This symposium explores how Asian diasporic archives might be reimagined through incommensurability as both an analytic and an ethical orientation. Bringing together Chicago-based junior scholars and artists, it asks what alternative futurities emerge when archives are read and produced through friction, opacity, and irreducible difference. How might queering the archive—and attending to bodies, nonhuman matters, and absence—unsettle dominant modes of archival knowledge? How might incommensurability reshape coalition-building and transoceanic relationalities across Asian diasporic, Afro-Asian, and Asian Latinx contexts in the afterlives of slavery, indentureship, and migration regimes? And how might thinking across—and at times against—fields such as Asian American Studies, Transpacific Studies, critical ethnic studies, environmental humanities, and queer of color critique open new forms of interdisciplinary engagement?
Symposium Schedule
| 9:00-9:15am | Coffee Service |
| 9:15-9:30am | Opening Remarks by Yunning Zhang |
| 9:30-10:15am | Cecily Chen, “Ambient Allusions: Pamela Lu’s generic subjects” Respondent: Megan Tusler (English) |
| 10:30-11:15am | Michelle N. Huang, “Skin’s Conditions: Lessons in Beauty Horror” Respondent: Yunning Zhang & Cecily Chen |
| 11:30-12:15am | Mee-Ju Ro, “The Novel In Translation: Yi Haejo’s (1911) Blood Of Flowers” Respondent: Angie Heo (Divinity School) |
| 12:15am-1:15pm | Lunch |
| 1:15-2:00pm | Kaneesha Parsard, “Return: Suspended Claims in Post-Indentureship Archives” Respondent: SJ Zhang (English) & Nikhita Obeegadoo |
| 2:15-3:00pm | Nikhita Obeegadoo, “Mauritian Carbs: Intergenerational Legacies and Diabetic Futures?” Respondent: SJ Zhang (English) & Kaneesha Parsard |
| 3:15-4:00pm | Jeong Eun Annabel We, “Diasporic Art: Arche-pelago or Archae-pelago?” Respondent: Soyoon Ryu (Art History) |
| 4:15-5:00pm | Linye Jiang, “Between Representation and Invisibility” Respondent: Ellen Larson (Center for the Art of East Asia) |
| 5:15-5:30pm | Concluding Discussion |
This symposium is sponsored by the Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality, the Franke Institute for the Humanities, and the Department of Comparative Literature. Free and open to the public.