Program Newsletter

The 2007 Symposium on America's Asia, Asia's America

The 2007 symposium call for papers

The 2007 symposium on America's Asia, Asia's America

Held from April 12 to 13, 2007, the Comparative Literature Symposium on America’s Asia, Asia’s America was a success. Over thirty faculty members and graduate students presented at the symposium and they represented institutions of higher education from across the region, the nation, and the globe.

The panels focused on issues such as “Immigration, Representation, and American Racial Politics,” “Space Reconfiguration,” "Representing Asia and America," "Literature, Ideology, and Rhetoric," “Rethinking the Postcolonial,” "The Vietnam War, the American War," "Rereading Asian American Literature in the Twenty-first Century," and "Re-imagine Asia, Re-imagine America." The average panel attracted about 30 Texas Tech faculty members and students.

Our keynote speakers, Dr. Sheldon Lu from the University of California at Davis, Dr. Sau-ling Cynthia Wong from the University of California at Berkeley, and Dr. Rob Wilson from the University of California at Santa Cruz, delivered lectures on “Transnational Asian Cinema,” “Cultural Long-Distance Nationalism,”  and “Asia/Pacific as Oceania.” The average keynote lecture had a turn-out of 60 faculty members and students from Texas Tech and symposium participants from institutions of higher education from the United States and the overseas. 

We had a special undergraduate panel on "Rereading Asian American Literature in the Twenty-first Century" from Texas Tech University. Melanie Harlan and Courtney Wortham offered provocative readings of David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly. Jeremy Jones discussed Frank Chin's trope of marketplace, Vanessa Dominguez explored U.S. imperialism in Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters, and Megan Selaiden investigated the difference between Asians and Asian Americans in R. A. Sasaki's short story, "First Love."

In addition to the academic exchanges, we had a film screening, visited the Vietnam Archives, and toured the campus. We also sold symposium T-shirts during the two days. Many symposium attendants spoke well of these activities and some even wanted to come back for further research at the Vietnam Archives and participation in our future academic conferences.