Conference Information
Conference Schedule
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8:15-8:45 Breakfast, coffee and tea
8:45-9:00 Opening remarks: Janet Hoskins and Viet Thanh Nguyen
9-9:50 Keynote: Brenda Yeoh, “Transnationalism Studies, their Perspectives and Blindspots: The View from Asia”
9:50-10:50 Panel: Hung Cam Thai, “Special Money in the Vietnamese Diaspora” and Nadia Kim, “Race and (Neo)Imperialism Across the Pacific”
Respondent: Rhacel Salazar Parreñas
10:50-11:10 Break
11:10-12:00 Keynote: Laurie Sears, “Twenty-first Century Area Studies and Asian American Studies: Between Cosmopolitanism and Diaspora”
12:00-1:00 Lunch
1:00-2:00 Panel: Yujin Yaguchi, “The Transpacific Imaginary in Japan during WWII” and Lon Kurashige, “Japanese Immigration, American Internationalism, and the Origins of Civil Rights”
Respondent: Biao Xiang
2:00-2:50 Keynote: Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, “Where is America in the Philippine Diaspora?”
2:50-3:10 Break
3:10-4:10 Panel: John Carlos Rowe, “Post-Nationalism, the Pacific, and U.S. Literary Responses to Imperialism” and Akira Lippit, “Asian Transnational Cinema”
Respondent: Laurie Sears
4:10-5:00 Keynote: Biao Xiang, “The Pacific Paradox”
6:30-8:30 Dinner for presenters
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:30-9:00 Breakfast, coffee, and tea
9-9:50 Keynote: Heonik Kwon, “Two Color-Lines in Modern Asia-Pacific”
9:50-10:50 Panel: Tridib Banerjee with Surajit Chakravarty and Felicity Hwee-Hwa Chan, “Ethnoscapes in the Network Society: The Southeast Asian Communities of Los Angeles”
Respondent: Yen Le Espiritu
10:50-11:10 Break
11:10-12:00 Keynote: Amitava Kumar, “My Enemy, My Friend: Reports from the War on Terror”
12:00-1:00 Lunch
1:00-1:50 Panel: Panivong Norindr, “‘La parole filmée’ in Rithy Panh’s Documentary Films” and Boreth Ly, “Paradigm Shift: A Theoretical Apparatus for a Trans (national) and Global Visual Cultures of Southeast Asia”
Respondent: Heonik Kwon
1:50 -2:50 Panel: Yunte Huang, “Living Transpacifically”
Respondent: Amitava Kumar
2:50-3:10 Break
3:10-4:00 Keynote: Yen Le Espiritu, “Refugees and Refuge: Vietnam, the Philippines, and Guam”
4:00-5:00 Concluding panel Janet Hoskins and Viet Nguyen
6:30-8:30 Dinner for presenters
Conference Abstracts
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“Ethnoscapes in the Network Society: The Southeast Asian Communities of Los Angeles”
The Southern California region is home to many immigrant communities, with a significant number from across the Pacific. This paper explores the circumstances of the emerging landscapes of Trans-Pacific communities in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. The tenet of the paper is primarily conceptual and theoretical based on preliminary field observations of four relatively smaller diasporic communities: Thai Town in Hollywood and North Hollywood, Filipinotown in Echo Park, Little Cambodia in Long Beach, and Little Saigon in Westminster and Garden Grove, Orange County.
The paper begins with the concept of “ethnoscape” advanced by Appadurai (1990 and 1991) in the context of his discussion of the effects of globalization on our understanding of localities. This notion of ethnoscape – scenes of group identity – may include specific cultural expressions in the forms of religion, food, music, festivals, and sensory experiences. But as he conceded, the idea of ethnoscape remains somewhat open-ended with possibilities for alternative meanings and interpretations. Certainly, he was not trying to link the concept to the more commonplace sociological discussions of ethnic enclaves or ghettoes that have an extensive literature with distinct political implications.
In this paper we explore the locational, ecological, and spatial dimensions of “ethnoscapes” of four Southeast Asian ethnic communities using a theoretical framework that draws on the work of Lefebvre on the production of space (lived, perceived and conceived) and the work of Castells (1996) on the contemporary network society and its spaces of places and flows. We expect to conclude that in contrast to the larger and more established enclaves such as Chinatown, Koreatown and Little Tokyo, these smaller and newly-designated communities (though some have been around for a long time) exhibit a variety of spatial identities and urbanisms – polynucleated, symbiotic, nested, and rhizoid, for example – that defy established categories of ‘enclaves’ and ‘ghettoes.’ As they search for power, prominence and permanence these communities balance expression of identity with the needs of commerce, find anchors for the diffuse distribution of their members, negotiate internal social order, and create instances of “market-culturalism” (Chakravarty 2010). While embedded in the network society of globalization, they also seek ways to hook up with the institutions of the host network society. These ethnoscapes in many ways are provisional expressions of their search for identity and legitimacy.
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“Refugees and Refuge: Vietnam, the Philippines, and Guam”
A “crisis”—this is how most scholars and the media have approached the Vietnamese flight to the United States. Refugee camp studies exemplify this crisis model, as scholars repeatedly portray refugees as abject figures that suffer not only the trauma of forced departure but also the boredom, uncertainty, despair, and helplessness induced by camp life. This crisis model, which fixates on the refugees’ purported fragile psychosocial and emotional state, discursively constructs the Vietnamese as “passive, immobilized, and pathetic.” In so doing, it makes invisible the militarized nature of these refugee camps as well as U.S. imperialism in Asia. In this paper, I trace the refugee flight—in particular from Vietnam to the Philippines to Guam and then to the U.S., all of which routed the refugees through various U.S. military bases—in order to map out the history of U.S. military expansion into the Asia Pacific region, specifically to connect the histories of Vietnam to the Philippines and Guam. By focusing on the ways that these U.S. military bases double up as refugee camps, this paper calls attention to the constitutive nature of the concepts “refugee” and “refuge”—both of which emerge out of U.S. militarism. In addition, by focusing on Transpacific conflicts and war refugees, this paper shows how the world’s poor and displaced—rather than the world’s “flexible citizens”—are producing, and reformulating our understanding of, global social change.
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“Living Transpacifically”
This paper is a piece of descriptive and meditative prose, a recollection of the author’s earlier years of growing up in China, an experience profoundly shaped by the currents of transpacific flows, cross-cultural exchanges as intangible as radio signals, or as real as blood-soaked pages of pirated foreign books. It begins with my chance encounter, when I was eleven, with the Voice of America, a radio program that was illegal to listen to in China at the time. The U.S. State Department’s propaganda machine transported me to a world beyond my immediate provincial environment. Caught in and yet oblivious to the invisible transpacific war of propaganda, ideology, rumor, and misinformation, I went on to become an English major at Peking University, where my continued bildungsroman in the English language and literature was enabled by Chinese underground piracy of foreign books. From Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick” to Emily Dickinson’s poems, from Sacvan Bercovitch’s “Puritan Tradition” to Jonathan Culler’s “On Deconstruction,” these bootlegged American cultural goods fed the young minds of cash-strapped students like me. But we also paid dearly, as evidenced by the Tiananmen Massacre of 1989. When the students, myself included, occupied Tiananmen Square and demanded “democracy and freedom”—ideas we had gotten from pirated books—the Chinese government sent in troops and tanks while the U.S. turned a blind eye to the pending tragedy because the senior Bush administration was busy coercing the Chinese regime to sign the copyright protection treaty. Transpacific flows turned into a deadly whirlpool.
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“Race and (Neo)Imperialism Across the Pacific”
Nina Glick Schiller laments the tendency of transnational and diaspora scholars to presume the lack of inequality between states, that is, to excise the role of power from scholarly analyses of transnationalism. I contend that one of the ways to address this gap is to analyze how the (neo)imperialist United States racializes many of its would-be immigrants before arrival (not just afterward) and how immigrants themselves negotiate this transnational racialization. However, whether transnational racialization processes have been at the institutional or interpersonal level, they have been understudied in general, even when imperialism and transnationalism are fused. If “race” is incorporated into transnational studies at all, it is usually to address how immigrants embrace their home country identities in response to racism in the receiving society. Although such a response among immigrants is certainly common, a focus on this process alone overlooks how immigrants from American–dominated countries have been subordinated by White racism there. Moreover, while a number of studies examine how immigrants negotiate the distinct racial structures of their home country and the United States, these works undervalue the force of global racial ideologies in the sending societies. My study serves as a corrective. It pushes us beyond merely examining the cultural interpenetration of different racial systems to an examination of neo-imperialist racial ideologies and structures. That is, the racialization of the diasporic subjects themselves and the creative responses that spring forth serve as a crucial window into the operations of inequality and exploitation across the Pacific.
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“My Enemy, My Friend: Reports from the War on Terror”
A new entry into the poetics and politics of migration can be found through an exploration of what one might call the global ecology of anti-terrorism. My presentation will begin with a brief introduction to the work of a Muslim American artist Hasan Elahi who, after being arrested and questioned by the FBI, has inaugurated a unique project of self-surveillance. Is Elahi a more incisive, a more articulate, member of a large immigrant community whose members have been detained and interrogated since the September 11 attacks? Maybe he is. But what seems more compelling to me is that those who have been convicted under terrorism charges find their mirror-images in the profiles and histories of the undercover informants who have helped entrap them. There is a human drama here, a drama of failure and the dream of success, and I see both the informant and the various accused as similarly trapped in a story that is much larger than them. I will discuss examples from two terrorism trials in New York and New Jersey before returning to the work of Elahi and several other artists, including Coco Fusco, Trevor Paglen, Martha Rosler, Jill Magid, Paul Chan, and Paul Shambroom, who have been instrumental in setting-up a new transnational archive of our lives under states of surveillance.
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“Japanese Immigration, American Internationalism, and the Origins of Civil Rights”
Immigration issues were at the center of US-Japan relations during the first third of the twentieth century. Congress voted to exclude Japanese immigrants from the US in 1924 while US Presidents and State Department officials tried unsuccessfully to prevent , and then to overturn, the exclusion act. This paper draws attention to the coalition of non-state actors (journalists, peace societies, foreign policy organizations, missionaries, scholars, and business interests) who also worked to prevent and counteract the movement to exclude Japanese immigrants. It focuses particularly on Chester Rowell, a leading California journalist and political activist who had switched in the 1920s from leading the campaign against Japanese immigration to speaking out in favor of Japanese American civil rights. The story of Rowell’s switching sides on the immigration debate reveals the heretofore unnoticed role that Japanese immigration and American internationalism played in the emerging struggle for civil rights in the early 20th century.
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“Two Color-Lines in Modern Asia-Pacific”
Contemporary critical studies on transnational migration and identity focuses primarily on colonial racial and cultural hierarchy and its postcolonial ramifications. In the historical horizon of modern Asia-Pacific, however, questions of postcolonial history and culture are not to be considered separately from the composition of another color-line, the relatively new political color-line of human belief and relationship imagined according to the frontier of the politically bipolarized international order and radicalized in polarizing national and communal politics. This paper argues that a careful consideration of the conjuncture between colonial and Cold War political formations is necessary for understanding the historicity of the Asia-Pacific region and for grasping its future horizon. In this light it also makes a critical commentary on the prevailing orientation in contemporary postcolonial discourse of cultural translation and hybridity that excludes the historical reality of the global Cold War from the history of human diaspora in the twentieth century.
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“Asian Transnational Cinema”
This presentation looks at the disintegration of national cinemas throughout Asia, and the emergence of a transnational asian cinema in its place–a phenomenon driven by inter-Asian co-production, a greater fluidity of talent across multiple Asian cultures, and the confusion of national and nationalist politics. Among the more complex instances of this phenomenon are films such as Lee Si-myung’s anti-Japanese blockbuster, 2009: Lost Memories (2002), notable for its significant Japanese funding; Kim Ki-duk’s Dream (Bi-mong, 2008), which is acted in two languages; Pen-Ek Ratanaruang’s Last Life in the Universe (Ruang rak noi nid mahasan, 2003), a hybrid Thai-Japanese gangster film; and Kore-eda Hirokazu’s Air Doll (kûki ningyô, 2009), which stars Korean actress Bae Du-na as an inflatable sex doll that comes to life. Another symptom of the Asian transnational cinema is Taiwanese-Japanese actor Kaneshiro Takeshi, a major star who appears in Chinese-language and Japanese films, inflected as Chinese or Japanese, depending on the needs of each film. The result of these and many other examples of trans-Asian cinema and media is that the individual identities of the works are frequently lost in a trans-Asian spectrum that shifts the work from a national to transnational cinema. This presentation seeks to think through the implications of a newly-configured Asian cinema that may retain its multiple nationalisms while yielding the very basis of such nationalisms, the very concept of national culture as such. What might such a nationalism without nations look like?
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“Paradigm Shift: A Theoretical Apparatus for a Trans (national) and Global Visual Cultures of Southeast Asia”
While the static and logocentric model of Southeast Asian areas studies can be destabilized by an integration of visual culture into teaching and scholarship, there remains an unmet need for a methodological and theoretical apparatus capable of unpacking the seemingly random images that constitute the temporally and geographically mobile multicentric visual signifiers of a trans (national) and global culture in Southeast Asia. The goals of this paper are: 1) to examine how such disparate media as ancient Cambodian temples, political cartoons, feature films, and contemporary works of Southeast Asian artists (to include their many diasporas) to illuminate the dialectic tension between global investment and national imaginaries; 2) to advance a theoretical apparatus for understanding this reconfigured and new visual and performative currency and how it could enrich and contribute to a transnational and global model of comparative areas studies; 3) to discuss the need for an multi(inter)disciplinary training to interpret this paradigm shift to students and the public.
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“‘La parole filmée’ in Rithy Panh’s Documentary Films”
Although Rithy Panh’s films are seldom screened in the United States, except in festival venues and college campuses, and conspicuously absent from scholarly discussion, with rare exceptions, they deserve to be better known because they are a much needed antidote to Hollywood’s filmic representation of Southeast Asia, which has been almost exclusively devoted to the Vietnam War and its aftermath on America. They also merit the sustained critical attention of film and cultural critics because they supplement, in important ways, the exotic images deployed by Tran Anh Hung in such films as The Scent of Green Papaya (1993), Cyclo (1995), and The Vertical Ray of the Sun (2000), and by those by Toni Bui in Three Seasons (1999). In a growing corpus of important films—his most recent being The Sea Wall (2008) his adaptation of Marguerite Duras’s novel, Un Barrage contre le Pacifique (1950), Rithy Panh provides a much needed history lesson, through his principled conviction that cinema has to be ethical. Rithy Panh’s films constitute a dark and luminous cinema that is uncompromising in its ambition to bear witness to history and the Cambodian tragedy, a cinema whose sense of urgency is made manifest not only in the subjects considered—war, genocide, indentured labor, geographic displacement, survival in refugee camps, prostitution, and daily practices of those who survived both the Vietnam War and the Khmer Rouge regime, and whose resilience is captured on the film strip—but also in the elaboration of a particular film aesthetic, a cinema that demands that we reflect on the role of cinema, its responsibility, its ethics, a cinema that is haunted by the forces of history.
By focusing on the work of Rithy Panh, my aim is to consider cinema as a form of filmic testimonial and eyewitnessing that problematize the very notion of documentary filmmaking and its limits; to address the specificity of the Cambodian situation, while situating it within the larger context of regional conflicts and transnational development; and finally, to reflect on the nature of cinematic signification. I will focus more specifically on three of his documentaries, The Land of Wandering Souls (1999), S-21, the Khmer Rouge Death Machine (2002), and Paper Cannot Wrap Amber (2007).
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“Where is America in the Philippine Diaspora?”
The talk explores the hierarchy of destinations in the Philippine diaspora and examines the reconstruction of the U.S. as a metropole in the global dispersion of Filipino migrant workers. In addition to examining diasporic ties in the geopolitics of host societies, the talk also calls attention to the shared displacements of citizenship for Filipinos across nation-states with a close examination of the state incorporation of migrant domestic workers in liberal democratic nations (US and Canada), socialist democratic nations (Sweden and Denmark) and autocratic nations (United Arab Emirates and Singapore).
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“Post-Nationalism, the Pacific, and U.S. Literary Responses to Imperialism”
I focus on the theoretical problem of the “Transpacific” that challenges both area studies’ models for scholarship and the national forms for disciplinary knowledge. Drawing on Martin Lewis and Kären Wigen’s “Oceans Connect” project at Duke University, I’ll suggest that some of the innovative work in cultural geography ought to guide new work on the “Transpacific” as a region defined by diverse flows and movements, rather than distinct and settled national forms. To exemplify my paper, I’ll rely on my specialization in U.S. literature, drawing on examples from such 19C U.S. writers as Herman Melville and Mark Twain and tracing a genealogy from their anti-imperialist (and anti-national) arguments up to more contemporary figures, like Maxine Hong Kingston.
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“Twenty-first Century Area Studies and Asian American Studies: Between Cosmopolitanism and Diaspora”
This talk begins by addressing the swiftly changing field of Southeast Asian Area Studies, as the field is situated between the rise of scholarship from Southeast Asian scholars and the growing interest of Southeast Asian Americans in their histories of diaspora, nostalgia, and return. How will increasingly transnational area studies programs change in the face of these challenges? How will interdisciplinary and disciplinary methodologies adapt to these changes? Asian American Studies is an interdisciplinary field and that brings both benefits and dangers. Interdisciplinarity is talked about today and encouraged by University administrators as well as in fields like Asian American and Ethnic Studies and Southeast Asian Studies. The best kind of interdisciplinary work takes a critical edge of one discipline and puts it up against a critical edge of another. This is not easy to do. Ethnic studies serves both as a strategic intervention at institutional levels and as a field organized around critical race theories and the politics of empire. Transnational studies of the imperial field and Asian American Studies are both interdisciplinary and timely but they also call scholars of area studies away from situated knowledges of the region. Conversations between area studies and ethnic studies are opening up as the diasporic and cosmopolitan routes of travel put more and more subjects in motion, and the insights from each field unsettle the other. I use literary texts from Southeast Asia and Asian America to illustrate these melancholy convergences.
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“Special Money in the Vietnamese Diaspora”
This paper expands our scholarly understanding of remittances by examining the flows of money that are sent by low-wage workers in the Vietnamese diaspora. Drawing on data from a larger study of consumption and return migration in the Vietnamese diaspora, I present a focused analysis of transnational family members who are both senders and receivers of remittances. I show that being a transnational family member located in overseas immigrant communities carries the burden of financial remittances, but not because the amount of money sent is large, but because of the social meanings embedded in the money being sent. Drawing on case studies, I establish that international remittance is a form of “special money” that has different social and economic meanings for those who receive and for those who send. I illustrate that such money is seen in some instances as an expression of care, and other instances, as an obligation of care. A central point I make is that the value of money sent and the sacrifice it represents for senders do not always commensurate with the same “value” placed on such money by receivers. This difference, I argue, will be at the center of tension for transnational family members. Furthermore, I show that remittances have become an important source of care in many parts of the third world, where an inadequate social and care infrastructure from poor nation states embedded in an international labor system means that financial care falls to family members living abroad. This analysis is significant because increasingly, low-wage workers are returning to the homeland (more so than the professional class), but their low wages are forcibly made into different social and economic meanings. Furthermore, this analysis expands current research on remittances by explicitly recognizing it as a form of care, and by interrogating the different social and economic value placed on money sent and money received. Data analysis is drawn from a study that consisted of 148 in-depth interviews with transnational family members in both the homeland and abroad.
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“The Pacific Paradox”
The neologism of “G2” and “Chimerica” indicate unprecedented intensity of economic integration and social connections between China and America across the Pacific; but at the same time political tensions and potential military confrontations loom large. These two processes are not contradictory, but are deeply intertwined and mutually enhancing. This “Pacific paradox” makes the Pacific at once structurally integrated and fundamentally divided. A central aspect to this paradox, I argue, is the fact that the geopolitically construed, instead of culturally defined, nation-state becomes as the primary framework of meaning making, yet the two sides of the Pacific articulate social meanings in profoundly different manners due to historical reasons and the unequal nature of globalization. This forms a sharp contrast with trans-Atlantic interactions. In this paper I will first examine how “geopolitical nationalism” or “national statism”—a type of nationalism that is based on geopolitical calculations instead of cultural heritage or historical mythology—emerged among intellectuals in China since the end of the 1980s precisely because of the deepening interactions with the world, particularly with the US. I will then provide an ethnographic account about “folk statism” based on my fieldwork on intermediary agents who facilitate outmigration from China. Although the intermediary business is characteristically nonstate and is often state evading, the Chinese state not only determines the process of brokering, but more importantly remains as the main institutional and symbolic source for agents and migrants in seeking trust, honor and dignity. This mode of meaning making contrasts with that on the west side of the Pacific where universalistic concern of individual liberty serves as the metanarrative. The gap may well grow wider instead narrower in the future.
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“The Transpacific Imaginary in Japan during WWII”
This paper focuses on the transpacific imaginary in Japan during World War II by focusing on the case of Hawai‘ i. In particular, it traces the popular image of Hawai‘i in Japan after the attack on Pearl Harbor in order to understand how the Japanese during the war appropriated certain historical events to naturalize the Japanese desire for Hawai‘i as well as their transpacific imaginary. In 1942 and 1943, many texts on Hawai‘i was published in Japan, in anticipation of the time when the islands would become a part of Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. In contrast to the pre-war Japanese narratives of Hawai‘i, which rarely questioned the US sovereignty over the islands, these books and articles repeatedly pointed out the injustices of American presence in Hawai‘i by particularly criticizing the forceful annexation of the islands to the United States in 1898. Moreover, these texts emphasized there were close historic ties between Japan and Hawai‘i for many centuries by pointing out not only the presence of immigrants from Japan in the islands but also encounters between the two that happened way before the European arrival in Hawai‘i. The paper points to how this memory of Japan’s colonial ambition is embedded in contemporary discourse of Hawai ‘i.
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“Transnationalism Studies, their Perspectives and Blindspots: The View from Asia”
While there has been phenomenal expansion of the scope and depth of literature interrogating the links between mobility, migration and the formation of transnational identities in recent years, much still remains to be done in reconceptualising fluid lives and interconnected socialities in a rapidly globalizing world of quickened motion. Drawing on ongoing work focusing on movements within as well as in and out of Asia, this paper discusses four challenges at the forefront of debates in transnationalism studies. First, as increasing migratory moves are no longer based on permanent uprooting and settlement, but often multi-directional, complex, provisional, and based on a multiplicity of interconnections and networks sustained between ‘home’ and ‘host’, the conceptualisation of emigration as a form of permanent departure from a home-nation and conversely the notion of immigration as a form of full incorporation and permanent settlement in a host-nation needs to be rethought to accord more provisionality and flexibility to people movements, as well as the relationship between people and nation-states. Second, as transnationalism studies give weight to the effects of ‘multiplying forms of mobility’, there is a need not to ‘lose sight of the importance of localities in people’s lives’ (Oakes and Schein, 2006): both situatedness in and connectedness across different spaces and places are simultaneous moments in the same account. Third, more attention needs to be given to the way transnationalism operates across multiple scales. In particular, the focus on transnational communities and transnationalising individuals as the scales worthy of analysis has tended to neglect dynamics and discourses at the scale of the family/household. Taken-for-granted objects of study such as the “family” and the “household” have to be rethought in terms of new spatialities and temporalities as borders are transgressed, rigidified or redrawn in the face of multiple-, hyper- and transnational mobilities. Finally, as transnationalism scholars challenge the myopia of methodological nationalism and contemplate comparative and connective multi-site research, this needs to go hand in hand with forwarding a socially progressive agenda for a more inclusive approach, requiring more conscious commitment to extend the dialogue beyond the Anglo-American world to connect with scholars and researchers elsewhere in sustained engagement with cosmopolitan (collaborative, bridge-building) practices of knowledge production.
Conference Bios
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Tridib Banerjee holds a James Irvine Chair in Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Southern California. His research, teaching, and writings focus on the design and planning of the built environment from a comparative perspective. He is interested in the political economy of urban design and development, and the effects of globalization on transitional urban form and urbanism. His publications include: Beyond the Neighborhood Unit (with William C. Baer, 1984); City Sense and City design: Writings and Projects of Kevin Lynch (co-edited with Michael Southworth, 1990); and Urban Design Downtown: Poetics and Politics of Form (with Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, 1998).
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Surajit Chakravarty is a PhD candidate at the School of Policy, Planning and Development, USC. His doctoral dissertation is a study of a South Asian and African enclave in Hong Kong, focusing on the formation of identity clubs, the false dichotomy of ghettoes and enclaves, and citizenship practices and the production of ‘transactive urbanism’. Surajit’s research interests include Community and Economic Development, Multiculturalism and Planning for diversity, Ethnic enclaves, Urbanization in developing countries, Tourism and heritage planning, Sustainable cities, and Environmental ethics.
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Felicity Hwee-Hwa Chan is a 3rd year Ph.D. candidate at USC’s School of Policy, Planning and Development from Singapore. Prior to USC, she worked as an urban planner in Singapore and thereafter as a research assistant in Boston. She received her B.A. in Geography (Hons) in 2000 from the National University of Singapore and completed a Masters in Urban Planning from the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 2004. Her dissertation research interest is in the relationship between urban spaces and multi-ethnic interaction.
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Yen Le Espiritu is currently Professor and Chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego. She has written four books: Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities; Filipino American Lives; Asian American Women and Men: Labor, Laws, and Love; and Home Bound: Filipino American Lives Across Cultures, Communities, and Countries, three of which have received national book awards. Her current research projects explore the socio-emotional lives of children of immigrants from the Philippines and Vietnam, refugee communities in San Diego, public commemorations of the Vietnam War, and Vietnamese transnational lives.
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Janet Hoskins is professor of anthropology at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. She is the author of The Play of Time: Kodi Perspectives on Calendars, History and Exchange (University of California Press 1994, winner of the 1996 Benda Prize for Southeast Asian Studies), Biographical Objects: How Things Tell the Story of People’s Lives (Routledge, 1998), and is the contributing editor of Headhunting and the Social Imagination in Southeast Asia (Stanford, 1996), Anthropology as a Search for the Subject: The Space Between One Self and Another (Donizelli, 1999), and Fragments from Forests and Libraries (Carolina Academic Press 2000). She spent two decades years doing ethnographic research in Eastern Indonesia, and is now studying Caodaism and other indigenous Vietnamese religions from a transnational perspective in Vietnam and California.
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Yunte Huang is Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Transpacific Imaginations: History, Literature, Counterpoetics (Harvard Univ. Press, 2008), and Transpacific Displacement: Ethnography, Translation, and Intertextual Travel in Twentieth-Century American Literature (Univ. of California Press, 2002). His new book, Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendevzous with American History, is to be published by W. W. Norton in August 2010.
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Nadia Young-na Kim is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Loyola Marymount University. She received a doctorate in sociology at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor in 2003 and was a faculty member at Brandeis University (Sociology and Women’s & Gender Studies) from 2004-07. Her research interests are ‘race’/ethnicity/nation, immigration/transnationalism, gender and intersectionality, community processes, and Asian American Studies. Her book, Imperial Citizens: Koreans and Race from Seoul to L.A. (2008, Stanford University Press) won two awards from the American Sociological Association (ASA) in 2009: the Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award from the Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities and the Book of the Year Award from the Section on Asia and Asian America. Her current project examines the gendered processes in fights for clean air among low-income immigrant women of color, namely Latino and Asian American (many of whom are undocumented). She has published in numerous scholarly journals such as Social Problems, Critical Sociology, the Du Bois Review, and Amerasia Journal, won a 2009 ASA Early Career Award and research paper awards, has been an ASA Minority Fellow, and a selected Social Science Research Council Summer Institute participant.
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Amitava Kumar is the author, most recently, of A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb. This book is a writer’s report on the global war on terror and will be published by Duke University Press in Fall, 2010. Kumar’s earlier books are Husband of a Fanatic (The New Press, 2005), Bombay-London-New York (Routledge, 2002), and Passport Photos (University of California Press, 2000). His novel Home Products was published in early 2007 by Picador-India, and will appear in the US under the title Nobody Does the Right Thing. Kumar serves on the editorial board of several publications and co-edits the web-journal Politics and Culture. He has edited five books: Class Issues (New York University Press, 1997), Poetics/Politics (St Martin’s Press, 1999), World Bank Literature (University of Minnesota Press, 2002), The Humour and the Pity: Essays on V.S. Naipaul (Buffalo Books and British Council, 2002), and Away: The Indian Writer as an Expatriate (Routledge, 2003). In addition, Kumar is the scriptwriter and narrator of two documentary films, Pure Chutney (1997) and Dirty Laundry (2005). He has been awarded research fellowships from the NEH, Yale University, SUNY-Stony Brook, Dartmouth College, and University of California-Riverside. At present he is Professor of English at Vassar College.
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Lon Kurashige is Director of Asian American Studies and Associate Professor of History and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. He is author of the award-winning book Japanese American Celebration and Conflict: A History of Ethnic Identity and Festival in Southern California as well as essays published in the Journal of American History, Pacific Historical Review, and other scholarly outlets. Professor Kurashige also has co-edited Major Problems in Asian American History and is currently re-interpreting US history for a new college-level textbook. The paper presented comes from his current book-length research project entitled “Rethinking the Yellow Peril,” which documents the origins of American civil rights discourse through the late 19th and early 20th century struggles over Asian immigration.
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Heonik Kwon is a reader in anthropology at the London School of Economics and conducted fieldwork in indigenous Siberia, central Vietnam and, most recently, in Korea. He is the author of the prize-winning After the Massacre: Commemoration and Consolation in Ha My and My Lai (2006) and Ghosts of War in Vietnam (2008). His forthcoming book is The Other Cold War (Columbia, 2010).
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Akira Mizuta Lippit’s teaching and research focus on four primary areas: the history and theory of cinema, world literature and critical theory, Japanese film and culture, and visual cultural studies. Lippit’s published work reflects these areas and includes two books, Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) (2005) and Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (2000). In addition to his two completed books, Lippit is presently finishing a book-length study on contemporary experimental film and video, and has begun research for a book on contemporary Japanese cinema, which looks at the relationship of late-twentieth and early twenty-first century Japanese culture to the concept of the world.
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Boreth Ly is Assistant Professor of Southeast Asian Art History and Visual Culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Ly was born in Phnom Penh, Cambodia and was educated in Paris and United States. His research interests include arts and religions (Hinduism and Buddhism), visual cultures of trauma, gender, sexuality, and the body in Southeast Asian Art and visual culture. He is currently engaged in several book projects, one of which includes a collected volume of essays: Mekong and Memory, which examines trauma and manifested in post-1975 contemporary art and cinema in Southeast Asia and its diaspora.
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Viet Thanh Nguyen is an associate professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America (Oxford University Press, 2002). He has held residencies, fellowships and scholarships at the Fine Arts Work Center, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. He is currently working on two book projects, a collection of short stories and a comparative study of American and Vietnamese memories and representations of the American War in Viet Nam, focusing on the literary and visual arts.
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Panivong Norindr is chair of the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Phantasmatic Indochina: French Colonial Ideology in Architecture, Film and Literature (Duke University Press). He has contributed to numerous anthologies on French, Francophone and Southeast Asian Cinema. He is currently completing a book entitled (Post)Colonial Screens.
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Rhacel Salazar Parrenas is Professor of American Civilization and Sociology at Brown University. She writes and teaches on issues of women’s labor and migration in contemporary globalization, speaking on these topics to audiences in Asia, Europe, as well as North America. She has written and co-edited six books. Her latest book is a co-edited anthology, Intimate Labors: Technologies, Cultures and Politics of Care (Stanford). In 2010-2011, she will be a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, where she plans to complete her manuscript Trafficked? The Morals and Migration of Filipino Hostesses in Tokyo’s Nightlife Industry.
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John Carlos Rowe is USC Associates’ Professor of the Humanities and Chair of American Studies and Ethnicity at USC. He is the author of seven authored books, including Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism: From the Revolution to World War II and The New American Studies, as well as eight edited volumes, including A Concise Companion to American Studies. His area of specialization is the cultural history of U.S. imperialism.
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Laurie J. Sears is the author and editor of books and articles about history, literature, and the politics of empire in 20th century Indonesia. Her publications include Shadows of Empire: Colonial Discourse and Javanese Tales, which won the Harry Benda Book Award of the Association for Asian Studies in 1999, and the editor of Fantasizing the Feminine in Indonesia. Her newest edited volume, Knowing Southeast Asian Subjects, appeared in 2007. Currently, Laurie Sears is a Professor in the University of Washington History Department where she teaches critical historiographies, feminist methodologies, and Indonesian histories. She is also the Director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies of the Jackson School of International Studies. She received an ACLS Fellowship last year to finish her forthcoming book entitled Dread and Enchantment in the Indonesian Literary Archive.
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Hung Cam Thai is Associate Professor of Sociology and Asian American Studies at Pomona College and the Claremont University Consortium, where he is also Vice President of the Pacific Basin Institute. His research focuses on gender, family and international migration across the Vietnamese diaspora. His first book, For Better or for Worse: Vietnamese International Marriages in the New Global Economy (Rutgers, 2008), is a study of international marriages linking women in Vietnam and overseas Vietnamese men living in the diaspora. He is currently writing a book about consumption and return migration in Vietnam.
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Xiang Biao is a Research Council United Kingdom Academic Fellow at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology and Centre on Migration, Policy and Society, University of Oxford. He is the author of Making Order from Transnational Migration (Princeton University Press, forthcoming), Global “Body Shopping” (Princeton University Press, 2007; winner of 2008 Anthony Leeds Prize), Transcending Boundaries (Chinese by Sanlian Press, 2000; English by Brill Academic Publishers, 2005) and over 30 articles in both English and Chinese, and in both academic journals and the public media. A number of articles were translated in French, Spanish and Italian.
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Yujin Yaguchi is Associate Professor of Area Studies at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the University of Tokyo. His research focuses on the historical memories of the Pacific islands both in Japan and the United States. He is the author of two books on Hawai‘i in Japanese as well as, most recently, the co-editor of Jenichiro Oyabe, A Japanese Robinson Crusoe (University of Hawai’i Press, 2009).
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Professor Brenda Yeoh is Professor (Provost’s Chair), Department of Geography, as well as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore. She is also the Research Leader of the Asian Migration Cluster at the Asia Research Institute, NUS, and coordinates the Asian MetaCentre for Population and Sustainable Development Analysis. She is currently the Editor-in-Chief for Gender, Place and Culture and also serves on the Editorial/Advisory Boards of the the Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography; Cultural Geographies; Asian and Pacific Migration Journal; Gender, Technology and Development; Urban Studies; and Progress in Human Geography, NIAS’ Gendering Asia Book Series, I.B. Tauris’ Monograph Series on Historical Geography, and the ARI-Springer Asia Series. She is deputy chair of the Commission on Population, International Geographical Union, and the Singapore coordinator for the Asia-Pacific Migration Research Network.