cfp.english.upenn.edu

The West in Asia/Asia in the West

In her seminal 1993 volume entitled Stella d’India, temi imperiali britannici, modelli di rappresentazione dell’India (republished in English in 2011 under the title Star of India, Imperial Themes, The Other Face of English Literature, Modes of Representing the Subcontinent), Italian scholar Lina Unali laid the foundation for the development of literary and critical studies focusing on the relationship between Asia and the West. Workshops organized and chaired at international conferences such as EAAS, AIHA and MESEA; lectures and papers delivered in numerous countries (particularly in India and China); the creation of the “Asia and the West” international conference (held annually at the University of Rome, Tor Vergata since 2000); the establishment of the intercultural studies center Asia and the West/Asia e Occident, at the same university; as well as many groundbreaking publications in this area are just a few of the contributions that Lina Unali has made to this transnational and transdisciplinary field of academic inquiry.

This volume of essays, which is currently under consideration by a major academic press, takes Professor Unali’s work as its point of departure while celebrating her scholarly activity and intellectual engagement over the years.

The co-editors seek submissions (full-length manuscripts of between 5,000 and 7,000 words in Chicago Manual footnotes—not parenthetical—style) that take Lina Unali’s writings, the “transnational turn” in Asian Studies, and/or the interstitial material between “Asia and the West” as their focus (submissions can also include those which consider Professor Unali’s contributions to other fields such Italian and Anglophone Studies). We also seek submissions on topics including, but not limited, to:

• The relationship between British and/or American writers and Asia
• Western travellers to Asia
• Eastern travellers to the West
• Transnational interlopers (historic/literary figures who embody the transnational tapestry)
• The construction of “the Orient”
• New trends and developments in transnational studies
• The politics of Asian American Studies
• Asian American/Asian British literature and the “canon”
• Asian American and Asian British digital culture and the Internet
• Bilingualism and biculturalism in the Asian American and Asian British contexts
• The Asian American and Asian British immigrant experience
• Italian American immigrants and their oral histories
• Italian American women writers
• Hybridity, diaspora and borders
• Fusion/Fragmentation/Intertextuality
• (Post)colonial Studies
• Asian American/Asian British Arts (visual, theatrical, cultural, oral traditions, etc.)
• Asian American/Asian British life-writing (incl. travel writing, journals, diaries, and memoirs)
• Translation/interpretation/adaptation
• Identity, representation, race, class and gender
• Globalization, citizenship, mobility
• Teaching the West in Asia/Asia in the West

Abstracts (max. 500 words) and one-paragraph bios should be emailed as Microsoft Word attachments to Drs. Elisabetta Marino marino@lettere.uniroma2.it and Tanfer Emin Tunc tanfer.emin@gmail.com by March 31, 2012. After the preliminary acceptance of abstracts, contributors will be asked to submit manuscripts by August 15, 2012. We reserve the right to decline full-text submissions that do not meet editorial standards, and anticipate a Fall/Winter 2013 publication date.