Out of the Box: Rethinking Southeast Asia through Comics (MLA 2025)
“Out of the Box: Rethinking Southeast Asia through Comics” (MLA 2025)
DEADLINE EXTENDED TO MARCH 21 2024
We invite paper proposals for a non-guaranteed session organized by the Southeast Asian and Southeast Asian Diasporic Forum for the January 2025 Modern Language Association conference in New Orleans. We seek papers about comics and graphic narratives by authors from Southeast Asia and its diasporas. Given Southeast Asia’s linguistic diversity, we welcome papers about comics in languages other than English.
Comics and graphic narratives by Southeast Asian creators have received international
acclaim over the past decade. From Singapore, Sonny Liew’s graphic novel The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye won three Eisner Awards in 2017. Budjette Tan and Kajo Baldisimo’s Trese, a Filipino komiks series, has garnered both a North American release and also a bilingual TV series adaptation by Netflix in 2021. During the COVID pandemic, graphic medicine webcomics by creators such as Weiman Koh (Singapore), Ernest Ng (Malaysia), and the Covid Comics PH collective (the Philippines) made international news. Southeast Asian diasporic authors in Europe and North America are also actively creating comics, with graphic memoirs being their genre of choice. Examples include Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do (Vietnam), Tian Veasna’s The Year of Rabbit (Cambodia), and Lorina Mapa’s Duran Duran, Imelda Marcos, and Me (the Philippines). This brief list is by no means exhaustive and does not include serialized comics, webcomics, or comics written Southeast Asian languages other than English.
We take our cue for examining critical differences in Southeast Asian comics from Katherine Kelp-Stebbins’s recent book How Comics Travel (2022). As Kelp-Stebbins argues, instead of “insisting that comics are intelligible identically everywhere” thanks to a globally recognizable visual vocabulary, reading for difference in comics means attending to “points of (un)translatability, cultural specificity, formal or commercial difference, and map[ping] out a wider, more diverse, and more democratic terrain” (7). Such differences are “not only between national traditions but also within traditions that may be national, but also international, or transnational” (7). Therefore, we want to consider how comics and graphic narratives not only represent but also rethink and re-evaluate social inequalities, prevailing cultural attitudes, and dominant power structures in Southeast Asia, whether in one nation-state or national culture, or in the larger region and its diasporas.
Furthermore, we also want to focus on how Southeast Asian comics creators engage with local and regional linguistic, cultural, and aesthetic elements in their work, and (in so doing) how these creators depart from or challenge the conventions of North American, European, or East Asian graphic narratives.
With this in mind, we invite papers that critically discuss Southeast Asian comics in relation to any topics on the following (non-exhaustive) list:
- decoloniality / postcoloniality
- race and ethnonationalism
- memory, history, and politics
- gender and sexuality
- myth, spirituality, and religion
- class, labor, and wealth
- migration and diaspora
- language and translation
Please send 250-word abstracts and current CV, as well as any questions, to Weihsin Gui (weihsing@ucr.edu) and Nazry Bahrawi (nazryb@uw.edu) by March 21, 2024. Please note that speakers whose papers are accepted for this session will need to become members of the Modern Language Association by April 7, 2024 in order to participate in the conference itself.