Creativity and Critique in Asian American Literature
Guest Editors: Aline Lo (Colorado College), Swati Rana (University of California, Santa Barbara)
Publication Date: Planned for Spring 2023
Submission Requirements: Scholarly essays: 5,000-6,000 words (not including endnotes); creative works: 1,000-3,000 words; due August 30, 2022
This special issue is driven by the perils and promise of our shared, yet differential present, when we face gendered anti-Asian violence, the mounting devastation of climate change, and the deepening injustices of racial capitalism and settler colonialism. These challenges arise even as a groundswell of global protest regenerates abolitionist horizons and demands redress for Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color. What is the agency of Asian American literature in this context? When we clear space on the page or screen, what do we find there that sustains us, enriches our understanding of Asian America, and sharpens our sense of the work literature does in the world? How does the power of literature and literary analysis recalibrate our relationship to the past and answer the exigencies of our moment?
We aim to enable imagination through and beyond the immiserating conditions of the present by revitalizing a literary orientation in Asian American studies. There is an opportunity here to reflect on how literature and literary studies shape the broader field of Asian American studies, and to explore how creativity and critique overlap fundamentally in the production of Asian American literature. We seek work by artists, creative writers, critics, and scholars that engages this expressive synergy, building bridges between Asian American literary and social formations; extending the potential of Asian American literature and literary analysis into other disciplines; generating new modes and modalities in Asian American creative and scholarly writing; and rethinking Asian American authorship and authority through writing in activism and community.
We encourage both traditional submissions of literary criticism and creative arts as well as hybrid submissions that bridge creative and critical modes, including scholarly essays, creative nonfiction, fiction, poetry, and mixed-genre projects. Taking our cue from the Circle for Asian American Literary Studies (CAALS), the organization which helped to originally conceive of this project, we pledge to support contributors who show potential but who may need some guidance in shaping their final submissions.
Possible topics include:
- Work emerging out of theories of racial forms, racial rhetorics, and other formalist, cultural materialist, and literary critical methods in Asian American studies
- Hybrid, cross-genre, speculative, and experimental forms in literature and literary criticism, such as autoethnography and autotheory, grounded in feminist, women of color, queer, and trans critique
- Projects that push the bounds of Asian American literature and literary criticism to engage with new fields, geographies, media, objects, and sociopolitical movements
- Interdisciplinary projects that articulate the distinctive contributions of literary studies to other established and emerging fields such as archipelagic studies, cognitive science, Cold War studies, critical refugee studies, ecocriticism, Pacific Islander Studies, and settler colonial studies
- Curatorial or other enactments of academic/artist/activist partnerships that traverse literary studies and other creative arts disciplines
- Explorations of how Asian American literature and literary studies distinctively anchors literature in relation to other fields of study and/or modes of praxis (activism, environment, law, science, technology)
- Engagements between Asian American literature/literary studies and vital social justice discourses such as abolition, Black Lives Matter, #LandBack, #MeToo, sanctuary, and transgender rights
- Interviews, dialogues, or other collaborations between creative writers and literary scholars
- Collective, dialogic, activist, and community projects in the public humanities and public arts that interrogate the bounds of literary authorship and the positionality of Asian Americans
Submission Guidelines and Review Process
Please submit your paper at: https://www.editorialmanager.com/ramj/default.aspx. There, you can find author instructions for uploading your submission, which requires a user account.
The guest editors, in consultation with the Amerasia Journal editorial staff and peer reviewers, make decisions on the final essays:
- Initial review of submitted papers by guest editors and Amerasia Journal editorial staff
- Papers approved by editors will undergo blind peer review
- Revision of accepted peer-reviewed papers and final submission
Please contact Arnold Pan, UCLA AASC Press Editor, with any questions regarding your submission: arnoldpan@ucla.edu.
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