The Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong invites abstracts for participation in its fourth annual postgraduate student workshop:

Hong Kong, China, and New Orientalisms
14-16 November 2024

Edward Said’s field-defining 1978 book, Orientalism, revealed how Western European scholarship on ‘the East’ created a homogenous and exotic world that legitimised Western European empires in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although Said focused specifically on orientalist scholarship – now called ‘area studies’, of the ‘Middle East’ and ‘South Asia’ — we may productively extend his insights to East Asia, and most notably, China.

Despite China’s status as a global power in the twenty-first century, orientalist discourses have often undermined its position in international relations. At the same time, China has relied on these same orientalist narratives to assert its autonomy and difference from ‘the West’. The persistent binary of ‘East’ and ‘West’, as well as the hierarchies it produces, has been an obstacle to transnational cooperation in the face of the most pressing global challenges: climate change, war, political instability, and the recent COVID-19 pandemic. Since the nineteenth century, Hong Kong has been the place where ‘the East’ and ‘the West’ — or more accurately, where the two sides of orientalist discourse – meet. Hong Kong has wrestled with its many hybrid identities, colonial histories, and questions of political belonging. Extending the insights of Said’s Orientalism while remaining attentive to significant cultural, political and historical differences, we seek to critically evaluate new orientalisms of the twenty-first century and their various effects in China and Hong Kong. ‘New orientalisms’ might refer to (but is not limited to): Continue reading HK, China, and New Orientalisms–cfp →

AAS 2025 Annual Conference: call for panelists
Topic: Asian Food: Culture, Literature, Philosophy, and Religion
Abstract submission deadline: July 22, 2024
Contact: Dixuan Chen <chenyuji@grinnell.edu>

In-person presentations at the AAS 2025 Annual Conference in Columbus, Ohio, March 13 to March 16.

We invite submissions of paper abstracts for the panel “Asian Food: Culture, Literature, Philosophy, and Religion.” We encourage studies from diverse academic disciplines, transregional studies, and studies of local food cultures (China, Japan, Korea, Thailand, etc.).

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

• How does food consumption construct the collective memory of a cultural, religious, or social community?
• Asian food choices and eating habits in the contexts of culture, society, philosophy, politics, and religious beliefs.
• The concepts, values, and practices of taboo, purity, and spirituality in Asian diets.
• The symbols of food, ingredients, and other edible materials.
• Eating and identity.
• Ethical food and sustainability.
• Fasting and abstinence from food for health, ritualistic, religious, or ethical purposes.

Paper abstracts (250 words) and a short biography or CV should be sent to the panel organizer Dixuan Chen, Grinnell College, chenyuji@grinnell.edu by July 22, 2024 (Eastern Standard Time). Communication will be in English. Files should be sent as PDF or Word documents (doc or docx).

Contact the panel organizer with any questions at chenyuji@grinnell.edu

Call for Contributions – Beyond Exoticism: Rethinking Southwest China
Special feature for China Perspectives
Guest editors:

Peter Guangpei Ran (pran@nju.edu.cn), Assistant Research Fellow at Institute for Social Anthropology, Nanjing University
Paul Kendall (p.kendall1@westminster.ac.uk), Senior Lecturer in Chinese studies, University of Westminster
 
Deadline for abstracts: 2 August 2024 
Deadline for papers: 1 March 2025

Since the 1980s, southwest China has enjoyed considerable academic attention, including a particular focus on representations and everyday practices relating to the many “ethnic minorities” within this region (e.g., Oakes 1998; Rees 2000; Harrell 2001; Mueggler 2001). While important theoretical tools, such as the notion of internal orientalism (Schein 2000), have subsequently emerged, recent years have seen a decline in the profile of southwest China in English-language academia and beyond. At the same time, a major shift in ethnic policy and governance, the deepening of infrastructural development, the intensification of translocal exchanges encouraged by global economy, and the unprecedented measures to tackle environmental issues have all profoundly affected this region, which continues to be remembered, imagined, practiced and contested in discursive and material terms. This special feature for China Perspectives aims to renew scholarly attention towards the historical complexity and contemporary transformation of southwest China, as well as put forward new ways of thinking about and researching the southwest as indispensable to wider understandings of China today.

For the full CfP, please see https://www.cefc.com.hk/call-for-contributions-beyond-exoticism-rethinking-southwest-china/.

Paul Kendall <p.kendall1@westminster.ac.uk>

CFP: Professionalism and Amateurism in Modern and Contemporary Chinese Arts
Special Issue of Modern Chinese Literature and Culture
Guest edited by Ruijiao Dong, Man He, and Yizhou Huang

This special issue welcomes essays on professionalism and amateurism in modern and contemporary Chinese arts. From the anti-commercialism in the 1920s to the unification of “red and expert” (Mao Zedong, 1958) in socialist China; from the market-oriented professional artists after 1978 to current-day practitioners who work with foreign commissions and the international festival circuit, the evolving meanings of professionalism in Chinese arts has yielded various (un)spoken rules in the making and the reception of arts in China. Correspondingly, the definition of amateurism has also transformed in a shifting political and cultural terrain. Once, it was celebrated as the mode of participatory mass art, and, at other times, it was disparaged as cheesy and unproductive. Understandings of these two concepts, as well as their porous boundaries have been repeatedly ruptured and redefined. How do we trace this shifting ground on which professionalism and amateurism have assumed new meanings and significance? How do the expressions of professionalism and amateurism in the social, political, and cultural discourses channel into Chinese arts, and how do Chinese arts, in turn, continuously shape and reshape these discourses? How do professionalism and amateurism produce and formulate each other in Chinese arts?

We invite scholars from various backgrounds, such as literature and media Studies, art history, sociology, and Chinese studies, to name a few, to formulate an interdisciplinary conversation. To hold together such a vast area of studies, we, as theatre and performance scholars, are keen to bring in performance studies as a theoretical approach and performance as a generative concept in Chinese studies. Since the 1960s, performance studies has significantly reshaped humanistic inquiries by expanding the object of studies, interrogating critical theories, and championing interdisciplinarity. Despite their prevalence, performance and performance studies are often suggested but remain unarticulated in Chinese studies scholarship, especially when the concept of performance is evoked beyond theatre, dance, and performance art. Guobin Yang and Hongwei Bao are among the few scholars outside of theatre, dance, and performance studies who deploy performance as an analytical lens. Yang uses it to examine Red Guard radicalism and social activism during the Wuhan lockdown (The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China, 2016; The Wuhan Lockdown, 2022) whereas Bao explicates how “the articulation between queerness and performance inevitably generates political and critical potentials” (Contemporary Chinese Queer Performance, 2023). Continue reading Professionalism and Amateurism (MCLC)–cfp →

Global Asias in a Deglobalizing World?
The 64th Annual Meeting of the Southeast Conference of the Association for Asian Studies
Hosted by the University of Kentucky in Lexington, KY
January 24-26, 2025
https://www.sec-aas.com/conf

As an academic discipline with roots tracing back to the Cold War era and its associated ideologies, Asian studies is currently facing a host of new challenges and opportunities due to the evolving geopolitical landscape within the Asia-Pacific region and globally. The forthcoming 2025 SEC-AAS conference serves as a vital platform for scholarly engagement and debate aimed at advancing the field of Asian studies amidst what could be arguably termed as a process of “deglobalization.” Factors such as the wars in Ukraine and Palestine, the escalating tension between China and the United States as well as other countries in Asia, and the rise of ultranationalist groups worldwide collectively contribute to this significant restructuring process that could bring about profound changes.

We cordially invite conference participants to evaluate the dynamic concepts and methodologies that are paramount to our understanding of Global Asias at this pivotal moment. These encompass, though are not confined to, overarching themes such as “Global,” “Asia(s),” “Asian/ness,” “Asian American,” “Asian Diaspora,” “Asia-Pacific,” and “Transpacific.” Of particular interest are submissions that focus on understudied areas, notably South and Southeast Asia, and that offer innovative and unconventional perspectives on the following submissions that engage with, but are not limited to: Continue reading Global Asias in a Deglobalizing World–cfp →

Below is a new call for papers for a special issue of our peer-reviewed, fully open access journal Writing Chinese: A Journal of Contemporary Sinophone Literature. Deadline is 31st August.

Special Issue Guest Editor: Dr Heather Inwood, University of Cambridge
Managing Editor: Dr Xunnan Li, University of Leeds
Keynotes: Prof Michel Hockx (University of Notre-Dame) and Prof Jiang Yuqin (Shenzhen University)

Call for Papers: Writing Chinese: Technology and Literature

With the rapid development of digital technologies such as the internet, artificial intelligence (AI), extended reality (XR), and other innovations in the twenty-first century, these advancements have become integral to the production, consumption, content, and education of literature. In the Sinophone world, the intersection of technology and literature has been explored through various lenses, including the context of the internet, intermedial or transmedia production, and the reconfiguration of literary content through digital technologies.

Given the significant technological advancements and capacities in the Sinophone world, there is a pressing need to conceptualize and contextualize the relationship between digital technologies and Sinophone literature. We invite scholars to submit papers that investigate this dynamic interplay, offering new insights and fostering a deeper understanding of how digital technologies are shaping Sinophone literary landscapes.

In preparing this special issue, we are calling for original research papers (up to 8,000 words) focussing on any aspect of Chinese or Sinophone literature and technology. We are especially interested in research articles that critically explore literary works relating to one or more of the following broad themes:

• Sinophone literature and culture in the digital or post-digital eras
• Sinophone science fiction and technologies
• Use of technologies in Sinophone literary and cultural production
• Chinese internet culture and online literature (CIL)

Please follow the Author Guidelines (https://writingchinesejournal.org/about/submissions) on our website before submission and submit on the template through the portal. All articles will be subject to the usual (double-blind) peer review process. The deadline for full submissions for this Special Issue is 31st August 2024.  For preliminary enquiries relating to submissions for this Special Issue, please contact the Managing Editor, Dr Xunnan Li at x.li12@leeds.ac.uk

NB: Alongside this special issue, we are also accepting research submissions for the journal on an on-going basis. For enquiries relating to general submissions to the journal, please contact  writingchinese@leeds.ac.uk.

Posted by: Frances Weightman <f.weightman@leeds.ac.uk>

CFP: Retelling Trauma and Imagining Catastrophe in the Modern East Asian and Sinophone World
Edited Volume with Amsterdam University Press
Co-Editors:  Géraldine Fiss and Wendy (Xiaoxue) Sun

In today’s culture, images and narratives of potential catastrophes and traumatic aftermaths have taken hold of the popular imagination. Inspired by Eva Horn’s quest in The Future as Catastrophe, this volume invites examinations of past traumas and future catastrophes in modern East Asian literature and film, including the broader Sinophone world and Asian diaspora.

We seek interdisciplinary perspectives from fields such as memory studies, gender studies, posthumanism, ecocriticism, trauma studies, and others to explore the literary, cinematic, visual, and poetic depictions of trauma and catastrophe in modern and contemporary East Asia. This volume aims to investigate how traumatic memories shape narratives of the past and reconstruct present reality through literature, film, and other arts. We also explore how imaginings of future disasters engage with our present and create alternative realities. By deciphering collective remembrance of the past and fantasies of future disasters, we hope to provide a platform for interpreting and perceiving modern East Asian reality with greater knowledge, rationality, sympathy, and solidarity.

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

• Trauma studies
• Narrative studies
• War and memory studies
• Gender and memory studies
• Science fiction studies
• Reproduction and futurism
• Ecocritical studies
• Ecoliterature, Ecopoetry, and Ecocinema
• Queer studies
• Posthumanism
• World Literature

Submission Deadline: September 1, 2024

If interested, please send a 300-word abstract and a brief bio to:

• Géraldine Fiss at gfiss@ucsd.edu
• Wendy Sun at sunxiaox@grinnell.edu

Conceptualizing Asian Commons Online Workshop
Co-organized by
Commoning Asia Collective,
Department of English and Cultural Studies, Christ (Deemed to be University), and
Department of Chinese Language and Literature, Hong Kong Shue Yan University

Date: June 22, 2024
Time: (HKT) 13:00 – 19:30 (IST) 10:30 – 17:00
Venue: Google Meet

This online workshop is the culmination of a project that began with an International Conference on Multiple Decolonialities and the Making of Asian Commons organized in February 2022. The idea was developed further in another Symposium at Centre for Social Studies (CSS), Surat in August 2023. At the conclusion of the Symposium which was attended by scholars based in Asia, it was decided that it was time to form a scholars’ collective to keep the discussion ongoing and alive but also develop common research agenda and collaborations.

This workshop is dedicated towards a research output around the concept of Asian Commons. The papers to be presented in the workshop engage with Asia both in its incredible heterogeneity and its important historical resonance. The intellectual and political desire to create an Asian Commons comes from a collective history of anti-colonial struggles and shared vision for social and economic justice. As a working concept, Asian Commons is informed by the historical resources accumulated through Asia’s varied but connected experience with decolonization, as well as the intellectual project to study such lived experiences on their own terms. The workshop aims to rethink Asia in an inclusive and collective manner without privileging any particular region/state on the basis of economic and political power.

All are welcome, please register here: Continue reading Conceptualizing Asian Commons online workshop →