Deadline for submissions: March 6, 2017
Full name / name of organization: Hong Kong University
Contact email: grwang@ucdavis.edu
CFP: Imagining Asia in the Era of Trump
Dates: May 22-23, 2017
Venue: University of Hong Kong
Living in the “Asian Century,” when different nationalisms and racial paradigms collide with discourses about rising Asia, the idea of Asia looms large in the U.S. cultural and political imagination. In this current moment of international uncertainty, retrenchment of rights, and growing anti-globalist sentiments, how can transnational, postcolonial, and Asian American critique on matters of citizenship, immigration, capitalism, empire, and migration help situate our understandings of the present? How might we look to artists and writers, activists and cultural producers for new possibilities, politics, and resistance? What temporal and spatial mappings of Asia, U.S.-China relations, diaspora, and transpacific connection are produced in everyday practices? And what are the geopolitical and cultural implications of these new imaginings?
This conference will bring together scholars from the U.S. and Asia to reflect on the changing meanings of Asia and Asianness in the era of Trump. Participants will be asked to explore how discourses of the rise of Asia is rendered in the U.S. imagination, the circulation of ideas about Chineseness or Asianness within changing global relationships, and/or the positioning of Asian Americans within transnational flows and markets.
Small, intimate, and with the goal of producing an edited volume or special journal issue, the conference will function more as a colloquium. Papers will be pre-circulated, with presenters briefly summarizing their work at the conference, and each paper will be the subject of an individual session. The sessions will be held over two days, with opportunities to socialize and experience the cultural richness and vibrancy of Hong Kong.
For presenters coming from abroad, accommodations will be made available at Robert Black College, the university’s on-campus guesthouse. Lunch will be provided on both days and there will be a conference dinner on Monday.
As an objective of the conference is to develop essays for an edited collection, all work presented at the conference must be new, original, and not previously committed or published.
The deadline for proposals is March 6, 2017. Proposals (300 words), together with a brief CV, should be sent to Grace Wang, grwang@ucdavis.edu and Tim Gruenewald, tgreune@hku.edu. Applicants will be notified by March 15, 2017 if their proposal is accepted.