Trajectories, institutions, and re-locations: a conversation on Inter-Asia outside Asia
Christopher LEE, Kuan-Hsing CHEN, Sneja GUNEW, Michelle O’BRIEN, and Audrey YUE (Transcribed by Rusaba Alam)
ABSTRACT This conversation explores the resonances of the inter-Asia project outside the geographical boundaries of Asia. The participants, who represent diverse national, institutional, and professional experiences, discuss the following topics: how Asia and the inter-Asia project has affected their intellectual trajectories; navigating academic institutions and formations; the changing meaning of diaspora and migration and their effects on language and communication; and the relationship between the academy and social movements. Particular attention is paid to reframing Australia and Canada from an inter-Asia perspective.
KEYWORDS: Academic training; professional development; academic fields and institutions; diaspora; migration; mother tongue; social movements; postcolonial studies; ethnic studies; inter-referencing; critical theory
Notes on panelists
Christopher Lee is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies Program at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of The Semblance of Identity: Aesthetic Mediation in Asian American Literature (Stanford University Press, 2012). He recently co-edited special issues of Canadian Literature (“Asian Canadian Critique Beyond the Nation”) and Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas (“Beyond Canada 150: Asian Canadian Visual Cultures”). He is currently Associate Editor of American Quarterly.
Chen Kuan-Hsing is co-executive editor of the journals Inter-AsiaCultural Studies: Movements and Renjian Thought Review.
Sneja Gunew (FRSC) is Professor Emerita of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of British Columbia, Canada. She has published widely on multicultural, postcolonial and feminist critical theory and is the author of Framing Marginality: Multicultural Literary Studies (1994) and Haunted Nations: The Colonial Dimensions of Multiculturalisms (2004). She has also edited and co-edited eleven books. Her most recent book is titled: Post-Multicultural Writers as Cosmopolitan Mediators (2017).
Michelle O’Brien is Assistant Professor in the English Department at Central Washington University, where she is also affiliated with the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program and Africana and Black Studies Minor. Her teaching and research focuses on Asian North American and Asian diasporic literatures and theory, multiculturalism, comparative raciality, and transpacific studies. She is currently completing a manuscript that examines the connections between multicultural/multiracial formations in Canada, Singapore, and Malaysia; this project focuses on how social organization across these subsites of Empire was transformed by the same racial logic that circulated throughout the colonial world and is reiterated in their multicultural structures. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Postcolonial Text, Asiatic, New Global Studies, and The Comparatist.
Audrey Yue is Professor of Media, Culture and Critical Theory, Head of the Department of Communications and New Media, and Convenor of the Cultural Studies in Asia Programme at the National University of Singapore.
Notes on transcriber
Rusaba Alam is a writer, cultural worker, and PhD student in English Literature at the University of British Columbia. She lives and works in Vancouver on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh nations.