2025 Event Information

• Date and Location:

17-18 October 2025 (Friday & Saturday)

Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures

College of Liberal Arts

National Taiwan University

*From hotel to the College of Liberal Arts building: see here

• Keynote Speaker

Dr. Andy Chih-Ming Wang (Academia Sinica)

Title: 

Asian Americans on the Move: Return Stories, Cold War, and Globalization Reconsidered

Moderator:

Prof. Guy Beauregard

Abstract: 

     This talk is based on my book-in-progress: "Multiple Returning: Asian American Literature and Post/Cold War Entanglements" which studies the multiple articulations of the return motif in Asian/American literary and cultural production. Situating return in the complex negotiation of affect and politics, of market and military, as manifested in the return of refugee, adoptee, and mix-raced subject, this book explores the long shadow that the Cold War cast on the present. While Asian American return narratives are often regarded as a triumph of economic globalization, in this talk, I intend to offer a different argument that globalization is geopolitical in nature, for it relies on the dual operations of the market and the military. Asian American return narratives took place precisely in these strictures and should be read as a counter-discourse of globalization. “Return” for Asian Americans is thus a complex event and discourse where belonging, identity, and complicity are rooted and routed in the grooves of empire.
    In this talk, I will draw selective examples from various literary and cinematic texts produced by Asian/American authors and directors whose representations of return, when put together, show a transnational landscape of geopolitical and affective shifts that connect the market with the military, diaspora with empire, and home with loss and guilt. Return stories, I argue, constitute an archive of difficult entanglements with the Cold War that triumphant discourses of globalization tend to ignore, but are critical to the formation of the Asian American as a transnational problematic. The meanings of diaspora, Cold War, and globalization, in this way, are determined by the stories we tell.

• Professionalization Panel: "Publishing in Peer-Reviewed Journals: Dos and Don'ts"

Moderator: Prof. Manuel Herrero-Puertas

Prof. Joan Chiung-Hue Chang (National Taiwan Normal University, editor-in-chief of Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies)

Prof. Sophia Ya-Shih Liu (National Taiwan University, editor-in-chief of Ex-Position)

Prof. Min-Hua Wu (National Chengchi University, editor-in-chief of The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture)