Submission Deadline | September 19, 2022
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We are excited to support the following three panels for possible inclusion at the 2023 AAAS conference:
- Hidden Histories of Migration in Global Asias: Rethinking Sustainable Publics and Envisioning Change | Kavita Daiya, kdaiya@gwu.edu
- The Orientalist Complex and Public Imagination in the Age of Global Contemporary Art | Nina Horisaki-Christens, ajh2187@columbia.edu & Chaeeun Lee, clee4@gradcenter.cuny.edu
- Relational Methodologies of Global Asias Cultural Production: (Re)envisioning Social Justice and Accountability | Kylie Ching, kmching@uci.edu
Submit 250-word abstracts and 2-page CVs to organizers by September 19, 2022. Please find the individual panel statements below. These panels will be submitted for the in-person AAAS conference in Long Beach, CA, April 6–9, 2023.
Hidden Histories of Migration in Global Asias: Rethinking Sustainable Publics and Envisioning Change
Kavita Daiya, kdaiya@gwu.edu
This panel invites papers from a range of humanities and humanistic social sciences that illuminate the diverse, hidden histories of transnational Asian migration circuits after WWII. New scholarship across the disciplines has illuminated transnational Asian displacement and migration practices in ways that challenge hegemonic ideas about racialized citizenship, the state, and belonging. Further, a Global Asias approach across the disciplines interrogates conventional geopolitical frames and recasts our received understanding of the borders and boundaries of Asia, Asian America, and the Asian diaspora; this opens up new possibilities, both in the academy as well as in activist praxis, for creating new counterpublics of engagement and resistance toward sustainable change/justice.
Anchored in this Global Asias approach, this panel highlights new and interdisciplinary research that critically engages with the neglected histories and experiences of transnational Asian migration since WWII. The panel welcomes papers that consider transnational Asian migration and movement in all their complexity, with attention to how a Global Asias approach generates new critical insights about histories (individual, state, and collective), identities, and counterpublics that have otherwise been obscured.
Whether considering inter-Asia immigration, or intercontinental circuits of Asian migration to/through Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, and North America, papers attentive to the role of race, gender, and sexuality are especially welcome. Topics considered can include but are not limited to labor and family immigration, memory and war, refugees and asylum, the carceral state and militarized borders, ecological displacement and climate change, social justice struggles, geopolitical conflict, capital and globalization, among others. Drawing upon a fruitful engagement with the conceptual framework of Global Asias to re-envision sustainable change and justice, the panel gathers papers that center an intersectional approach to hitherto neglected transnational Asian migration stories. This interdisciplinary engagement with Asian movement and transit, we hope and contend, offers new, aspirational ways to reimagine activism, identity, belonging, and collective struggle today.
The Orientalist Complex and Public Imagination in the Age of Global Contemporary Art
Nina Horisaki-Christens, ajh2187@columbia.edu & Chaeeun Lee, clee4@gradcenter.cuny.edu
Even as the orientalist and colonialist roots of institutional art continue to inform how museums, biennials, and art markets frame cultural production, theoretical tools for addressing contemporary dynamics of orientalism have multiplied in recent years: techno-orientalism, re-orientalization, transorientalism, afro-orientalism, ornamentalism, and glorientalism. As events like Documenta 15 and The Asia Forum for Contemporary Art launch in Venice demonstrate, contemporary art discourse is beginning to engage deeply with the ways such orientalist complexes structure our institutional forms and the publics they engender.
Reckoning with the historical and contemporary forms of orientalism remains critical given the proliferation of Asian diasporic communities in the wake of WWII and Cold War violence, as well as the economic power of East Asia post-1980. Furthermore, the rise in anti-Asian hate in response to the COVID-19 crisis shows how its impact continues to shape public consciousness in our so-called global era. Using a Global Asias approach that brings area and ethnic studies into dialogue to examine the “global” aspirations of contemporary art, this panel seeks presentations addressing the dynamics and complexities of orientalism in art and art institutions. We welcome papers that address the following questions: How do shifting forms of orientalism color the way that art from Asia and the Asian diaspora is analyzed, juxtaposed, and presented? How have individual artists and communities navigated orientalist paradigms? And how does an in-depth consideration of social transformations in Asian countries and diasporic communities, including inter-racial, international, gendered, and queer formations, complicate the discourse of orientalism in art?
The Relational Methodologies of Global Asias Cultural Production: (Re)envisioning Social Justice and Accountability
Kylie Ching, kmching@uci.edu
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the rise of anti-Asian violence served as a call to action for many artists in the US and globally. Critically addressing anti-Asian racism, however, cannot be limited to exceptionalizing the Asian experience, as artists, creatives, and scholars must sustain intersectional approaches to dismantling oppressive systems, such as those that reproduce logics of anti-Blackness and the dispossession of Indigenous lands. This panel explores art and creative practices across temporal, spatial, and media boundaries that center relational methodologies to (re)envision forms of social justice and accountability. How do cultural productions respond to contemporary and historical moments of racialized violence to foster collective modes of engagement? How do such works and their creators sustain conversations, scholarship, and action across multiple publics and counterpublics?
To cultivate this conversation, this panel holds in tension the fluidity and contestation between the categories of Asian/American, Asian diasporic, and Asian art to address such concerns. More specifically, how might utilizing a Global Asias approach decenter a nation-based understanding of art history and cultural studies? Making visible circuits of encounter across global sites of production and belonging, this panel considers how creative works imagine and encourage engagement across communities by invoking the multisensorial or by using new media, among many strategies. We invite scholars across disciplines (whether in Art History, New Media Studies, Anthropology, Literature, and associated fields) to interrogate how cultural productions make visible the intimate entanglements of settler colonialism, imperialism, militarism, xenophobia, and other nexuses of oppression. We welcome papers on the role of the scholar in the interpretation of cultural productions, the interrogation of historiography and narrative formation, art and activism, social media, public murals and art, and pandemic art exhibitions, among other topics.
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