M/MLA Convention, November 8-10, 2002, Minneapolis, Minnesota.
ACCEPTED PANEL: Asian-American Literature and Integral Autonomy
Please note deadline extension.
In much recent criticism of Asian-American poetry, an "elegiac" tone
subtends discussions of identity, identification, and subjectivity, even in
the more celebratory works. Given as a discursive backdrop such a horrifying
series of historical events-social, historiographical, and canonical
exclusion in the United States and neo-colonial expansion abroad-such a tone
is of course warranted. What worries me, however, is whether the critical
stress on the condition of lack, dispossession, alienation, exclusion-in a
word, of loss-remains the most productive or interesting way of reading
Asian-American literature. (Take, for example, the titles of two recent
brilliant works: _Racial Castration_ (David Eng 2001) and _The Melancholy of
Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief_ (Anne Cheng 2000).)
While the tropes deployed by literary writers who regard themselves as
exilic/diasporic subjects might indeed effect a "symbolic" reversal of
cultural and
historical disfranchisement, as Oscar Campomanes has suggested, I would
contend that their writing also actualizes and stimulates "real" agency and
literary and critical production.
Perhaps we might see the ways in which the prose and poetry of
Asian-American writers bracket off a monolithic notion of the traumatic
altogether and generate a new "minor" style, one characterized by properties
of connection, conjunction, and contiguity. In my own work, I have turned
to the writing of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri for their
"nomadological" exploration of desire not as determined by lack, but as
productive. I explore their anti-oedipal musings, via the discussion of
Filipina-American poets, in order to "map out" a critical line that would
allow us both to critique institutionalized modes of representation and to
survey new ways of talking about Filipino-American and Asian-American
identity.
I hope to look for papers that similarly dare to explore a
"post-post-traumatic" avenue of critical discourse of Asian-American
literature, whether it charts such an approach in the form of a
phenomenological look at production, a "post-marxist" discussion of literary
identity, or via any critical paradigm or experimental theoretical form. I
don't mean to suggest that we should or can move "beyond" conditions
engendering "hidden grief"--clearly any historical account that overlooks
cultural, social, material, and psychic alienation rehearses and reproduces
the very hegemonic effects that make mourning necessary. Rather, I hope to
find a form that somehow moves through a critical repetition-compulsion, one
that perhaps acknowledges and asserts the possibility of what Gramsci has
called "integral
autonomy," which, as Lisa Lowe has poignantly and cogently suggested, would
ultimately allow us to imagine "a new set of relationships that together
embody a different hegemony and a different balance of power" within and
outside of the United States academy.
I of course welcome any submissions of challenge to this project.
Please submit a 200-300 word abstract, with a cover letter, to Victor
Mendoza, victor_m@uclink.berkeley.edu (via attachment), by April 15, 2002.
Please refer to the panel title in the subject line.
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or write Erika Lin: elin@english.upenn.edu
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