CfP: Retelling Trauma and Imagining Catastrophe in the Modern East Asian and Sinophone World

Share:

Call for Papers: Edited Volume with Amsterdam University Press
Retelling Trauma and Imagining Catastrophe in the Modern East Asian and Sinophone World
Co-Editors: Géraldine Fiss (UCSD) and Wendy Xiaoxue Sun (Grinnell College)

In today’s culture, images and narratives of potential catastrophes and traumatic aftermaths have taken hold of the popular imagination. Inspired by Eva Horn’s quest in The Future as Catastrophe, this volume invites examinations of past traumas and future catastrophes in modern East Asian literature and film, including the broader Sinophone world and Asian diaspora.

We seek interdisciplinary perspectives from fields such as memory studies, gender studies, posthumanism, ecocriticism, trauma studies, and others to explore the literary, cinematic, visual, and poetic depictions of trauma and catastrophe in modern and contemporary East Asia. This volume aims to investigate how traumatic memories shape narratives of the past and reconstruct present reality through literature, film, and other arts. We also explore how imaginings of future disasters engage with our present and create alternative realities. By deciphering collective remembrance of the past and fantasies of future disasters, we hope to provide a platform for interpreting and perceiving modern East Asian reality with greater knowledge, rationality, sympathy, and solidarity.

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

  • Trauma studies
  • Narrative studies
  • War and memory studies
  • Gender and memory studies
  • Science fiction studies
  • Reproduction and futurism
  • Ecocritical studies
  • Ecoliterature, Ecopoetry, and Ecocinema
  • Queer studies
  • Posthumanism
  • World Literature

Submission Deadline: September 1, 2024

If interested, please send a 300-word abstract and a brief bio to:

Géraldine Fiss at gfiss[at]ucsd.edu
Wendy Sun at sunxiaox[at]grinnell.edu

Please share this call for papers and circulate it among colleagues and students in your departments and networks.