Recovering Southeast Asian Identity through the Postcolonial Archive
Northeast MLA, March 5-8 2026
This session explores how postcolonial Southeast Asian literature grapples with memory, trauma, archival recovery, and cultural identity. Rather than thinking of identity as fixed or linear, selfhood is complex and palimpsestic due to colonial violence, migration, and historical erasure. This session invites papers that analyze how characters or narratives navigate misremembering, inherited trauma, or overwritten histories to reclaim belonging, agency, and identity. Topics may include narrative voice, transgenerational memory, silence, storytelling, and archival gaps in multiethnic and immigrant literatures.