CFP: Anthology, East and South Asia

Editors Helen Asquine Fazio and V.G. Julie Rajan invite your submissions of
papers for a multi-disciplinary anthology entitled Language, Mysticism, and
Iconography: Exploring the Cultural Interface Between East and South Asia.
The collection addresses the shared cultural traditions in narrative,
language, religion, philosophy, and art between East and South Asia.

Centuries of territorial conflict, shared tradition, and economic exchange
between the nations of East and South Asia have produced a wide-range of
hybrid cultural expressions influenced by the identity politics of both
regions. The evolution of Tibetan representations of the Indian-born Buddha
over the centuries, for example, displays Tibet's ongoing attempts to
integrate South Asian tradition into the hegemonic Chinese culture
dominating its territory. A plethora of travel writings, for example by
eighteenth-century British writers George Bogle and Samuel Turner and
modern-day Indian writer Vikram Seth, illustrate the various cultural
lenses, colonial, Western and postcolonial, non-Western, that have
speculated on the interpolation of East and South Asian cultures.

The existence of East and South Asian cross-cultural expressions speaks to
the fluidity of the borders between those regions and, therefore, highlights
similarities in their social, political, economic, and religious discourses.
Yet at the same time, explorations of the cultural interface between both
regions are problematized by the differences in their histories with regard
to issues of imperialism, postcolonialism, and postmodernism. The
similarities and differences between East and South Asia complicate notions
of human identity and Otherness that can be read in their cultural
expressions.

The proposed anthology explores the how the social, political, economic, and
religious interactions between East and South Asia have influenced and
produced a wide-range of subjectivities framed by those regions, as
expressed through literary and cultural productions from the ancient through
modern times. Paper topics may address themes pertaining, but not limited,
to: Reading and Representing the "Subject"; Literature and Human Rights;
Translation and Metamorphosis; Western Readings of Orientalism and
Otherness; Human beings and the Natural World; Gender and Transformation;
Religion and Globalism; Terrorism and Tradition; Monsters and Angels; and
Temporal and Spatial Expressions of Identity.

Please send 1-page abstracts and 150-word biographies by May 1, 2006 to:
V.G. Julie Rajan, julie_at_rajans.org

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Received on Fri Mar 31 2006 - 07:08:56 EST