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The East Asian LLC Forum invites abstract submissions for the following four sessions that we are arranging for the 2027 MLA Convention. Please consider applying and distributing widely to those who might be interested.

 

Call for Papers: MLA 2027 Convention, Los Angeles, CA

LLC East Asian Forum

 

 

CFP #1

 

War, Memory, and Haunting in East Asian Literatures

 

This session offers a forum for exploring the relationship between war and literature in East Asia through the lens of memory and haunting across premodern and modern periods, languages, and genres. From antiquity to the modern age of total and civil wars, East Asian literatures have frequently served as a crucial medium for human imagination about warfare and its consequences, including death, survival, power, and justice. While it often eulogized or propagandized heroism, literature in both high and popular genres especially played a key role in remembering the dead, engendering representations of ghosts, the afterlife, and sacrifice, and enacting mourning and commemorative rituals. As war changes its nature, and as religions and secularism transform forms of life, East Asian literatures have commemorated war in various ways, but those modes have rarely been examined in a broad, comparative framework. We welcome papers that address any questions with regard to the relationship between war, memory, and literature in East Asia including, but not limited to:

 

·     How does the way literature engages with war and memory change between premodern and modern periods?

·     How does literature commemorate the dead, including soldiers, victims, perpetrators, or members of mass death? What mode of commemoration does it perform relative to that of ritual or other forms of expression?

·     How does literature represent different sites of war and haunting, including battlefields and civilian lives? How does it make sense of various experiences of war, such as trauma, defeat, victimhood, and remorse?

·     How does literature make sense of deaths caused by war during periods of historical transitions?

·     How does literature contribute to justice, reconciliation, or peace in relation to the ineradicable vice of war in human history?

 

This session highlights diverse contributions to the topic across languages, periods, and genres, and will be structured around points of convergence among presenters.

 

Please submit a 250-word abstract and brief bio to Satoru Hashimoto (shashimoto@jhu.edu) and Fumiko Joo (fumiko@cmll.msstate.edu) by March 20th, 2026.   

 

 CFP #2

 

Writing within Catastrophe:  Weiji, Risk, and the Futures of East Asian and

Comparative Literature

 

Drawing on the conceptual ambiguity of weiji (risk and opportunity), which simultaneously denotes both crisis and contingency, this session asks how East Asian and comparative literature respond to a world in which catastrophe is ongoing rather than resolved. In the early twenty-first century, economic decline, environmental disasters, pandemic aftermaths, geopolitical instability, and migration crises have made uncertainty and risk part of everyday life across East Asia and its global diasporas. Under these conditions, border crossings, such as geographic, linguistic, medial, or epistemic, have become the norm rather than an anomaly, routine rather than emergency, and risk management has become a habitual, ceaseless cultural practice. This panel asks how literary writing and theory in East Asian contexts move beyond paradigms of trauma, testimony, and immediate crisis response toward new modes of conceptualization oriented toward contingency, futurity, and ethical recalibration. If catastrophe is no longer an endpoint but a sustained environment and everyday occurance, what new literary forms, interpretive frameworks, and theoretical vocabularies emerge from within it? Where do opportunities arise amid prolonged instability?

 

We welcome papers exploring a wide range of East Asian and comparative viewpoints, including, but not limited to, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Sinophone, and diasporic literatures, as well as transregional and global frameworks.

 

Possible areas of inquiry include (but are not limited to):

Ÿ  Literary and theoretical responses to pandemic aftermaths, environmental crisis, and geopolitical risk in East Asia;

Ÿ  The impact of artificial intelligence and digital technologies on authorship, interpretation, and literary theory;

Ÿ  Innovative methodologies in digital humanities and comparative analysis;

Ÿ  New approaches to historical conceptualization under conditions of permanent crisis;

Ÿ  Shifting literary functions in relation to ecology, migration, media saturation, and global inequality;

Ÿ  Innovative responses to the inexorability of climate change;

Ÿ  Emerging ethical turns in East Asian and comparative literature, shaped by risk, contingency, and futurity.

This session frames catastrophe not as a resolved event but as a generative condition that reshapes how literature in and about East Asia thinks, theorizes, and intervenes in the world. By bringing together scholars from East Asian studies, comparative literature, media studies, the environmental humanities, and critical theory, this session aims to reflect collectively on the risks and possibilities shaping the field’s future at this critical ethical and epistemic crossroads.

 

Send proposals of approximately 300-words (title and abstract) and 250-word bios to Christopher Lupke <lupke@ualberta.ca> by Friday, March 20^th.

 

CFP #3

 

False Starts, Not-So-Dead-Ends, and Unsung Side Projects: Reconsidering the Act of

Creation in East Asian Literary Culture

 

 

Abstract:

 

The discipline of literary historiography has an inborn bias toward the completed, published, and fully realized, and if the concept of “incompletion” is addressed in our scholarship, it is generally examined as either a point of termination for a particular project, or as a temporary setback and stopping point on a teleological account of eventual authorial triumph. This panel attempts to provisionally reverse the hierarchy between the complete and incomplete, and explore the concept of incompletion from a different perspective: eschewing the model of linear progress with its clearly demarcated beginnings and ends, in favor of a more rhizomatic schema in which the incomplete and seemingly unrelated are treated as generative in their own right. 

 

-What role do aborted inquiries, side projects, and even hobbies play in the process of literary creation, and how might a revised “grammar of creativity” make room for these seemingly ancillary endeavors? 

 

-What happens when side projects and other activities are seen not as derailments, but as spaces of experimentation without the demand for or expectation of completion? 

 

-What theoretical models related to these uncompleted and parallel undertakings can be derived from various case studies in the East Asian literary tradition? 

 

This session centers on projects engaging Japanese, Chinese, and Korean contexts, and the session will be structured to highlight connections and points of convergence between individual panelists.

 

Please submit a 250-word abstract and brief bio by March 15^th, 2026 to William C. Hedberg (William.Hedberg@asu.edu).   

 

 

CFP #4

 

Arrival Stories: Migration, Language, and Early East Asian Writing in America

 

This collaborative session between East Asian LLC and Asian American LLC Forums invites proposals examining the literary production of East Asian international students in the United States before 1950, with particular attention to how their work complicates and redefines the borders between Asian and Asian American literary, cultural, and intellectual histories. Many early writers from China, Japan, and Korea arrived in the U.S. as students—often through missionary, reformist, or modernizing educational pathways—and it is this phenomenon of student migration giving rise to unexpected literary production that the session seeks to theorize and explore. Notably, some later returned to their places of origin, re-entering Asian print cultures and publics. Their arrivals unfolded amid broader migration patterns and racialized political climates that shaped Asian representation and intellectual life.

 

While language is a pivotal lens for understanding these writers, it is only one factor that problematizes the Asian/Asian American divide. Their writing also emerged from transnational educational systems, missionary schooling, and cross-lingual intellectual networks that encouraged translation, code-switching, and hybrid forms of expression. These intersecting dynamics made possible forms of literary production that resist neat categorization within national, colonial, or diasporic frameworks.

 

The session welcomes comparative and cross-lingual approaches, including studies that bring Japanese, Chinese, and Korean contexts into conversation without requiring presenters to address all three. The session will be curated to place individual papers into conversation, emphasizing productive intersections, divergences, and resonances across linguistic, historical, and cultural frames. This session aims to rethink early transpacific literary formations and reexamine the distinction between “Asian” and “Asian American” literature.

 

Please submit a 250-word abstract and brief bio of 150 words by March 20, 2026 to Jina Kim jinak@uoregon.edu & Chris Eng caeng@umd.edu