Annual Conference for the American Literature Association

Chair: Caroline Kyungah Hong, Queens College, City University of New York
Due Date: January 10, 2015

This roundtable will focus on the connections across Asian American literature and visual cultures. Politics of visibility and visual representation loom large for Asian Americans, who are simultaneously culturally invisible and hypervisible, and who are haunted by imagery that reifies stereotypes of Asians and Asian Americans as the yellow peril, the perpetual foreigner, the model minority, the terrorist, and so on. The visual has been and continues to be employed to both empower and discipline subjects, to create and destroy communities, to define and deny citizenship, to injure and traumatize, but also heal and bring pleasure. Examining the interconnectedness of Asian American literary and visual cultures in our hypermediated world is a crucial and timely project for the field of Asian American studies, one that hopefully leads to new ways of seeing and reading and generates innovative scholarly and pedagogical practices.

Participants are invited to discuss a broad range of visual practices—both dominant/mainstream and alternative/independent, including but not limited to fine/visual arts, public art, photography, film, performance, architecture, design, fashion, advertising, graphic narratives, digital media, social media—and the material, historical, social, cultural, and political contexts of their production and consumption. Each participant will prepare 8–10 minutes of remarks, to be followed by at least 30 minutes of open discussion.

Please email a proposal (250 words maximum) and a brief CV to Caroline Kyungah Hong (caroline.hong@qc.cuny.edu) by January 10, 2015. Please note that if your proposal is accepted and you agree to participate in the roundtable, you will need to become a member of CAALS prior to presenting, in addition to registering for the conference. For more information, please visit our website at http://caals.org/. CAALS is a member society of the American Literature Association; the national conference meets this year at the Westin-Copley in Boston, Massachusetts, May 21-24, 2015 (www.alaconf.org).