world literatures and indigenous studies

Philip Kan Gotanda’s play Yankee Dawg You Die centers a conflict between two Asian American actors. The aging Vincent Chang built his career playing bumbling Japanese soldiers and one-dimensional Asian stereotypes in classic Hollywood. He’s confronted by the up-and-coming Bradley Yamashita, who insists that Asian (American) characters should be played with dignity and accuracy. The heart of the play is an ambivalence about Asian (American) representation and whether viewers should sympathize with Chang for taking the only acting jobs available or with Yamashita in his condemnation of the racist roles—or with both.

Call for Abstracts/Chapter Proposals

SCREEN STORYTELLERS: The Works of Jaco Van Dormael

Edited by Albert Lee

Sponsored by the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE) 

This roundtable envisions writing as a collaborative act and centers writings that empower Environmental Justice communities. How have/do writing communities negotiate and enact environmental justice? How do writing communities disseminate scientific and technical information towards environmental action and justice? Participants in this roundtable are encouraged to consider:

o How does/can writing raise collective environmental consciousness?

o Writing in the Humanities to mobilize marginalized communities in the age of climate change

o Aesthetic writings beyond the pleasure of nature writing but those that fuel ethical actions

- LITERATURE FOR PEACE: NARRATIVES OF CO-EXISTENCE

Call for Papers: Short Fiction in Theory & Practice

Special Issue: ‘Writing Across Languages: Anglophone Short Stories by Multilingual Authors’

Guest edited by Elsa Court (University of Oxford), Nina Ellis (The American University in Cairo), and Sonya Moor (Manchester Metropolitan University).

View the full call here>>

https://www.intellectbooks.com/short-fiction-in-theory-practice#call-for-papers

Following the lead of activist and disabled writer Alice Wong, this panel “creates a

dialogue” and is, of itself, “an intimate act bringing us together across space and time”

(Disability Intimacy xx). It therefore invites papers engaged in the long genealogy of literary,

visual, and historical representations of a frequently overlooked, or gainsayed, symbiosis: that is,

between intimacy, broadly defined, and the disabled or “defective” bodymind in the early

modern archive. This might include considering how disability sparks desire, enhances pleasure,

This is a CFP seeking panelists for the 2027 Annual Conference of the Association for Asian Studies. We invite papers that examine racialization and ethnicization across Sinophone and Asian contexts in which local projects of improvement and rule are entangled with colonial and imperial systems and epistemologies, both Western and non-Western, external and internal, often sustained by local elites and intermediaries. We understand these contexts in broad terms, including transnational, diasporic, and colonial aspects. Processes of racialization and ethnicization, as well as resistance to and negotiation of such processes, could involve, but are not limited to, discussions of care, gender, and sexuality.

In Africa and the African diaspora, knowledge is often produced, circulated, and critiqued in “minor forms”—small-scale oral, visual, material, and digital ephemera such as proverbs, folktales, rites, images, social media, and other non-canonical modes of expression that structure everyday cultural life but are frequently marginalized within dominant academic and cultural hierarchies. While “major forms” such as the literary canon, the national archive, and peer-reviewed scholarship obscure the complexity and vitality of African cultural production, minor forms interact with, resist, coexist alongside, and reshape those dominant modes.

In India, the displacement of Adivasis, tribals, poor, farmers, forest-dwelling and land-based people, and other marginalized communities for development and infrastructure projects like dams, railways, power projects, and bridge construction, or for capitalist accumulation like mining, resource extraction, tourism, and industry, is a common occurrence. The trajectory of such displacement has a long history, starting in the colonial period and being aggravated in the postcolonial period under the Nehruvian model of development. Although such projects are implemented for the sake of the ‘greater common good’ for all, only a few elites enjoy the benefit of these projects, depriving millions of displaced, marginalized people (Roy 1999).

The Global Asias Initiative (GAI) and Institute for Korean Studies (IKS) at the Pennsylvania State University (PSU), in partnership with UC-Irvine’s Center for Critical Korean Studies (CCKS), are conducting a mentoring project designed to foster a network of scholars working on Korean and Korean diasporic topics under the conceptual rubric of Global Asias. The goal of this project is to build a community of early-career scholars who are working at the intersections of Korean studies and Global Asias approaches; and to encourage intellectual exchange, collaboration, and the development of new critical approaches to Korean studies, Korean American studies, and Korean diaspora studies.

About the volume

Oceanography & the Blue Humanities: Literary Geographies of Islands and Water Bodies

December 09-12, 2026 

Concept Note:

Location and Date: May 20-23, 2027 University of Houston 

In-person and Virtual: This panel will meet in-person

Call for Chapters