FRIDAY, APRIL 22
Swift Hall, 3rd Floor Lecture Hall, 1025 E. 58th Street, Chicago, IL 60637

2:30 - 3:00 pm
Introductions with Coffee and Refreshments

3:00 - 5:00 pm
Panel 1 - Legibility, Legitimacy, Intimacy: Reading Ethnic Identity in Transnational Contexts

5:15 - 6:15 pm
Keynote Speech 1 - "What Is an Asian Diaspora?" by Timothy Yu (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

SATURDAY, APRIL 23
Logan Center for the Arts, Performace Penthouse 901, 915 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637

9:30 - 10:00 am
Introductions with Breakfast

10:00 - 12:00 pm
Panel 2 - Between, Through, and Across: Transmedial Modes and Methods

12:00 - 1:00 pm
Lunch

1:00 - 3:00 pm
Panel 3 - On Their Own Terms: Dialogues and Creative Spaces Between Languages

3:00 - 3:30 pm
Coffee and Refreshments

3:30 - 4:30 pm
Keynote Speech 2 - "No Translation Necessary? Liberal Democracy’s Monolingualizing Impact in Our Time" by Rey Chow (Duke University)

“Legibility, Legitimacy, Intimacy: Reading Ethnic Identity in Transnational Contexts” (3 - 5 p.m., Friday, April 22) considers the tensions that develop in the process of establishing racial and/or national identity within cultural displacement or destabilized social orders. Ranging from the early 20th century to contemporary times, the discussions in this panel demonstrate that questions of belonging, community, desirability, and/or visibility continue to be complicated by migrant or border-crossing identities. Using the musical term “transposition” as a creative tactic, Angie Chau illustrates the ways the figure of the modern Chinese artist in 1920s-40s Paris translated Chinese culture for a global viewership. Andre Haag performs an intertextual investigation of recorded paranoia about ethnic passing in the Japanese Empire and sheds light on the precarious position of Koreans as both “Japanese” imperial subjects and “treacherous” imposters disguising themselves as true “mainlanders.” Nick Ogonek analyzes Takahashi Mutsuo’s novella Legend of a Holy Place (1972) as a critique of New York City as a cosmopolitan “gay heaven” where race and white supremacy determine individuals’ levels of sexual liberation and worth. Emily Jungmin Yoon examines Kim Hyesoon’s self-described “diasporic” cultural existence of women poets in South Korea and Kim’s place in the Anglophone literary world, especially following the international success of her collection Autobiography of Death (2016).

Discussant: Paola Iovene (University of Chicago)

• “Paris and the Art of Transposition” by Angie Chau (University of Victoria)
• “Passing, Paranoia, and the Korean Problem in Narratives of the Japanese Colonial Empire” by Andre Haag (University of Hawai'i at Mānoa)
• “Forty Days in the City of Sin: Liberation and Apocalypse in Takahashi Mutsuo’s Legend of a Holy Place” by Nick Ogonek (University of Chicago)
• “A Place Where Everything Shifts: Kim Hyesoon’s ‘Diasporic’ Poetry” by Emily Jungmin Yoon (University of Chicago)

“Between, Through, and Across: Transmedial Modes and Methods” (10 a.m. - 12 p.m., Saturday, April 23) reflects on the potential for transmedial models of cultural production to generate new approaches to modern and contemporary literature across East Asia. Yoon Jeong Oh examines the critical dialogues between translingual literatures and transmedial arts through the “transmedial translations” of colonial-era Korean writer Yi Sang’s work from self-translated bilingual writing to contemporary multimedia presentation. Susan Dan Su investigates the Tibetan-language literature website Chömé, which drew on print and online literature to create a Tibetan cultural space that was simultaneously facilitated and hindered by state-led infrastructural development and cultural management policies. Ethan Waddell considers the migration of language and poetic form from recorded sound to printed text through the dissemination of the trot song “Camelia girl” (1964) by Yi Mi-ja into the literary imagination of South Korean writers. Renren Yang analyzes the work and techniques of celebrity novelist, blogger, and film director Han Han to demonstrate the centrality of both printed pages and electronic screens in Han Han's celebrity as well as in his disruption of the “cult of mobility, connectivity, and portability” in contemporary China.

Discussant: Hoyt Long (University of Chicago)

• “Dialogic Space of Translation: From Translingual Poetry of Colonial Korea to Contemporary Transmedial Arts” by Yoon Jeong Oh (New York University)
• “The New Era of Digital and Print: The Third Generation’s Transmedial Interventions into China’s Cultural Regime” by Susan Dan Su (University of Chicago)
• “The Elegiac Imagination: Tracing Yi Mi-ja and Trot through Literature” by Ethan Waddell (University of Chicago)
• “From Printed Pages to Electronic Screens: Han Han’s Lyricism and Cynicism” by Renren Yang (University of British Columbia)

The papers in “On Their Own Terms: Dialogues and Creative Spaces Between Languages” (1 - 3 p.m., Saturday, April 23) read across languages to illuminate new modes of self-expression and cultural negotiations that emerge from transnational relations and information flows. Carl E. Kubler interprets the transcriptions and translations in 18th- and 19th-century Chinese-English and Chinese-Portuguese commercial handbooks as early documentations of practical concerns and translingual communication methods that arise in a globalizing economy. Evelyn Shih compares nonsense literature by Korean and Taiwanese writers in the 1930s and their varying practices of the genre that both convey and defy their colonial realities. Timothy Thurston scrutinizes translational avenues for Tibetans to articulate the urgency of language and culture preservation, amidst new discourses and terms produced by translations of Chinese State policies as well as Western literature and other foreign texts. Yinzhi (Celia) Xu interrogates the poetic utility of the unraveling scroll as a contemporary composition device by reading the American poet A. R. Ammons’ Tape for the Turn of the Year (1965) alongside the Chinese poet Zhai Yongming’s Following Huang Gongwang in Touring the Fuchun Mountains (2015).

Discussant: Haun Saussy (University of Chicago)

• “Transcription and Translation in Historical Perspective: Hybrid Texts from Chinese Contact Zones” by Carl E. Kubler (University of Chicago)
• “Escaping Sense: Colonial Nonsense Literature in Korea and Taiwan” by Evelyn Shih (University of Colorado Boulder)
• “Translation in/of Cultural Sustainability: Thoughts and Experiences from a Collaboration in Tibet” by Timothy Thurston (University of Leeds)
• “Long Poems on Scrolls: A. R. Ammons and Zhai Yongming” by Yinzhi (Celia) Xu (University of Chicago)

*Asterisk next to name denotes virtual presenter

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
*Rey Chow (Duke University)
Timothy Yu (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

PANELISTS
Angie Chau (University of Victoria)
Andre Haag (University of Hawai'i at Mānoa)
Carl E. Kubler (University of Chicago)
Nick Ogonek (University of Chicago)
Yoon Jeong Oh (New York University)
*Evelyn Shih (University of Colorado Boulder)
Susan Dan Su (University of Chicago)
Timothy Thurston (University of Leeds)
Ethan Waddell (University of Chicago)
Yinzhi (Celia) Xu (University of Chicago)
Renren Yang (University of British Columbia)
Emily Jungmin Yoon (University of Chicago)

DISCUSSANTS
Paola Iovene (University of Chicago)
Hoyt Long (University of Chicago)
Haun Saussy (University of Chicago)

Literary Transversals is co-sponsored by the Franke Institute for the Humanities, the Association for Asian Studies Northeast Asia Council, the Korea Foundation, and the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Chicago with generous support from a Title VI National Resource Center Grant from the U.S. Department of Education.