"Technologies of Migration: Asia, Media, Mobility, and Virtuality"
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
April 21-22, 2011

This is a free conference for presenters and for attendees. We are particularly interested in giving graduate students a venue to present their work. If you wish to present a 20 minute paper, please send a proposal consisting of:
1>. your title
2>. a 200 word abstract
3>. a 50 word biodata
to yang140@illinois.edu by January 1, 2011.

We welcome presentations on topics such as Migration, Asia, and the Internet, Media Platforms for Asian/American Migration: Literature, Film, and Television, Mobile Media, Mobile Identities, Virtual Migration, Asia, and Digital Games, and Gender, SE Asia, and Technologies of Labor Migration, or related topics.

For more information, visit: http://www.technologiesofasianmigration2011.illinois.edu/index.html

CFP: Panels for ALA 2011

Circle for Asian American Literary Studies
American Literature Association Conference 2011

The Circle for Asian American Literary Studies (CAALS) seeks papers for three panels and one roundtable discussion to be held at the American Literature Association Conference, May 26-29, 2011, in Boston, MA. Proposals should be emailed to each panel’s organizer by January 10, 2011. See individual CFPs for details. All are welcome to apply; accepted panelists are asked to become members of CAALS by the date of the convention.

1. Comparative Ethnic Religion in a Postsecular World
Chair: Khanh Ho, Grinnell College
Co-sponsored by the Latino/a Literature and Culture Society

2. Techno-Orientalism and Asian American Culture
Chair: David Roh, Old Dominion University

3. New Perspectives on the Works of Meena Alexander
Chair: Trevor Lee, CUNY/Graduate Center

4. Pedagogy Roundtable: Asian American Studies, Literacy, and Education
Chair: Greta Aiyu Niu, University of Rochester

For more information on CAALS, visit our website: http://caals.org
Find us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=19663624895
For more information on the ALA conference: http://americanliterature.org

CIC-AISC Graduate Student Conference

The 12th annual Graduate Student Conference for the CIC-American Indian Studies Consortium will be held in Detroit, Michigan on February 4-5, 2011. Abstracts are due on December 10, 2010. For more details (including the official call for papers, information on lodging, and requirements for the paper prize) please visit the CIC-AISC conference webpage.

Upcoming Bridges & Borders Roundtable

Please mark your calendars for the USEP (US Ethnic and Postcolonial Studies Association) Roundtable Discussion on November 16:

Bridges & Borders 

POSSIBLE INTERSECTIONS BETWEEN 

U.S. ETHNIC AND POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES

A ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION WITH HAPPY HOUR TO FOLLOW

Presenters Include:

PROFESSORS ADÉLÉKÈ ADÉÈKÓ, KORITHA MITCHELL, AND JOE PONCE

GRAD STUDENTS ANNE JANSEN, LIZZIE NIXON, AND TIFFANY SALTER

Tuesday, November 16

3:30 in Denney 311 

HOSTED BY USEP, THE U.S. ETHNIC AND POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES ASSOCIATION

CFP: MELUS 2011 Conference

For those of you who are interested, MELUS has moved their deadline up significantly from last year so proposals are now due by November 15. The following information was taken directly from the official MELUS website.

25th Annual MELUS Conference
April 7 – 10, 2011
Florida Atlantic University
Boca Raton, FL

THEME: Ethnic Canons in Global Contexts
As an ongoing and vital process through which societies and cultures have become integrated through a globe-spanning network of communications, economics, and politics, globalization addresses the transnational circulation of ideas and languages. Its impact on literature is manifold, with both positive and negative associations, wherein cultures receiving outside influences ignore some, adopt others as they are, and then immediately start to transform others. Certain aspects of globalization – such as hybridity and multi-rootedness – are increasingly present in literary texts as we witness ways in which they shape new literary forms, interrogate existing canons, and explore the emergence of ethnic canons.

We invite paper abstracts and complete panels, workshops, and roundtable proposals on all aspects of the multi-ethnic literatures of the United States and elsewhere. We are particularly interested in proposals that explore globalization in terms of its influence on ethnic canons, and vice versa, and encourage presentations on all global frameworks of analysis, such as Atlantic studies, global feminisms, pan-Africanism, postcolonialism, transnationalism, global indigenous studies, etc. Submissions should detail requests for specific audiovisual equipment, if needed. We also ask that a proposal for a complete panel, roundtable, or workshop include a short description of the central topic, supplemented by brief abstracts of individual speakers’ contributions.

Deadline for abstracts and proposals (250 words in Word or rtf format): NOVEMBER 15, 2010

OSU Asian American Studies Workshop Series

The OSU Asian American Studies Program

announces

The 2010-2011 Workshop Series

If you are interested in presenting works in progress or participating in discussions about Asian American Studies topics, please contact Prof. J. Wu (wu.287, 2-9331).  The workshop series is open to all (faculty, graduate and undergraduate students, as well as staff both at OSU and elsewhere).  Information about our first workshop will be sent to those who respond before November 5. 

http://asianamericanstudies.osu.edu/

CIC-AISC Grad Student Conference CFP

Twelfth Annual 
CIC-American Indian Studies Consortium Graduate Student Conference
February 4 – 5, 2011
Detroit Institute of Art

Graduate students at any stage of graduate study and in any academic discipline in or related to American Indian Studies are invited to submit papers for the annual graduate student conference to be held at the DETROIT INSTITUTE OF ART February 4-5, 2011 in Detroit, Michigan. For the CFP and more details, visit the CIC-AISC Graduate Student Conference page.

Deadline for Paper Titles and Abstracts: DECEMBER 10, 2010

USEP Welcome Reception

You're invited to a USEP (US Ethnic and Postcolonial Studies Association) reception to kick off the new academic year!

USEP Welcome Reception
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Denney Hall 311, 5:45-7:15

USEP is a (grad) student-run organization dedicated to fostering an academic community of scholars in Ethnic Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and related fields. Each year, we sponsor a variety of events from reading groups to colloquiums, and we'd love to have you participate in, attend, and contribute to what USEP is all about. At this reception, we'll have a brief meeting to discuss the upcoming year and then you can enjoy the food and refreshments provided and catch up with or meet your colleagues.

cfp: MLA Asian American literature panels

The following panels are sponsored by the Division of Asian American Literature:

Asian American Cityscapes. How can work on urban sites (emphasizing geography, globalization, architecture, ecocriticism, etc.) reshape understandings of metropolitan Asian Americans and their cultures--from ethnic enclaves to global cities? Abstracts, vitae by 15 March 2010; Tina Chen (tchengoudie@gmail.com).

Literature, Wars, and the American Body. Literature about or from US engagements with wars abroad that have generated significant changes to the American body--refugees, diasporas, nationalisms, and militarisms. Abstracts, vitae by 15 March 2010; Paul Lai (plai2@stthomas.edu).

Teaching Asian American Literatures. Pedagogical theories and practices in Asian American literary studies: particular challenges of, institutional contexts of, historical and other conditions informing, specific strategies in, etc. 250-word abstracts, 2-page vitae by 15 March 2010; Kandice Chuh (kchuh@umd.edu).

Writing Human Rights: Asian American Contexts. Human rights discourse in Asian American literature; e.g., ethnocide and genocide, asylum, ethics and social justice, impact of globalization, critiques of universality. 300-word abstracts and 2-page vitae by 18 March 2010; Anita Mannur (amannur@muohio.edu).

***

This is another call from Victor Mendoza and Vanita Reddy.

Asian American Queer Critique. Papers examining queer formations in Asian / Pacific Islander American literature. Topics can include sexualities in a transnational framework, normativities, genderqueering, imperialism, liberalism, diasporas. Proposals of 300-500 words by 15 March 2010 to Victor Mendoza (vmendoza at umich.edu) and Vanita Reddy (vdreddy at tamu.edu).

Queer of Color roundtable

Please Join the US Ethnic and Postcolonial Studies Association (USEP)
For Our Round-Table Discussion

Queer of Color
Thursday, February 25
from 10-12 in 311 Denney Hall

Featuring:
Professors Debra Moddelmog and Joe Ponce
Grad Students Chris Belcher, Chris Lewis, and Corinne Martin

We hope to see you there!

Please note: Even if you have to leave early or come late, we'd still love to have you there for whatever portion of the event you're able to attend.

Midnight's Children Symposium

USEP Presents a Graduate Student Symposium on

Midnight’s Children

this Thursday, February 4 at 5:30pm in Denney 311

Stop by and listen to Rachel Aldous, Tiffany Salter, and Julia Voss present their papers on Salman Rushdie’s (in)famous novel. Stay afterward for a discussion with Jesse Potts acting as moderator. We hope to see you there!

cfp: Critical Ethnic Studies and the Future of Genocide

Critical Ethnic Studies and the Future of Genocide:
Settler Colonialism/Heteropatriarchy/White Supremacy

A Major Conference
March 10-12, 2011 (NOT 2010)
University of California, Riverside

Plenary Speakers:
Jacqui Alexander•Keith Camacho•Cathy Cohen•Glen Coulthard•Angela Davis•Gina Dent•Vicente Diaz•Roderick Ferguson•Ruth Wilson Gilmore•Gayatri Gopinath•Avery Gordon•Herman Gray•Judith Halberstam•Sora Han•Cheryl Harris•David Lloyd•Lisa Lowe•Wahneema Lubiano•Manning Marable•Fred Moten•José Muñoz•Nadine Naber•Hiram Pérez•Michelle Raheja•Dylan Rodríguez•David Roediger•Luana Ross•Josie Saldaña-Portillo•Sarita See•Ella Shohat•Denise da Silva•Audra Simpson•Nikhil Singh•Andrea Smith•Neferti Tadiar•João Costa Vargas•Waziyatawin

CALL FOR PAPERS

Ethnic studies scholarship has laid the crucial foundation for analyzing the intersections of racism, colonialism, immigration, and slavery within the context of the United States. Yet it has become clear that ethnic studies paradigms have become entrapped within, and sometimes indistinguishable from, the discourse and mandate of liberal multiculturalism, which relies on a politics of identity representation diluted and domesticated by nation-building and capitalist imperatives. Interrogating the strictures in which ethnic studies finds itself today, this conference calls for the development of critical ethnic studies. Far from advocating the peremptory dismissal of identity, this conference seeks to structure inquiry around the logics of white supremacy, settler colonialism, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy in order to expand the scope of ethnic studies. An interdisciplinary or even un-disciplinary formation, critical ethnic studies engages with the logics that structure society in its entirety.

As ethnic studies has become more legitimized within the academy, it has frequently done so by distancing itself from the very social movements that helped to launch the field in the first place. Irrefutable as the evidence is of the university's enmeshment with governmental and corporate structures, the trend in ethnic studies has been to neutralize the university rather than to interrogate it as a site that transforms ideas into ideology. While this conference does not propose to romanticize these movements or to prescribe a specific relationship that academics should have with them, we seek to call into question the emphasis on professionalization within ethnic studies and the concomitant refusal to interrogate the politics of the academic industrial complex or to engage with larger movements for social transformation.

We invite panel and individual paper submissions on a wide range of topics that may include but are not limited to the following:

• Settler colonialism and white supremacy
• Critical genocide studies
• Queering ethnic studies
• Heteropatriarchy
• Race, colonialism, and capitalism
• Professionalization, praxis, and the academic industrial complex
• Decolonization and empire
• Social movements and activism
• Multiculturalism and colorblindness
• Critical race studies
• Liberationist epistemologies
• Critical ethnic studies, un-disciplinarity, and relationship to other fields

We encourage submissions of traditional academic conference paper and panel formats, as well as alternative, creative, collaborative, and site-specific presentations, workshops, roundtables, etc., from academics, independent scholars, artists, cultural producers, activists, community workers, and others.

Please submit individual paper abstracts (250 words) along with a 1-page CV that includes contact information. If submitting a panel proposal, a panel abstract (250 words) should also be included.

Deadline for submissions: June 1, 2010
Email submissions to: criticalethnicstudies@gmail.com

Conference participants/attendees need to register at: http://www.ethnicstudies.ucr.edu/

Searching Looks: Asian American Visual Cultures

Searching Looks: Asian American Visual Cultures

February 25-26, 2010

Slought Foundation
4017 Walnut Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104-3513

“Searching Looks” explores the practice and materiality of Asian American visual culture. In highlighting visual technologies and their repercussions within Asian America, this event proposes to examine the concept of visuality as a critical lens for understanding minority cultural studies. The conference brings together practitioners and scholars of Asian American visual art to consider questions of art history and practice, new media, and the poetics of visuality.

Cultural theorists have been heralding and lamenting a turn to visual culture from at least the turn of the last century—and within Asian American studies, a rhetoric of racial invisibility and hypervisibility has defined the field from its inception in the late 1960s. At the start of the twenty-first century, how are we to see the image, firmly ensconced as a global commodity? A renewed call to transnationalism is presently transforming cultural studies in the academy, and Asian American studies marks a crucial site for understanding global flows of things and bodies. How can we theorize visuality in the context of a rigorously transnational understanding of Asian American studies?

Thursday, February 25
Keynote Address: Anne Anlin Cheng, “Strange Skin” (5pm)

Friday, February 26
Ways of Seeing: The Visual and Material Practice of Asian American Art (10 -11:45am)
Margo Machida, and Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, moderated by Bakirathi Mani

Desiring Images: Performing and Representing Asian American Cultures (1 – 2:45pm)
Patty Chang, and Mimi Nguyen, moderated by Homay King

Writing Seeing: Visuality in Asian American Poetics (3 – 4:45pm)
Brian Kim Stefans, and Timothy Yu, moderated by Josephine Park

For more information, visit: http://asam.sas.upenn.edu/visualcultures

Reading Group = Success!

The reading group met last night and it was a great success! 


The reading (Quare Studies or Almost Everything I know about Queer Studies I learned from My Grandmother) prompted some really interesting discussions. Thanks to all of you who came (especially those who brought goodies and chairs). And a very special shout out to Anne Jansen for letting us take over her home. Thanks Anne!


We look forward to seeing you at our next event!

cfp: Re-SEAing SouthEast Asian American Studies

Re-SEAing SouthEast Asian American Studies. Memories & Visions: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow.

San Francisco State University
March 10-11, 2011

The third tri-annual interdisciplinary Southeast Asians in the Diaspora conference will take place at San Francisco State University. The San Francisco Bay Area is home to sizable populations of Burmese, Cambodian, Filipino, Hmong, Indonesian, Lao, Malaysian, Singaporean, Thai, and Vietnamese Americans. This conference will foreground the large Southeast Asian American communities of the Bay Area, Silicon Valley, and the Pacific Northwest, as well as continue to build momentum and grow just as the Southeast Asian American demographics increase in size and visibility here in the U.S. and in particular, on the West Coast.

The main objectives of this conference are:

• to encourage the interdisciplinary and comparative study of Southeast Asian
• American peoples and their communities
• to promote national and international cooperation in the field
• to establish partnerships between academia and the community

This two-day conference explores memories (e.g., memories of homeland; memories of war; memories of childhood and growing up American; historical memories; embodied memories; intergenerational memories; technologies of memories; and imagined/created memories) and visions (actual sightings and sites of Southeast Asian Americans and their communities, both real and imaginary). Because this conference takes place after the constitutionally mandated 2010 census, the focus will be on locating/situating Southeast Asian American Studies for the 21st century.

The conference invites proposals for panels, workshops, and individual papers from all disciplines and fields of study that explore the dialectical relationship between memories and visions related to the following topics:

• Southeast Asian American health and wellness
• Southeast Asian American social justice
• Southeast Asian American and critical pedagogy
• Southeast Asian American youth cultures
• Southeast Asian American folklore, folklife, and religions
• Southeast Asian American families, relationships, and communities
• Southeast Asian American queer cultures and spaces
• Southeast Asian American sexualities
• Southeast Asian Americans of mixed heritage/race
• Southeast Asian American transnationality, transnationalization, and transnationalism
• Sino-Southeast Asian Americans
• Explorations of how artists (writers, filmmakers, visual artists) “see” and envision themselves and their communities as Southeast Asian Americans
• The location and relationship of Southeast Asia to Southeast Asian America
• The shifting demographics of Southeast Asian Americans vis-à-vis (in)visibility

Papers will also be considered on any related topics in Southeast Asian American Studies. 250 word abstracts should be submitted by June 15, 2010 to Dr. Jonathan H. X. Lee at jlee@sfsu.edu with the following information: a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, and d) abstract with title.

All papers will go through an internal review process and decisions regarding acceptance of papers for the conference will be communicated by October 15, 2010. Information on previous conferences:

• 1st 2005 at University of California, Riverside
• 2nd 2008 at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Jonathan H. X. Lee, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies
San Francisco State University
Department of Asian American Studies
1600 Holloway Ave, EP 103
San Francisco, CA 94132

cfp: 'Life in Marvelous Times': Cultural Work in the Racial Present

'Life in Marvelous Times': Cultural Work in the Racial Present

A Race/Knowledge Project Conference
Keynote address by Vijay Prashad

In the 2009 single “Life in Marvelous Times,” Mos Def declares that “we are alive in amazing times.” The lyrical images that follow those opening lines, the sleeve artwork, and the fan-made video Mos Def chose to represent the song suggest that the meaning of “marvelous” and “amazing” must be read as multiple; they must be read to mean both “excellent” and “great” but also “to cause wonder,” “to astonish,” and “to bewilder.” [read full cfp]

Proposals due: Feb. 8, 2010
Conference dates: May 13-14, 2010
Location: The University of Washington, Seattle