“Inter-Asian Literature and Arts: A Research Workshop” is a two-day conference to be convened online on March 5-6, 2021. The conference is designed to bring together prominent junior and senior scholars who are rethinking literature and arts from an inter-Asian perspective. Miya Qiong Xie (miya.xie@dartmouth.edu), Assistant Professor in the Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages Program at Dartmouth College, is the main convener of the workshop. The event is co-sponsored by the Dartmouth Leslie Center for the Humanities, the Inter-Asia program of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), and the South-South Forum of Dartmouth College.
The notion of Inter-Asia, in this workshop, derives largely from the SSRC Inter-Asia program, with which several of the workshop participants have been affiliated. It explores connections, convergences, and comparisons not only among different geographical sites within Asia, but also between Asia and the broader Global South (Africa and Latin America). How can Inter-Asian connections be imagined, established, and criticized in the fields of literature and arts, across linguistic barriers, discrete literary traditions, and distinct aesthetic sensibilities? What kinds of Inter-Asian and South-South solidarity can be envisioned in the process? And how might insights from the study of literature and arts problematize the contradiction embedded in the conjunction of Inter-Asia’s emphasis on Asia as an empirical site, the ultimate inaccessibility of experience, and the theoretical desire to move beyond the empirical? These are among the major questions the workshop asks.