Acts of Elaboration: A Symposium on Asian American Studies in the Northeast
May 29-30, 2009
Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA
This symposium is being sponsored by the Asian American Studies Program and the Institute for Liberal Arts at Boston College to highlight new research by junior Asian American Studies scholars working in the Northeast, and to provide a forum for intellectual exchange with more senior scholars. It also seeks to showcase how the field of Asian American Studies as it takes greater root in the Northeast is developing beyond a state of emergence toward an extended period of elaboration, as advances in thought build on already established insights. The symposium is part of an annual series of events started at Dartmouth and continued at Fordham last year designed to provide support for junior Asian Americanists working in the Northeast and, in the process, to contribute to the growth of a community of scholars in the region who are interested in Asian American Studies.
SCHEDULE
All Events will be held at Connolly House
Friday
3:00 to 3:15 Opening Remarks by Min Hyoung Song
3:30 to 5:00 Publishers’ Roundtable
Leslie Mitchner, Rutgers University Press
Emily Taber, Temple University Press
Ken Wissoker, Duke University Press
Eric Zinner, New York University Press
moderator: Josephine Park, University of Pennsylvania
5:00 to 5:30 Break (coffee and snacks)
5:30 to 7:00 “Feeling Our Way Through the Crises: Embodied Belongings and Asian American Studies”
Keynote Address by Martin Manalansan, UIUC
introduction: Crystal Parikh, New York University
Saturday
8:30 to 9:00 Continental Breakfast (on campus)
9:00 to 11:00 Panel 1. Form and Affect
“Forming Family, Aestheticizing Kin in Contemporary Asian American Fiction”
Crystal Parikh, New York University
“Petting Asian America”
James Kim, Fordham University
“Affect, History, and the Subject of Asian American Literature”
Susan Muchshima Moynihan, SUNY at Buffalo
“Reading Form in Okada's No-No Boy”
Elda Tsou, St. John’s University
chair: Shilpa Davé, Brandeis University
respondent: Daniel Kim, Brown University
11:00 to 11:30 Coffee Break
11:30 to 1:00 Panel 2. Recovering the Past
“Making Friends, Missing Enemies”
Josephine Park, University of Pennsylvania
“Inter-Colonial Migrations and U.S. Imperial Sovereignty in Hawai'i”
Jean J. Kim, Dartmouth
“Opium, Colonialism, and Migration in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies”
Anupama Arora, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth University
“Reconstruction’s Labor”
Caroline Yang, Wesleyan University
chair: Richard Chu, UMass-Amherst
respondent: Naoko Shibusawa, Brown University
1:00 to 2:00 Lunch (on campus)
2:00 to 3:30 Panel 3. Racial Epistemologies
“All in the Family? Kin, Gifts, and the Networks of Fashion”
Thuy Linh Tu, New York University
“The Anxiety of Neoliberal Capital: Asian Migrants and the Global City in Recent Hollywood Film”
Jeffrey Santa Ana, SUNY-Stony Brook
“Laural Nakadate—Photographer of Loneliness”
Jun Okada, SUNY-Geneseo
chair: Cynthia Wu, SUNY at Buffalo
respondent: Jiannbin Shiao, Dartmouth
4:00 to 5:30 Concluding Roundtable –
David Kyuman Kim, Connecticut College
Viet Thanh Nguyen, University of Southern California
Rajini Srikanth, University of Massachusetts-Boston
Jinhua Emma Teng, MIT
moderator: Min Hyoung Song
Directions to Connolly House
Participants from outside Boston will be staying at the Courtyard Marriott Hotel in Brookline
Please contact Professor Min Song with questions at songm@bc.edu