CFP for ACLA 2021 seminar: Asia and Revivalist Ireland: Postcolonial, Transcultural and Modernist reciprocal literary exchanges

CFP for ACLA 2021 seminar: Asia and Revivalist Ireland: Postcolonial, Transcultural and Modernist reciprocal literary exchanges

Organizer: Simone O Malley Sutton

Co-Organizer: Ji Hyea Hwang

Asia and Revivalist Ireland exchanged reciprocal Postcolonial, Transcultural and Modernist literary models in the twentieth-century as part of our shared global history. New literary movements arose in postcolonized peripheries in China, Japan, Korea, India and Ireland, to challenge constructions of colonial and capitalist modernity from the imperial centers. Innovative variations of postcolonized modernism and transcultural exchange emerged to pose alternative imaginings on how to be Asian and modern, or Irish and modern in a postcolonized setting. Irish Revivalists provided an alternative route to the modern for nascent modern Asian literary movements, one that was counter-utopian, and bypassed assumptions on constructions of race that saturated discourses in literatures from the imperial center. New trends in comparative Asian Studies and Irish Studies re-examine mutual literary connections between China and Ireland, Japan and Ireland, Korea and Ireland and India and Ireland, and how Asian influences circled back to inform the Irish Revivalists. From these exchanges questions arise - on how the New Modernist Canon can expand to include planetary modernisms, whether the Postcolonial condition and Modernism are imbricated or overlap, and how the postcolonial condition contributed to the urgent modernist need to ‘make it new’. We welcome all papers that discuss the related matters of Postcolonialism and Modernism and offer other comparative pairings between Asia and Ireland.

Please submit your abstract through the ACLA website (acla.org).