Oceans and Empires: Sinophone Crossroads in Global Space and Time

The 2nd Biennial Conference of the Society of Sinophone Studies

5/12—5/14/2023

Penn State University

Call for Papers

The Sinophone world that is invigorated by “multisensory protests” and “ally-ship” (the focus of the 2021 conference) also constantly reinvents its pasts as it manufactures imaginaries of futurity through interactions with – sometimes in contradistinction to – other societies and communities and the world at large. As we adhere to the ethical investment and political sensitivity inherent to Sinophone studies as an intellectual formation, we must reflect upon how our conceptual and political categories, as well as our geographies, are pre-determined historically. The histories of empire and global geopolitics necessarily have left an imprint on existing social and cultural forms, legitimizing and making legible the connectivity between some of them while ostracizing and obscuring others. Likewise, human connections and relationality have been shaped by patterns of the flows of idea and movement of people across the globe even as we explore new pathways across the Sinophone spaces. How, then, does the Sinophone afford a useful lens for the critical scrutiny of historical crossroads, hence materializing the potential of renewal? How might we conceptualize spatial crossroads across a palimpsest of temporalities? How does the Sinophone offer an interdisciplinary platform to explore its conjunctions with empire studies, borderland studies, oceanic studies, indigeneity studies, race and ethnicity studies, gender studies, postcolonial and decolonial studies? How might the Sinophone shift the conventional focus on the continent, and through a reorientation to the seas, foster alternative imaginaries of the human world? This conference invites papers that situate contemporary Sinophone discussions in historical and interdisciplinary nexus of various forms. We are interested in papers that explore these themes, including—but not limited to—the questions:

How do the overlapping histories of empire and nation-state, both Chinese and non-Chinese, inform the contemporary geography and geopolitics of the Sinophone world? How do the movements of different populations, as settlers, colonialists, natives, or indigenous peoples engage with questions of power and territoriality? How do they conform to or challenge these imperial or inter-imperial geographies?
How do cultural infrastructures –language for one, but certainly beyond language – mediate the management of center and periphery, boundary and crossing? How does intermediality afford a lens to engage with intertwined environmental and geopolitical concerns beyond conventional conceptualizations of the nation and the region?
How do empires’ expansions foster historical formations of dissent, localism, trans-local and transnational alliances?
How do interdisciplinary forms of inquiry from literary and cultural studies, historical sociology or anthropology, linguistics, and other fields intersect in the studies of the Sinophone?
How does the Sinophone, an intellectual formation inspired by notions of the archipelagic and the relational, reconfigure landed or land-based understandings of power, culture, and history?
How does the Sinophone intersect with the “blue humanities,” and what critical potential arises from such a critical confluence?
How can the ocean figure as a source of epistemological innovation, to interrogate our own critical toolkit and vocabularies, and hence build new alliances for the Sinophone—such as with Indigenous Studies and Ethnic Studies?
How does the oceanic foreground the ecocritical impulses of the Sinophone?

The conference will be held in person at Penn State, University Park, on May 12-14, 2023, with a remote component to accommodate attendees who are unable to physically travel to the conference. Please submit an abstract (no more than 300 words) and short bio (no more than 100 words) via this Google Form by August 31, 2022. If you are unable to access the Google Form, please submit your abstract and bio by emailing admin@sinophonestudies.org

This conference will be hosted by the Department of Asian Studies of Penn State University (University Park, Pennsylvania), with additional support from the Department of Comparative Literature, PSU. The Asian Studies Department of Penn State is profoundly interdisciplinary, ranging across the humanities and social sciences. The Department of Asian Studies at Penn State is home to the Global Asias Initiative and the journal Verge: Studies in Global Asias.

The Society of Sinophone Studies (3S) is an international, nonprofit scholarly society founded on May 4, 2019. Our main goal is to promote the study of Sinitic-language communities and cultures around the world. Through fostering communication across the humanities and social sciences, we encourage the development of new conceptual frameworks and methods that enable, on the one hand, the visibility of marginalized subjects and, on the other, the synergy with fields as diverse as (but not limited to) postcolonial studies, migration studies, ethnic studies, media studies, gender & queer studies, science studies, indigenous studies, and area studies. Membership in 3S is open to anyone with an interest in Sinophone studies and any regional, disciplinary, and topical expertise.

Members of the conference committee:

Shuang Shen (Penn State University)

Nicolai Volland (Penn State University)

Clara Iwasaki (University of Alberta)

Brian Bernards (University of Southern California)

Multisensory Dissent and Alliance Building:

The Inaugural Biennial Conference of the Society of Sinophone Studies

Link for all sessions except keynote: https://usc.zoom.us/j/99729974245

Keynote (register to receive Webinar link): https://usc.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_wlMzejilQoWoRyOSQ106hQ

*Conference attendance is restricted to members of the Society of Sinophone Studies: to register for your free membership https://www.sinophonestudies.org/membership

Please ensure your Zoom name matches the name under which you register.

Conference Theme & Overview

Multisensory Dissent and Alliance Building is the inaugural conference of the Society of Sinophone Studies (3S). The concept for the conference was motivated by increasing authoritarian and ethnic/race-based repression in key Sinophone sites around the world: the holding of democratic elections in Taiwan ROC in the face of PRC social media interference and disinformation campaigns; anti-extradition bill protests in Hong Kong SAR that were met with increasingly hostile state violence; the PRC’s intensified regime of surveillance and internment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang while enacting a new National Security Law for Hong Kong; and the flaring anti-Asian racism, rhetoric, and violence in the United States (under an administration perpetuating anti-immigrant policies and emboldening white supremacy) and the West, as well as anti-African actions taken in Guangzhou, amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Responding to these challenges, popular demonstrations against systemic racism and against authoritarianism grew stronger worldwide as they adapted to the “new normal” of engaging a “socially distanced” civil sphere. Recognizing that this rapidly changing reality cannot but influence our academic culture, this conference takes seriously the need to analyze, historicize, and theorize interconnected and creatively adaptive Sinophone expressions of dissent and alliance building across geopolitical boundaries. By mobilizing interarea, interdisciplinary, and cross-methodological perspectives on multisensory modes of expressing dissent and ally-ship across the Sinophone world (including Taiwan, Hong Kong, mainland China, Southeast Asia, North America, Africa, and Europe), our interdisciplinary conference seeks to generate new cross-disciplinary frameworks for understanding, interpreting, and amplifying the broader theoretical, methodological, and relational salience of such multisensory expressions.

The conference highlights perspectives that exceed or depart from the reductive discursive frameworks of liberal humanism vs. nationalist/racialist difference (i.e. pan-Chinese or East Asian exceptionalisms) that often dominate the lens through which Sinophone conditions are viewed. It also foregrounds research that includes but also goes beyond audiovisual sensoria to consider haptic, tactile, or kinetic perception (touch, taste, smell, etc.) or different (meta)physical states and activities (pain, disability, hallucination, exercise, dreaming, etc.). Key questions include: How might multisensory approaches to Sinophone conditions evoke novel or unintuitive intimacies or relations that bring other actors/agents into play, such as the transpacific, “other” Asias, the indigenous or minoritarian, or the non-Sinophone? How might a multisensory approach to Sinophone dissent and ally-ship transform Sinophone studies or other disciplinary conventions?

The conference features one keynote speech and six panels spread across three days.

Day 1: Thursday, April 22

16:20-16:45 PDT (19:20-19:45 EDT; Fri, Apr 23, 07:20-07:45 HKT)

Welcome and Opening Remarks

Brian Bernards (3S Program Director) and Howard Chiang (3S Chair)

Sonya Lee (Director, USC East Asian Studies Center)

Janet Hoskins (Co-Director, USC Center for Transpacific Studies)

17:00-18:30 PDT (20:00-21:30 EDT; Fri, Apr 23, 08:00-09:30 HKT)

Panel 1: Inter-Asia Migrant Labor, Literature, and Art

Nicholas Y. H. Wong (U of Hong Kong), “Staying Put or Running Away: Economic Migrants in Mahua Literature”
Myron Chun-chieh Tsao (National Chung Hsing U), “Translating in Coalition: Reading Yu-Ling Ku’s Our Stories: Migration and Labour in Taiwan as Storytelling of Healing”
Junting Huang (Cornell U), “Bordering ‘Domesticity’: Filipina Domestic Workers in Hong Kong’s Contemporary Art”

Discussant: Kun Xian Shen (U of California, Los Angeles)
- Moderator: Lily Wong (American U)

19:00-20:30 PDT (22:00-23:30 EDT; Fri, Apr 23, 10:00-11:30 HKT)

Panel 2: Technologies of Protest, Popular Media, Countercultural Lyrics

Aubrey Tang (Chapman U), “Focalizing the E-Sinophone Body through Reversed Front”
Nathanel Amar (CEFC Taipei), “Sinophone Music and Social Movements, 1989-2019”
Lillian Ngan (U of Southern California), “The Logic of Racial Misrecognition: Are the Hong Kong Protests seen as a Vietnamese Threat?”

Discussant: Ka Lee Wong (U of Southern California)
- Moderator: Howard Chiang (U of California, Davis)

Day 2: Friday, April 23, 2021

13:00-14:30 PDT (16:00-17:30 EDT; Sat, Apr 24, 04:00-05:30 HKT)

Inaugural Keynote: Shu-mei Shih, “Major and Minor Commons in Empire”

Shu-mei Shih is American Comparative Literature Association President (as of April 12, 2021)

and Edward W. Said Professor of Comparative Literature, Asian Languages and Cultures,

and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles

17:00-18:45 PDT (20:00-21:45 EDT; Sat, Apr 24, 08:00-09:45 HKT)

Panel 3: The Cold War Legacies of Global South Sinophone Alliances

Shuang Shen (Penn State U), “Refiguring Empires from the Sinophone South”
Derek Sheridan (Academia Sinica), “The Limits of Solidarity: Translating ‘Chinese Imperialism’ Between Sinophone and African Contexts”
Jessica Siu-yin Yeung (SOAS London), “Hong Kong Literature and the Taiwanese Encounter: Literary Magazines, Popular Literature, and Shih Shu-ching’s Hong Kong Stories”
Mark McConaghy (National Sun Yat-sen U), “The Historical Afterlives of Sinophone Socialism: Yang Kehuang, Xie Xuehong, and Gu Ruiyun in Cross-Straits Historical Memory”

Discussant: Sunyoung Park (U of Southern California)
- Moderator: E.K. Tan (Stony Brook U)

19:00-20:30 PDT (22:00-23:30 EDT; Sat, Apr 24, 10:00-11:30 HKT)

Panel 4: Translingual Postcoloniality and Intersectional Alliance

Desmond Hok-Man Sham (National Chiao Tung U), “Revisiting ‘Between Colonizers’: In Search of an Adequate Postcolonial Theory for Hong Kong”
Ting Fai Yu (Monash U Malaysia), “The Politics of Language in Queer Sinophone Malaysia”
Alvin K. Wong (U of Hong Kong), “Towards a Queer Feminist Sense Method: Protest and the Politics of Intersectionality in Hong Kong”

Discussant: Hangping Xu (U of California, Santa Barbara)
- Moderator: Brian Bernards (U of Southern California)

Day 3: Sat, April 24, 2021

13:00-14:30 PDT (16:00-17:30 EDT; Sun, Apr 25, 04:00-05:30 HKT)

Panel 5: Transpacific Literary, Documentary, and Bio-Imperial Encounters

Liang Luo (U of Kentucky), “A Sinophone Documentary by a Dutch Filmmaker on the Great Leap Forward?”
Jih-fei Cheng (Scripps College), “Cold Blood: Translations and Transmissions of Race/Ethnicity across the United States and the People’s Republic of China”
Clara Iwasaki (U of Alberta), “A Place for Everyone and Everyone in their Place: North American Nikkei through the Eyes of Lao She and Helena Kuo”

Discussant: Li-Ping Chen (U of Southern California)
- Moderator: Rebecca Ehrenwirth (U of Applied Sciences/SDI Munich)

17:00-18:45 PDT (20:00-21:45 EDT; Sun, Apr 25, 08:00-09:45 HKT)

Panel 6: Body Politics, Cinema, Ecology, Movement

Emily Wilcox (William & Mary), “Ethnic Presence and Ethnic Absence: Qemberxanim’s Bodily Discourse and the Making of ‘Uyghur Dance’”
Ta-wei Chi (National Chengchi U), “Cripping Sinophone Cinema: Recognition of the Bare Lives in Singapore”
Zizi Li (U of California, Los Angeles), “Negotiating in Chaos: Amdo Tibetan Mediascape and Landscape in Pema Tseden’s Tharlo”
Kyle Shernuk (Yale U), “Being-With and Bodpa Epistemology: Ethnicized Environmental Practices in Lhaze’s Digital Videography”

Discussant: Jenny Chio (U of Southern California)
- Moderator: E.K. Tan (Stony Brook U)

19:00-20:00 PDT (22:00-23:00 EDT; Sun, Apr 25, 10:00-11:00 HKT)

Post-Conference Chat & Virtual Cocktail Hour (Facilitated by SSS Board)