. Oceanic Archives and Transnational American Studies

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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.

The symposium is generously supported by the Louis Cha Fund, the Henry Luce Foundation, Texas Tech University, and the School of English and the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at HKU.

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

Accommodation for participants
  Traders Hotel
  Address: 508 Queen's Road West, Western District, Hong Kong.
  Tel: +852 2974 1234
  Web: http://www.shangri-la.com/en/hongkong/traders

Contact  
  Otto Heim (oheim@hku.hk) or Kendall Johnson (kjohnson@hku.hk)

Maps    
 
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School of English / School of Modern Language and Cultures / Faculty of Arts / HKU