04-06/06/2012

This symposium brings together scholars and writers working in transnational American Studies and Oceanic Studies in dialogue probing the critical connections between navigations of the past and imaginative charts of the future. It intends to connect and confront the oceanic and the transnational as two paradigms of globality that critically question and reframe history and cultural memory. Participants will address the significance of specific oceanic regions and histories as well as the ocean as a connecting and encompassing environment on a trans-regional and global scale, and discuss in what ways attention to oceanic histories may orient American Studies and promote work across regional and hemispheric borders. While exploring how transnational American Studies, in critical attention to textual and material foundations, can draw on and add to oceanic archives, the symposium also aims to ask how oceanic and transnational perspectives may critically stretch or reframe notions and methodologies of knowledge production, maintenance and accessibility that have more often been defined in terms of national and continental frontiers.

Speakers:

Tomoko Akami
Elizabeth DeLoughrey
Wai Chee Dimock
James R. Fichter
Shelley Fisher Fishkin
Otto Heim
April Henderson
Evelyn Hu-DeHart
Corey M. Johnson
Kendall Johnson
Elizabeth Marchant
Brandy Nālani McDougall
Walter Mignolo
Susan Y. Najita
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Craig Santos Perez
Rafael Pérez-Torres
John Carlos Rowe
Yuan Shu
Rob Wilson

Dates and Venues:

June 4 and 5:         MB218, 2/F, Main Building, The University of Hong Kong
June 6:                    MBG07, G/F, Main Building, The University of Hong Kong

For more details, please visit http://www.english.hku.hk/events/oatas .