Zoom Link: https://duke.zoom.us/j/96890842437

CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS—Feminisms with Chinese Characteristics: A Scholarly and Creative Collaboration

What do feminisms mean to you? Whose feminisms? Do Chinese interpretations of feminisms accord with or contradict your own views? Perhaps you have not thought of these questions, especially the last one. This special collaboration between editors of 𝐹𝑒𝑚𝑖𝑛𝑖𝑠𝑚𝑠 𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ 𝐶ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑒𝑠𝑒 𝐶ℎ𝑎𝑟𝑎𝑐𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑖𝑠𝑡𝑖𝑐𝑠, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, and Chinese Literature and Thought Today aims to bring together scholarly work and creative endeavours on feminisms.

We are looking for a group of creative writers to participate in a unique scholarly and creative collaboration. In this experiment, each writer will create an original piece of creative work in response to one essay in 𝐹𝑒𝑚𝑖𝑛𝑖𝑠𝑚𝑠 𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ 𝐶ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑒𝑠𝑒 𝐶ℎ𝑎𝑟𝑎𝑐𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑖𝑠𝑡𝑖𝑐𝑠 (Syracuse University Press, 2021), edited by Ping Zhu and Hui Faye Xiao. Each creative work should be at least 3 pages; it can be a long poem, a short story, a literary memoir, an inventive interview, and more—please surprise us.

Selected pieces by Ho, Xiao, and Zhu will be published in 𝐶ℎ𝑎 as a special feature and their authors will be invited to read their work in online events alongside the academics. Each selected creative writer will be awarded an honorarium for their contribution.

The collaboration is co-sponsored by the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Kansas, 𝐶ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑒𝑠𝑒 𝐿𝑖𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑎𝑡𝑢𝑟𝑒 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑇ℎ𝑜𝑢𝑔ℎ𝑡 𝑇𝑜𝑑𝑎𝑦, and 𝐶ℎ𝑎.

If you are interested in taking part in this project, please write to 𝐶ℎ𝑎’s editor Tammy Lai-Ming Ho (t@asiancha.com) with a short biography of no more than 300 words by Friday 23 December 2022. Writers who are chosen to participate in this experiment will be notified by the end of 2022. They will be given 80 days to complete their creative work. The online events to present the creative pieces are tentatively scheduled to take place in April-May 2023.

LINK to 𝐹𝑒𝑚𝑖𝑛𝑖𝑠𝑚𝑠 𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ 𝐶ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑒𝑠𝑒 𝐶ℎ𝑎𝑟𝑎𝑐𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑖𝑠𝑡𝑖𝑐𝑠:

https://press.syr.edu/supressbooks/3935/feminisms-with-chinese-characteristics/

Ping Zhu <zpdarr@gmail.com>

Dear list members,

The deadline for submitting to the 2023 KFLC has been extended to Tuesday, November 15th. Interested participants will have until November 15th at 11:59 PM EST to submit their abstracts here: https://kflc.as.uky.edu/form/submit-abstract

Please remember that because we updated our website over the summer, all users (even returning users) will need to create a new account before being able to submit an abstract. You can create a new account here: https://kflc.as.uky.edu/user/register

A General CFP is available here. For the East Asian Studies track, we welcome individual paper and panel proposals broadly related to East Asia.

Liang Luo
University of Kentucky

CFP: Literatures of Transnational Race/Critique (ACLA 2023 Seminar)
Organizer: Taylor Johnston-Levy
Co-Organizer: Keru Cai

Since the 2020 global resurgence of Black Lives Matter, race critique has been disparaged as an unwanted American export. European politicians, for example, attribute demonstrations against police brutality, the removal and defacement of monuments, and even Islamist extremism to local uptake of US race critique. Scholars and activists have sought to complicate this one-directional narrative, citing longstanding, transnational investments in global movements like decolonial struggle. Our panel will explore literary texts that similarly attempt to reconstruct the transnational life of race critique – in our own times and at earlier historical moments, in both the Global North and South. How, for example, does literature map the global existence of critical race analytics like intersectionality, blackness, whiteness, ethnicity, the social construction of race, or the permanence of racism? How does it depict the relationship between the transnational circulation of race critique and geographies of migration and displacement? And how does it capture the complex, past-future temporalities of transnationally formed critical race concepts? In considering these questions, the panel will intervene in heated cross-disciplinary debates around Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant’s 1999 claim that the global circulation of race critique amounts to American cultural imperialism. Even as we approach such one-directional and exceptionalist accounts with skepticism, we will consider both the limitations and potentials of transnationally formed race critique, which has traveled along both activist and hegemonic trajectories. Continue reading →

Please consider submitting your abstract to this ACLA panel “Love at Large: Eros in World Literatures and Cultures.” Here is the submission link:

https://www.acla.org/love-large-eros-world-literatures-and-cultures

Organizer: Fatima Moolla

Contact the Seminar Organizers

Romantic love appears to be a cultural universal with expressions in literatures across geographies and histories. But love as passion has also been disproportionately associated with European culture through transformations in personal relations linked with courtly love. Culturally specific forms of valorization of largely heterosexual romance have led to the conception of romantic love as the “religion” of European secular modernity. Paradoxically, love in the contemporary era of online dating and “hook-ups” may have reduced the “civilizational” significance of love to just sex – eros morphed solely into the erotic. Through colonization, imperialism and globalization, Anglo-American specificities of love in various periods emerge universally as normative and normalized. Reading for romance in world literatures and cultures opens up the diversities of love. Against a broad cultural history of love, papers are invited which consider, but are not limited to, the following conjunctions: Continue reading →

#MeToo in China: Media, Activism, Patriarchy, Queer/ing Feminism and Beyond
November 18 (Friday) @12:00–2:00 EST
MW 329, University of Toronto, Scarborough Campus, and Zoom (hybrid)

Following the global #MeToo movement, activists in China have also demonstrated tenacity, #creativity, and strength despite systemic constraints, making the Chinese #MeToo movement one of the most resilient against all odds. More recently, a settlement in the US court between Chinese billionaire Richard Liu/Liu Qiangdong 刘强东 and Chinese graduate student #Jingyao is considered a landmark case for its unprecedented transparency.

This panel draws on some of the latest scholarship as well as activism experience on the Chinese #MeToo movement from the perspectives of media, sociology, feminist and queer studies, and religious studies. It will have comparative value for anyone interested in contemporary feminism, transnational activism, and the global flows of patriarchal politics and populism today. Continue reading →

Professor David Wang is hosting an online workshop on Oct. 28 on Eileen Cheng’s new translation of Lu Xun.

Title: Lu Xun and World Literature: The Task of Translation

Panelists:
Eileen J. Cheng (Pomona College)
David Damrosch (Harvard University)
Theodore Huters (UCLA)
Hu Ying (UC-Irvine)

Moderator:
David Wang (Harvard University)

Date/Time: October 28th, 8-9:30 pm (EDT)

Sponsors:
Department of Comparative Literature, Harvard University
Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies
Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation

Zoom: https://harvard.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_jFdej11VT_qDbHJrcmtdBw

Call for Papers
ACLA Chicago (March 16-19, 2023)
The Politics of Reading and Writing in Chinese and Sinophone Literature
Organized by Tiffany Yun-Chu Tsai and Cara Healey

This seminar explores depictions of reading and writing in Chinese and Sinophone literature across time and space. Chinese literary traditions – from Confucian and Daoist canons to Lu Xun’s “madman” reading between the lines to the formal innovations of contemporary authors like Mo Yan and Dung Kai-cheung – draw attention to the dynamics among readers, writers, and texts. Authors mobilize intertextual, metatextual, and paratextual techniques to elucidate the multiplicity and fragmentation of narrative, history, and reality. This seminar probes the politics and ethics of reading and writing, at both the textual level and the levels of literary production, circulation, and consumption. It explores conceptions of truth and challenges creations of meaning through language.

We welcome papers on topics including but not limited to:

• Truth in literature, including unreal truth, unjustifiable truth, truth beyond reality, anti-truth, and more.
• Intertextuality and metatextuality, within and across Chinese and Sinophone literature, broadly conceived, including comparisons with other literary traditions.
• Formal interventions such as allusion, allegory, ambiguity, commentary, self-referentiality, palimpsest, texts-within-texts, unreliable narrators, and self-censorship.
• Reading and writing as means of identity construction across intersections of ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexuality, region, class, and ability.
• Questions of authorship and textual authority, including issues of translation and adaptation.
• Censorship and literary innovation.
• Reading and writing as tools to (re)shape history and memory, including non-human or posthuman memories or ways of being.
• Connections and tensions between written and oral traditions, including issues of language sovereignty.

If you are interested, please submit your paper proposal to this seminar via the ACLA website by October 31, 2022. If you have questions, please contact the organizers, Tiffany Yun-Chu Tsai (ytsai@citadel.edu) and Cara Healey (healeyc@wabash.edu).

CFP: Discovering the Subplots: the (De)construction of Gender, History, and Power, ACLA 2023 Seminar

In her 2019 book Ornamentalism, Anne Anlin Cheng looks at the historical relationship of conflation between person and thing and the problematic relationship between Asiatic femininity and its entwinement with commodities and artifacts. Asian bodies, Asian women particularly, have been simultaneously embodied and erased through ornamental objectness. Late imperial Chinese nuns were often portrayed in a hyper-sexualized way by male authors, serving as the spectacle for the voyeuristic gaze upon transgressive women. Similarly, opium smoking women in the nineteenth century who were condemned as the ills of traditional Chinese society further speak to the irony of the addict/viewers’ pleasure-seeking and the disembodiment of women in an empire in its twilight. In the twenty-first century, mingong (migrant peasant workers) migrated to metropolitan cities for better living conditions, only to find a delicately presented promise of urbanization. Likewise, in a media-saturated, online culture young women idealize the lavish city life, dissolving themselves in fashion and consumption. Living in pages, on stage, in pictures, and on screen, these people fade into mainstream discourses of commercial publishing, national salvation, urbanization, and fetishism. What are other subplots depicted in history and literary works? This seminar focuses on past and contemporary Asian women, seeking to envision alternatives to their simultaneously opaque and hyper-visible voices and presences through the analysis of a variety of genres, for instance, drama, newspaper, films, and animation. Ultimately, this seminar hopes to unfold a gendered and nonlinear story about Asian women’s “forgotten genealogy”, which combines their “life and nonlife, labor and style that conditions the modern human conceit” (Anne Anlin Cheng 442).

Please submit a paper proposal to https://www.acla.org/discovering-subplots-deconstruction-gender-history-and-power, and join us for a great discussion on women, gender, literary and performance studies.

We welcome you to contact us (Shu Yang, shu.yang@wmich.edu; Xiaoqiao Xu, xiaoqiao.xu@uconn.edu) if you have any questions/concerns, thanks!

Below, please find the seminar proposal for a panel on “Women’s Literary Production and the Publishing Industry in Modern China” at the American Comparative Literature Association’s Annual Meeting March 16-19, 2023 in Chicago. To submit a paper for the seminar, please visit the ACLA website. Please e-mail me (xliu@butler.edu) with questions or for more information. Paper proposals are due by October 31.

Publishing, with its cultures and related activities, and with its changing technicity, is a multifaceted phenomenon in modern China. It is commercial and profit-seeking. Meanwhile, it often carefully maintains its public resistant stance against commercial interests and grooms its long-standing support to various literary and artistic causes. It is patriarchal, as it is mostly male-dominant. Yet, it also shows support in varying forms to women writers and provides space for their literary activities in the changing socio-economic environments and techno-material conditions. These complexities in printing and circulation inevitably play into the writing of modern Chinese women writers. Continue reading →