Transpacific Memory: Life Writing across the Western Divide

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2014 MLA Chicago (Special Session)
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While Transpacific Studies often focus on Asian diasporic writing, this call for papers seeks essays on life writing emerging from travel across the Pacific in all directions, East-West, West-East, North-South. Following Yunte Huang's lead in *Transpacific Imaginations* and *Transpacific Displacements,* we might expand the definition of transpacific to encompass modern Western expatriate memoirs such as Mark Salzman's *Iron and Silk*; Simon Manchester's *The River at the Centre of the World*; Nathan Gray's *First Pass Under Heaven*; Mark Kitto's *Chasing China*; Rachel DeWoskin's *Foreign Babes in Beijing*; Angela Carter in Japan; Bruce S. Feiler's *Learning to Bow*; and life writing by missionaries, diplomats, teachers and businesspeople in Taiwan, Hong Kong , China and Korea. Also welcome are papers that take a fresh or macro view of Transpacific life writing by Asian emigrants to the US, Canada and Central and South America. Please send abstract and a brief bio by March 15 to Mary Goodwin at profgood@hotmail.com.