In her foundational text Immigrant Acts, cultural theorist Lisa Lowe argues that the Asian immigrant exists as a “perpetual foreigner within the body politic,” a figure through whom the nation-state defines its own boundaries and citizenship. For Lowe, Asian American cultural production emerges precisely from this “distance from the national culture,” serving as a site that critiques the state’s false promises of universal inclusion. Critic and author Viet Thanh Nguyen, in his reflections on the fiction of the “Asian American” identity, also observes that “belonging always involves exclusion,” noting a historical, cyclical tension between “American aspiration and American reality” that routinely positions Asian Americans as scapegoats who embody both “threat and aspiration.” For Asian Americans, the promise of American “hospitality” has historically been transactional, conditional, and deeply tethered to structures of legal exclusion, surveillance, and containment. From the legislative thresholds of the Chinese Exclusion Act and Japanese American internment to contemporary narratives of the “model minority,” the Asian American experience is frequently suspended between the status of the invited guest and the excluded outsider.

This special session invites papers, cultural analyses, and creative works that explore how Asian American literature, culture, and/or media engage with, complicate, or subvert the ethos of hospitality. How should the concept of hospitality be defined or understood in the realm of Asian America? How do Asian American writers navigate the power imbalances of the host-guest dynamic? In what ways do narratives of migration, diaspora, and refuge expose the underlying friction embedded in state-sanctioned hospitality? How do texts construct alternative spaces of belonging—what Lowe calls spaces of “heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity”—that bypass the traditional boundaries of the nation-state?

Comparative or interdisciplinary studies, multiethnic, transnational, cross-cultural, and pedagogical research related to the SAMLA 98 theme, Hospitality, are especially welcome. Please submit a 250-300 word abstract/proposal, a brief bio, and any A/V requests by September 1, 2026 via the following SAMLA abstract submission portal: https://samla.ballastacademic.com/Home/S/19608