Northeast MLA, March 5-8 2026

This session explores how postcolonial Southeast Asian literature grapples with memory, trauma, archival recovery, and cultural identity. Rather than thinking of identity as fixed or linear, selfhood is complex and palimpsestic due to colonial violence, migration, and historical erasure. This session invites papers that analyze how characters or narratives navigate misremembering, inherited trauma, or overwritten histories to reclaim belonging, agency, and identity. Topics may include narrative voice, transgenerational memory, silence, storytelling, and archival gaps in multiethnic and immigrant literatures.

Drawing inspiration from the 2026 NeMLA theme “(Re)generation,” this session engages with texts that explore the fractured, nonlinear, and layered nature of diasporic subjectivity, as well as looking into how the concept of a recovered archive, where past inscriptions haunt present narratives, applies to immigrant and postcolonial experiences.

The significance of this session lies in its aim to foreground how literature resists dominant frameworks of memory and belonging by engaging with forgotten, silenced, or erased pasts. These narratives do not just remember; they reconfigure memory as a contested and embodied site of selfhood. These narratives also act as a response against the colonizing empires; a marker of resilience and survival of people and cultures.

This panel is intended for scholars, teachers, and community members interested in recovering and analyzing lost archives within the Southeast Asian diaspora and participating in the recovery and recirculation of such underrepresented authors.

This will be a in person panel. In Person Only: The session will be held fully in person at the hotel. No remote presentations will be included.

Please submit an abstract of 300 words and a short (approx. 50-word) bio statement to the NeMLA portal via this link:https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21966

Any questions can be directed to J. Matthew Villanueva at Temple University: james.matthew.villanueva@temple.edu