12th Biennial Symposium on Literatures & Cultures of Asia Pacific Region

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November 1, 2007

The 12th Biennial Symposium on the Literatures and Cultures of the Asia Pacific Region

November 22-24, 2007
Department of English and Comparative Literature
University of the Philippines

The Asia Pacific region has been the site of the enthusiastic production of literature and other cultural texts for the last fifty years but many of these productions have so far been just a token presence in the anthologies and scholarship outside the region. Even within the region, knowledge of each other's literatures and cultures is minimal. Current theories have helped address the imbalance by privileging “ Third World ” or “postcolonial” texts, by exposing processes of containment, co-optation and mediation, and by suggesting solutions such as retrieval, negotiation and recuperation.

REWOR(L)DINGS: CONTESTATIONS AND RECONFIGURATIONS IN THE LITERATURES AND CULTURES OF THE ASIA PACIFIC REGION seeks to up the ante by questioning the paradigms that have forced the writer and scholar in this region to retrieve, negotiate and recuperate, contesting the worlding that has relegated the region to the margins. It will explore possibilities of re-mapping culture so that no center has single dominance, and every center retains a fidelity to its people's history and culture without negating a colonial past or current global imperatives.

Specifically, the conference will explore breaking away from popular paradigms for the creation and analysis of literature and culture. It will review concepts ubiquitously present in current discourse—globalization, for instance, and postcoloniality with its panoply of accompanying terms, such as hybridity, diaspora, dialogic. It will invite new discourses that promote reconfigurations and new visionings, e.g. the creation of “moving”/ “untranslatable” identities, translation as a globalizing force. It will cite regional realities that should inform this new cartography and the ways by which the writers, especially those in the “new” genres, have responded to them. It will encourage the creative writers to share their process of resolving contradictions between art and subjectivity. Writers, translators and scholars will be expected to draw from traditions and currrents in their cultures, and through the power of the word and the image, re-world this region's literature and culture.

Topics that will be of interest are the following:

• Literary Theory: Windows from the Pacific
• Europe-Asia: Dis/Connections
• Re- Searching Language and Literature: Methods of Research
• In/Trans-nation: Issues of Translation
• The Past in Present: Myths and Folklore in Literature
• Gendering the Word: Gender and Literature from Another Perspective
• Narratives of Self-Fashioning
• Literary Fetish(es)
• Borders and Borderland Cultural Landscapes and Mindscapes
• “Untranslatable”/”Moving” Identities
• Asia-Pacific Literature in the Global Market
• Memory and Narratives of Terror and Displacement
• The Word in/and Cyberspace: Re-imagining the self in cyber community
• English and the Linguistic Realities of the Asia Pacific Writer
• The “New Genres”
• Children's Literature: Stirrings and Movements
• Speculative Fiction
• Genre Fiction
• What's Chic about Chick Lit?
• The Literary Blog
• The New Gothic Literature
• Literature and Anime
• Narratives of the Game/Gaming (Video games storylines)

The network's conferences usually allow only a minimum number of non-paper readers to participate. For this symposium, a considerable number of non-paper readers will be invited to participate in the conference. These participants will come from various local tertiary institutions which may benefit from an international conference on Asia Pacific literatures and cultures.

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