postcolonial

Adaptation studies was originally established with the intent to study  the manner in which cinematic texts altered their literary sources.  However, this concept has since expanded to engage with broader ideas of  how adaptation functions and the manner in which it has come to  interface with not only specific genres of literature, film, theatre,  media, and the digital, but also the narratives that underlie these in a  broader social, political, and historical sense (Raw and Gurr, 2013).  In fact, it is now maintained that the field is broad enough to be  conceptualised as an active determining process that affects almost  every aspect of our lives as we engage with the world around us.

In 1984, Diacritics published a “Colloquium on Nuclear Criticism,” exploring the need for a new subsection of theory addressing the nuclear age. Critics understood this age to have begun in 1945 but to have accelerated in the 1980s when stockpiles of nuclear weapons were at their peak and rhetoric between the US and the Soviet Union grew increasingly hostile. Total nuclear war was the main concern of this nuclear criticism. General audiences used the term “unthinkable” to emphasize the magnitude of nuclear war between the superpowers banking on the deterrence value of aiming as many warheads as possible at the enemy.

This seminar seeks to examine diasporic literature in a comparative context. Taking as our literary frame Southeast Asian literature in the diaspora, we invite proposals that address the diaspora as the “dispersion” into many and multiple places. Whereas U.S. and French mainstream cultural productions have relegated the past to the Others (Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large 1996: 31), Southeast Asian diasporic cultural productions often work creatively against the dominant cultures in which they operate. Southeast Asian diasporic formations, while multiple in their origins, can be deterritorialized sites of robust critical thought about the legacy of the devastating Asian Pacific theater of the global Cold War.

Call for papers           —        Edited Collection of Essays   

Tentative title:

Malaysian Ecocriticism: Contested Environments, Identities and the Politics of Nature

With the landmark establishment of the Southeast Asian chapter of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) in August 2016, it is both timely and crucial for member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to assess their literary and cultural artifacts from an ecocritical perspective.

CFP: SSAWW Panel at the College Language Association Convention, April 2018
Hosted by DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois

“Rewrit[ing] the American Literary Landscape”:
Immigrant American Women Writers across the Diaspora and Tales of Black Metropolitan Life

Overview