State University. “The Transformation of the Filial Subject in Chinese Discourse.”
Kevin Tsai, Indiana University. “Cultural Memory and the Reception of the Water Margin in Modern China.”