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.