Call for Papers:
Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association (RMMLA) Convention 2023 in
Denver, Colorado, October 11-14, 2023
Asian Comparative Literature and Film Session
Retelling Trauma and Imagining Catastrophe in the Modern Asian World
Images and narratives of potential catastrophes and traumatic aftermaths have taken hold
of today’s popular imagination in our modern culture. Inspired by Eva Horn’s quest in The
Future as Catastrophe, our panel invites examinations of recollections of the past’s traumas and
fantasies of the future’s catastrophes in modern Asian literature, film, and culture. We invite
interdisciplinary perspectives from memory studies, gender studies, posthumanism, ecocriticism,
trauma studies, and other disciplines to offer scientific, political, and fictional depictions of
trauma and catastrophes in modern Asia. We aim to investigate how traumatic memories
rigorously shape the narrative of the past and reconstruct present reality through mass media
productions. We also seek to explore how the imagination of future disasters can engage with our
present and explore, as well as create alternative realities. We intend to decipher the collective
remembrance of the past and disastrous fantasies of the future to negotiate a platform in the
present where we are able to interpret and perceive our living reality in modern Asia from a more
knowledgeable vision and simulate an open future with rationality, sympathy, and solidarity.
Possible topics include but are not limited to:
Trauma studies
Narrative studies
War and memory studies
Gender and memory studies
Science fiction studies
Reproduction and futurism
Ecocritical studies
Queer studies
Posthumanism
World literature
If interested, please send a 300-word abstract and a brief bio to Géraldine Fiss at gfiss@ucsd.edu
and Wendy Sun sunxiaox@grinnell.edu by 1 April 2023.
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