CFP: NEMLA: Revisiting Asian American Women's "Articulate Silences"

PLEASE NOTE: DEADLINE EXTENDED TO OCTOBER 12, 2007

Northeast Modern Language Association (NEMLA) Annual Convention
Buffalo, NY
April 10-13, 2008

Call for Papers:
Panel sponsored by the NEMLA Women’s Caucus:
“Revisiting Asian American Women’s ‘Articulate Silences’”

In her significant 1993 book, _Articulate Silences: Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa_ (Cornell UP), King-kok Cheung links the legacies of silence for both Asian Americans and for women more broadly, tracing the connections among constructions of docility, acquiescence, silence, and inscrutability, and argues that Asian American women writers turn the assumption regarding silence on its head:

“They articulate—question, report, expose—the silences imposed on themselves and their peoples, whether in the form of feminine and cultural decorum, external or self-censorship, or historical or political invisibility; at the same time they reveal, through their own manners of telling and through their characters, that silences—textual ellipses, nonverbal gestures, authorial hesitations (as against moral, historical, religious, or political authority)—can also be articulate.” (3-4)

This panel revisits Cheung’s influential argument, as well as other pertinent analyses such as Patti Duncan’s book _Tell This Silence_, in order to extend our understandings of silence in Asian American women’s literature. What are the forms that silence takes? What kinds of articulations are possible? How is silence read? Are feminist coalitional politics enabled and/or limited by complicating the political emphasis on voice? Are various forms and styles of articulate silences traced to differences among Asian American women? (those marked by diaspora? by trauma and refugee status? by postcolonial legacies?) How are articulate silences shaped by historical contexts and the political and legal issues of the time? Proposals that address the literary, rhetorical, or political dimensions of silence and voice in Asian American women’s prose or poetry are welcome.

Deadline for presentation abstracts: September 15, 2007

Please email 250-500 word abstracts to the panel chair:

Susan Muchshima Moynihan, Assistant Professor
Department of English
State University of New York at Buffalo
Email: sm246@buffalo.edu