THIRD CONFERENCE ON ORIENTALISMS

 

3rd Conference on Orientalisms

and the Asian and Arab Diasporas:

 

Imaging the “Oriental”

  in the Americas and the Iberian Peninsula

 

 

CALL FOR PAPERS

 

“We need to explore alternative ways of thinking about cross-cultural exchange that exceed the     pointed, polemical framework of ‘antiorientalism’—the lesson from Said’s work—by continually

problematizing the presumption of stable identities and also by continuously asking what else there is to learn beyond destabilized identities themselves” (Ethics after Idealism, Rey Chow)

 

 

Dear colleagues,

You are all invited to participate in the Third Conference on Orientalisms and the Asian and Arab Diasporas in the Americas and the Iberian Peninsula, which will take place on Friday, April 22 and Saturday, April 23 at the University of California, Merced.  The name of this year’s conference is Imaging the “Oriental” in the Americas and the Iberian Peninsula.

 

Those interested are invited to submit a one-page abstract in Spanish or English, dealing with any of the topics listed below or any other topic related to Orientalism, Occidentalism, and/or the Asian and Arab presence and heritage in the Americas and the Hispanic world, or their respective imaginaries. Please send it via e-mail to Dr. Ignacio López-Calvo, ilopez-calvo@ucmerced.edu, Dr. Cristián H. Ricci cricci@ucmerced.edu, or Dr. Kevin Fellezs kfellezs@ucmerced.edu.

 

We hope you find it interesting and decide to participate. Please forward this flyer to any colleagues or graduate students who may be interested. Extended versions of a selection of the papers presented at the conference will be published in the academic journal TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World.

 


         Best wishes,

         Ignacio López-Calvo, Cristián H. Ricci, and Kevin Fellezs
         University of California, Merced

 

 

 

 

 


CONFERENCE DATE AND LOCATION


Friday, APRIL 22 and Saturday, APRIL 23, 2011

All presentations will be held at the Chancellor’s Conference Room (Kolligian Library 232)


Supported by UC Merced’s Center for Research in the Humanities and Arts

and hosted by the University of California, Merced (Merced, California)

 

 

REGISTRATION

Before MARCH 1, 2011:

Professors and Lecturers: $80    Graduate Students: $50

After MARCH 1, 2011:

Professors and Lecturers: $100     Graduate Students: $70

 

Please send a check signed to UC REGENTS to the following address:

Ignacio López-Calvo, Ph.D.
               Professor of Latin American Literature,
                     Chair of the World Cultures Graduate Group
                          School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts

     University of California, Merced

                                                 5200 North Lake Road

                                                 Merced, CA 95343

 

DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSION OF PAPERS

Preference will be given to proposals submitted by MARCH 1, 2011,

 

 

 

KEYNOTE SPEAKER

De cerca nadie es normal.

¿Cómo reporto y escribo mis perfiles?

Julio Villanueva Chang is widely considered one of the best Spanish-language chroniclers. He is    the author of the collections of chronicles Mariposas y murciélagos: crónicas y perfiles (Butterflies and Bats: Chronicles and Profiles, 1999) and Elogios Criminales (Criminal Praise, 2008).


Villanueva Chang has lectured at several institutions, including Harvard, Yale, Columbia University, and the University of Barcelona, has won the Interamerican Press Association Award (IAPA) in feature writing, and is the founder and director of the magazine Etiqueta Negra, widely considered one of the best literary and intellectual publications in Latin America. He was born in Lima, where he still lives, and studied Education at the Universidad Mayor de San Marcos. He currently teaches a workshop on chronicle writing and literary journalism at the Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas (UPC). His texts have appeared in several newspapers and journals in Spain and Latin America, including El País, La Vanguardia, La Nación, Página 12 Reforma, Gatopardo, El Malpensante, Vogue, Marie Claire, Letras Libres, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and World Literature Today. Each Sunday, he publishes a column titled “Horóscopo chino” (Chinese Horoscope) in the Spanish journal Público. He has published an anthology of his profiles titled Elogios Criminales (Random House Mondadori, Mexico) and a Collection of chronicles titled Mariposas y murciélagos (UPC, Lima). The Conference of Digital Journalism of Spain published Un día con Julio Villanueva Chang, with his experiences as an editor. Villanueva Chang has a B.A. in Pedagogy from the Universidad Mayor de San Marcos and teaches at the Fundación Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano, presided by Gabriel García Márquez.

 

 

 

 

2nd KEYNOTE SPEAKER

Orientalism and Beyond:

Subverting Hierarchies/Re-membering Ourselves through Narratives and Images

Roshni Rustomji-Kerns (Ph.D., U of California-Berkeley), Professor Emerita at Sonoma State University and Visiting Scholar at the Center for Latin American Studies, Stanford University (1996-1998). Born in India and educated in India, Pakistan, Lebanon, Mexico, and the United States, she is the coeditor of Blood into Ink: South Asian and Middle Eastern Women Write War (Westview, 1994) and the editor of Living in America: Fiction and Poetry by South Asian American Writers (Westview, 1995) and The Geography of Encounters: People of Asian Descent in the Americas (Rowman & Littlefield, 1999).   Rustomji-Kerns's short stories have been included in the anthologies Our Feet Walk the Sky: Women of the South Asian Diaspora (Aunt Lute Press, 1993), Her Mother's Ashes and Other Stories (Vol. I and II), and Contours of the Heart: South Asians Map North America (1996). She is also the author of the novel The Braided Tongue

 

 

SCOPE


The conference will focus on the different interpretations of Orientalism (roughly, the image and stereotypes of the Near and Far East in the Western world) that originated after the publication of

Edward Said's seminal work Orientalism and with the opposite version of reading the “Other”: Occidentalism. It will also deal with the cultural production written by and about Asians and Arabs in the Americas and the Hispanic world in general (including Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain, the Philippines, and Equatorial Guinea). Se aceptan comunicaciones sobre todas las disciplinas en inglés o español (aunque se prefiere que se lean en inglés).


TOPICS

Possible topics include the following:

  1. Can we speak about orientalist discourse when the exoticist gaze comes from formerly colonized countries?
  2. Can a text be considered orientalist if it exoticizes the other without an obvious idealization of

     self?

  1. Can we talk about orientalism when dealing with non-eastern cultures and peoples?
  2. How can strategic self-orientalization be used for economic or political profit?
  3. Is the “Orient” still helping Europe and the Western Hemisphere to define themselves?
  4. Orientalism, Occidentalism, strategic Orientalism, and self-orientalization
  5. How can strategic self-orientalization be used for economic or political profit?
  6. Is the “Orient” still helping Europe and the Western Hemisphere to define themselves?
  7. Orientalism, strategic Orientalism, and self-orientalization
  8. Occidentalism
  9. Asianness and Arabness in the Americas and the Hispanic world
  10. "Cooleism"
  11. Asian and Arab literature and culture in the Americas
  12. Asian and Arab characters in Western literature
  13. Nationalisms and the Asian or Arab as the "Other"
  14. Japonisme in literature, film, and other types of cultural production
  15. Asian and Arab testimonials, memoirs, and autobiographies in the Americas and the Hispanic World
  16. Asian and Arab women in the Americas and the Hispanic world and their representation
  17. José Rizal and other Spanish-language Filipino Authors
  18. Asian/Arab transculturation, hybridity, and assimilation in the Western World
  19. Erasure and misrepresentation of Asians and Arabs in Western cultural production
  20. Asian and Arab religiosity and "witchcraft" in the Americas
  21. White supremacy and Asians/Arabs in the Americas and the Hispanic world
  22. Chinatowns in the Americas
  23. “The Orient” in Travel Literature
  24. Performing, Reading, and Writing “the Orient”
  25. Feminization of “the Orient” and “t