ACLA Panel: Transculturalism, Cultural Hybridity and Globalization
Call for Papers
In the article “Global Mobility, Transcultural Literature, and Multiple Modes of Modernity,”Arianna Dagnino considers the term transcultural as “a mode of reflexive identity” to examine one’s cultural beliefs as well as a “critical perspective that sees cultures as relational webs and acknowledges the transitory, confluential, and mutually transforming nature of cultures.” Such dynamic notion of culture also echoes with Homi Bhabha’s postcolonial notion of hybridity, a transformational form of culture created by mixing two or more different sources and any accompanying dynamics associated with this process. Ever since the 15th century’s first globalization, we have witnessed not only people from distant regions but also their cultural heritages have continued to meet in “Third Space” (Kramsch & Uryu 2012) and been hybridized with one another to create a new form of culture. This dynamic process that allows the emergence of new culture has been significantly accelerated by today’s rapid globalization of economy, the increase of human migration and the diffusion of global information technologies.
Referring to Bhabha’s theory of hybridity (1994) and the post-structuralist view of human subjectivity, agency and performativity (Butler 1997), this seminar attempts to reconceptualize the post-colonial notion of hybridity as a source of transformation, which enhances not only the existing language and culture but also identity of people in today’s globalized society. Hence it extends Dagnino’s concerns beyond transcultural literature to study transnational creation and consumption of (both old and modern) culture such as arts, narratives, films, popular cultures and so on in the world. Transculturalism thus becomes a continuum in relation to hybridity.
Possible topics include:
- transnationalism, cosmopolitanism,
- cultural hybridity,
- globalized popular culture, collectivity, imagined community
- identity, multiplicity, agency
- ethics, moral imagination, empathy
- transnational fandom, soft power, nation branding
- gender, race, ethnicity, and religion in transnational cultural practices
- technology, online communities
- utopian imagination
- transpacific/transatlantic cultural connection, the global South,
- hierarchical relationship, the nation state, Orientalism, Occidentalism
Please submit your paper proposal through the ACLA portal before September 20. If you have any questions, please email the organizers at chunhui.peng@sjsu.edu and michiko.uryu@sjsu.edu.