American Literature Association
35th Annual Conference
May 23-26, 2024
Chicago, IL

We invite papers that consider how Asian American literary texts illuminate, challenge, or reimagine Asian American relationships to carceral structures. We ask, how might a deeper awareness of the Asian American subject's implication in carceral structures allow for more interethnic coalition building? 

Japanese American incarceration during World War II belongs to an important historical trajectory which he traces, from the Chinese Exclusion Act and mass detention of immigrants on Angel Island to the ongoing detainment of suspected enemy combatants in Guantanamo; racial and ethnic identities in the United States have always been indelibly bound to legal, and therefore, carceral structures. Memory work, often at the heart of contemporary Japanese American literature on wartime incarceration by descendant writers, is also central to the concerns of many artists and writers who engage with large-scale mass displacement, warfare and related genocidal violence from U.S.-backed military conflicts in Asia; AAPI artists having to negotiate personal and collective trauma, its afterlife, or both abound in recent works of Asian American literature, from wars experienced in the Philippines, Korea, and Vietnam, as well as related Cold-War era brutalities in Cambodia, Laos, and Indonesia, while most recently joined by writers from Pakistan and Afghanistan impacted by War on Terror. 

This panel explores, what it means to represent histories of mass incarceration, and attending experiences of dispossession, family separations, and forced relocations, through Asian American poetry, drama, fiction, graphic novel, or other particular modes of literary and cultural expression.

Please email an abstract (max. 250 words) and a brief CV (max. 1-page) to Rei Magosaki at magosaki@chapman.edu and Christine Kitano at christine.kitano@stonybrook.edu by January 23rd, 2024. Please be sure to mention any technological needs for your presentation.