CFP: Explorations in Southeast Asian Studies: a graduate student journal of Southeast Asian Studies

Deadline for 2009 issue is: November 9, 2008

The journal Explorations in Southeast Asian Studies: a graduate student journal of Southeast Asian Studies is edited and published by graduate students at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. Explorations showcases student research on Southeast Asia from a diverse range of disciplinary perspectives and welcomes submissions from graduate students currently enrolled in a formal program of study in the United States and abroad. The editors welcome submissions from all disciplines, including history, Asian studies, languages & literature, social sciences and the humanities. All submissions should be written with an interdisciplinary audience in mind, avoiding technical or other jargon, and should address themes of interest for specialists in Southeast Asian studies.

HOW TO SUBMIT:
• Submissions are considered on a rolling basis until the final November 9, 2008 deadline. Submissions received after the deadline will not be considered.

• Please submit your work by email, as a Word document (.doc, not .pdf), to explore@hawaii.edu.

• Submissions should follow APA or Turabian style, using endnotes and including a complete Bibliography of all works used. The total length of the submission should not exceed 30 pages in length.

• Submissions are expected to neither be currently under review for another publication, nor to have been previously published elsewhere.

• We consider the following types of submissions:
• Reviews of current books, films or exhibitions,
• Original translations of poetry or short stories in English, from a Southeast Asian language
• Photo essays
• “Notes from the Field” pieces, that is, informal essays on firsthand field research experiences written for a graduate student audience
• Short reviews of new research tools and resources useful for research

Want to see what we are all about? View our current and past issues online: http://www.hawaii.edu/cseas/explorations/explorations.html

Explorations is supported by the Center for Southeast Asian Studies (CSEAS), the Southeast Asian Studies Student Association (SEASSA) and the Student Activities and Program Fee Board (SAPFB) at the University of Hawai’i. The journal is produced through a blind review process, by volunteer editors with the guidance of a faculty advisor. The editorial board consists of graduate students from a range of disciplines whose regional interests lie within Southeast Asia. The journal is published electronically and in hard copy, and is distributed to major Southeast Asian studies centers and libraries both nationally and internationally.

Papers published in Explorations are not necessarily representative of the views of the editors or the sponsors, and responsibility for the opinions expressed and the factual accuracy of papers lies with the individual authors.

Questions? Email us at: explore@hawaii.edu

CFP: Asian American Literature -- the Voice of Southeast Asian Diaspora

CALL FOR PAPERS: Asian American Literature -- the Voice of Southeast Asian Diaspora

40th Anniversary Convention, Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)
Feb. 26-March 1, 2009
Hyatt Regency - Boston, Massachusetts

Session Description:

After the Vietnam War ended in 1974, the refugees from Southeast Asia risked their lives traveling across the Pacific Ocean in order to escape from the political persecution of communism in their home countries and look for a better life in North America. What has their "American Dream" come to be? Without the experiences of Exclusion Laws and racial discriminations that early Asian immigrant groups have had during the first half of the twentieth century, how are the diasporic experiences of Southeast Asian immigrants different from other Asian ethnicities like Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and Filipinos? In Lan Cao's Monkey Bridge, the narrator Mai Nguyen describes Vietnamese immigrants in America: "Not only could we become anything we wanted to be in America, we could change what we had once been in Vietnam. Rebirthing the past, we called it, claiming what had once been a power reserved only for gods and other immortal beings." How do these Southeast Asian immigrants accommodate themselves to a new life? How do their younger generations identify themselves in North America? Pioneer Southeast Asian American writers like Lan Cao, Monique Thuy-Dung Truong, Le Ly Hayslip, Lê Thi Diem Thúy, T. C. Huo, Lawrence Chua, etc. have initiated this dialogue in their literary expression and addressed the voice of Southeast Asian diaspora. This panel invites papers discussing the voice of Southeast Asian diaspora, including but not limited to Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians, Hmongs, Thais, and Burmese. We will be discussing how these diasporic groups inscribe their North American experiences and sociopolitical issues - their joy and sorrow, their assimilation, their homesickness, their reinvention of identity and history, etc. Any disciplines and approaches are welcome: literary studies, cultural studies, anthropology, history, sociology, psychology, and the like.

Please send an abstract of 500 words and a brief bio in a single file to Dr. Brian Guan-rong Chen at grc0930@yahoo.com. (Note: Only PDF and DOC files are acceptable. If you are using the latest version of Microsoft Word, please make sure that your filename ends with DOC, not DOCX.)

Deadline: September 15, 2008

Please include with your abstract: Name and Affiliation, Email address, Postal address, Telephone number, A/V requirements (if any; $10 handling fee)

The complete Call for Papers for the 2009 Convention will be posted in June: www.nemla.org. Interested participants may submit abstracts to more than one NeMLA panel; however panelists can only present one paper. Convention participants may present a paper at a panel or seminar and also present at a creative session or participate in a roundtable.

CFP: Asian American Theatre Group

Asian American Theatre Group
American Society for Theatre Research
2008 Conference

Co-conveners:
Esther Kim Lee, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (kim32@uiuc.edu)
Ron West, Metropolitan Community College, Omaha, NE (rwest33449@aol.com)

Asian American theatre, as an investigatory category, offers a particularly appropriate opportunity to explore the implications of migration across and within geopolitical borders and cultural boundaries. Though "migration" generally implies a willing movement of people among geographic areas, it also provides a convenient euphemism for the manipulative consequences of globalization. Thus, "migrant" populations may be compelled or encouraged to move among geographic regions but remain excluded from full membership in "settled" social and political territories such as the Americas. The borders are economically fluid, but culturally unyielding. In particular, Asian populations historically have been excluded by convention and statute from full membership in the "American" imagination, even while the! y have been exploited as economic necessities and defined as the Other. Asian American theatre likewise struggles with the relegation to contingency status, signaled by its persistent depiction as a component of the mid-twentieth century's countercultural movement, a sidebar to the main event. Still, Asian American theatre broadly defined remains one of the most promising sites for challenging the false dichotomy of "Asian" and "American" that continues to define the constructed representation of the Asian diaspora in the Americas.

Our group invites participants to address the ways in which the migration, map, and memory of Asian American theatre unsettles "American" theatre by re-settling the territory between the illusory poles of Asia and the Americas. As the first ASTR session to focus on Asian American theatre, the meeting will allow participants to explore the potential o! f Asian American theatre as a web of links rather than a series of discrete "ethnic" discourses and thereby to examine a range of interstitial relationships that avoid isolating Asian American, yet retain a productive distinction. In part because of our hope to draw upon a broad community of perspectives, we especially encourage submissions that extend Asian American beyond the American subdivision of the United States.


Session format:

The process and implementation of the session will resemble the ASTR seminar's 2-hour structure. Participants must commit to submitting preliminary drafts of their papers by August 1st and actively participate in an online pre-conference discussion by means of a fully secure website. The final conference drafts (8-10 pages) are due by October 15th.

By June 6, 2008 please submit an abstract (max 500 words) and brief biography (150 words) via email to:

Esther Kim Lee, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (kim32@uiuc.edu)
AND
Ron West, Metropolitan Community College, Omaha, NE (rwest33449@aol.com)

JOB POST: U of W-Madison, Visiting Prof in Hmong Studies

The Asian American Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin, Madison is hiring a visiting assistant/associate professor for 2008-2009. We are interested in applicants with PhD or ABD from any discipline and able to teach the following courses:

Hmong Experiences in the U.S., Special Topics
Hmong American Studies

If you are interested in being considered for this position, please send your curriculum vita and a letter describing what your course content might be to:

Lynet Uttal
Director, Asian American Studies Program
304 Ingraham Hall
1155 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706

Video: Kao Kalia Yang Interview

One of our artists from the "Southeast Asians in the Diaspora" conference, Kao Kalia Yang, is on her book tour for The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir (published on Coffee House Press). Check out an extended interview with her here!

CFP: Hmong Studies Journal

The Hmong Studies Journal invites article submissions for its 2008 issue (Volume 9). The deadline is May 30, 2008.

The Hmong Studies Journal is a unique and established peer-reviewed Internet-based academic publication devoted to the scholarly discussion of Hmong history, Hmong culture, Hmong people, and other facets of the Hmong experience in the U.S., Asia and around the world. The Hmong Studies Journal has published 10 online issues in 8 volumes and more than 60 scholarly articles since 1996.

Hmong Studies-related scholarly articles from all disciplinary backgrounds and perspectives are welcome. Works considered for submission must consist of original research and not have been previously published elsewhere. Book reviews are welcome but works consisting primarily of non-original literature reviews of other works generally are not accepted. Neither are works that consist primarily of political-oriented commentary.

Articles for submission review should be sent on diskette or by e-mail attachment to Mark E. Pfeifer, PhD, Editor, Bell Library, Texas A and M University, 6300 Ocean Drive, Unit 5702, Corpus Christi, TX 78412-5702. E-Mail: editor@hmongstudies.org.

CFP: Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora

The Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network is soliciting submissions for a collection called Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora: Troubling Borders in Literature and Art. From the call:

The literature of Southeast Asian women within the diaspora is marginalized in mainstream cultures. When visible, our writings are often misunderstood as stereotypical representations of purity, pathos, folklore, or matrilineal caricature. As activists, writers, and scholars, we are committed to bringing together a truly unique collection of voices by Southeast Asian women who trace their ancestry to Viet Nam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Indonesia, Burma/Myanmar, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei or East Timor, and whose stories have yet to be told or visualized. We would also like to hear from women of minority groups, like the ethnic Chinese and Indians throughout Southeast Asia, and the Mien, Hmong, and Cham, who are located in many regions of the world. As the book’s subtitle suggests [Troubling Borders in Literature and Art], we hope the collection will question the concept of national borders and the boundaries of literature and art.

Because we envision this anthology will feature importantly in classroom curricula, we are looking for pieces that speak to broad themes and concerns relating but not limited to questions of youth, generational difference, nationality, identity, gender, sexuality, and class. We are soliciting submissions of various genres: short stories, poems, fiction, personal essays, and artwork.

The deadline is December 19, 2008.

Download the full CFP here.

Based in the San Francisco Bay Area and greater Los Angeles, the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN) is a new organization composed of academics, artists, and organizers committed to advancing Vietnamese American art and to bringing Vietnamese cultural productions from the diaspora to the United States.

Conference Photographs!

Check out some of the photographs from the Southeast Asians in the Diaspora conference here. If you have more, please leave a note in the comments!

Southeast Asians in the Diaspora Conference, 15-16 April

The second (and successful) Southeast Asian/American studies conference was held this past week at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, hosted by the Asian American Studies Program and coinciding with the annual Association of Asian American Studies meeting in Chicago. This blog emerges out of the conference as a collaborative project tracking the field of Southeast Asian/American studies, collecting links, resources, and research for students, scholars, community organizations, and artists working in (and sometimes around) cultural and intellectual production about the categories and queries collected loosely, and sometimes uneasily, under the rubric of "Southeast Asians in the diaspora."

The exact contours of this project are still in development; for now, here is the 2008 conference site and our overview, as follows:

This two-day conference examines the emerging field of Southeast Asian/American studies, which because of specific histories of colonialism and imperialism, has produced subjects and objects of analysis that confound categories of diaspora, citizenship, and affiliation. Studies of the Cambodian, Laotian, and Vietnamese diasporas investigate and trouble the structuring effects of Cold War geopolitics; while studies of Hmong, Mien, Cham, and other stateless ethnicities necessarily reconsider the bases for global and local practices of identification as well as strategic claims to rights and resources.

Given this, the field foregrounds important epistemological and methodological shifts that productively disrupt the analytic conventions of area studies, American studies, ethnic studies, and Asian American studies. Thinking across these fields, Southeast Asian/American studies fulfills the intellectual and political promise of what Kandice Chuh imagines as "studies in comparative racialization and intersectional projects that deliberately unravel seemingly stable distinctions among identificatory categories and disciplinary divisions." Complicating the examination of nationalisms and transnationalisms, Southeast Asian/American studies questions the circulation of, the negotiation with, or challenges to the knowledge regimes of U.S. nation and empire.