NEMLA 2003 Convention: Boston, MA; 6-9 March
Asian American Studies: Rethinking Injury, Rethinking Trauma
In much recent criticism of Asian American texts, an "elegiac" tone
often subtends discussions of identity, identification, and
subjectivity, even in the more celebratory works. Against the backdrop
of so many horrifying historical instances--social, historiographical,
and canonical exclusion in the United States and not-spoken-of
neocolonial expansion abroad--such a tone is of course warranted. What
I'm unsure of, however, is whether the critical emphasis on the
condition of lack, dispossession, alienation, exclusion--and thus of
injury or loss--remains the most productive mode of reading Asian
American texts.
I'm seeking, therefore, papers that explore a "post-post-injury" or
"post-post-traumatic" avenue of critical discussion of Asian American
texts. I don't mean to suggest that we should not address "hidden
grief"; clearly any historical or theoretical accounts that overlook
cultural, social, material, and psychic alienation threaten to rehearse
or reproduce the very hegemonic effects that make mourning necessary.
Yet I do hope to find ways in which we might question--or even bracket
off--discourses emphasizing injury or trauma and, perhaps more
importantly, subject to critique the very political identities resulting
from them.
Please submit a 200-300 word abstract to Victor Mendoza,
victor_m@uclink.berkeley.edu (attachments accepted), by 20 September
2002.
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