Call for Papers: American Comparative Literature Association 2026 Conference
Seminar: Versatile Bodies in Global Asia
Organizers: Yucong Hao (Vanderbilt University) & Yihui Sheng (The Chinese University of Hong Kong)
Location/Date: Palais des congrès de Montréal, February 26 – March 1, 2026
Our seminar explores the potentialities of body as method in the study of Global Asian literature and culture. Engaging with interdisciplinary inquiries of literary studies, performance studies, ethnomusicology, and media history, we understand the polysemy of the body, as literary motifs, techniques of embodiment, lived experiences, as well as historical traces, with which we interrogate not only how body matters but what it capaciously enables, both conceptually and methodologically, to the study of literature, performance, and media in Global Asia.
In particular, we recognize the multivalent manifestations of the body in both premodern and modern Global Asian literature and cultures, where the versatility of the body–the technical body that mediates lived experiences, the performing body that enacts alternative imagination, the diasporic body that crosses solidified boundaries, and the posthuman body that disrupts epistemic orders–unleashes agential capacities far exceeding the scope of the Cartesean body-mind dualism, thus creating and transforming reality, subjectivity, and epistemology.
The prism of the body, an ephemeral subject that often evades textual scrutiny, also compels us to reflect methodologically strategies of reading literature and archives. The body’s persistent resistance to textualization urges us to consider the (im)possibilities of reconstructing the body from textual records – it forces us to read between the lines and read diachronically to locate its phantagmatic traces, and to acknowledge that the body simultaneously is a subject of representation yet its anti-representational proclivity demands other forms of reading strategies, such as embodied reading, affective reading, and performative reading.
In light of the versatile bodies in Global Asian literature and cultures, we invite papers that examine the plurality of the body in the context of Global Asia, of both premodern and modern times, specific national contexts as well as transnational encounters.
We invite submissions that explore include, but do not confine to, representation and mediation of the body in literature and media, the politics and aesthetics of the body, sensory and affective bodies, queer and disabled bodies, embodied experiences of history and performance, bodily labor and migration, digital and virtual bodies, and reflections on body-centered analytical methodologies. Ultimately, we seek to not only illuminate the body’s diverse roles in Global Asian literature and cultures but also to envision new possibilities for Asia-centered poetics and epistemologies of the body that will open up new avenues for comparative inquiries.
You may find the CfP also here: https://www.acla.org/seminar/50c72fee-e84a-4e73-87cf-1085bfd22e92
Please submit your abstracts through the ACLA portal by October 2, 2025
For further inquires, please contact Yucong Hao (yucong.hao@vanderbilt.edu) and Yihui Sheng (yhsheng@cuhk.edu.hk)