Organized by Co-sponsored by

AMERICA’s ASIA

ASIA’s AMERICA 13-14 August 2018

ASIA RESEARCH INSTITUTE | NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE

Conference on America's Asia, Asia's America | 13-14 August 2018

2

This conference is co-organized by Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore and Department of English and Asian Studies Program, Texas Tech University. It is co-sponsored by the US Embassy in Singapore and Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore.

With the recent historical Trump-Kim Summit in Singapore and an ongoing trade war between the United States and China, the Asian Pacific has remained a hot spot in global geopolitics. What do these new developments mean to the U.S. and the Asian Pacific? How would the U.S. continue to promote its political ideals of democracy and human rights in the region? Why would the U.S. presence matter to the stability and prosperity of the region? These questions not only require us to consider historically the relationship between the United States and the Asian Pacific in the fields of American studies, Asian studies, and Asian American studies, but they also compel us to develop new critical models to investigate religion, literature, and culture in transnational spaces and temporalities. This conference will bring together leading scholars in American studies, Asian studies, and Asian American studies and initiate a critical conversation on geopolitics, representation, transpacific American studies, and global Asian studies. Hailing from North America, Oceania, East and Southeast Asia, these scholars will share their unique critical and historical perspectives on geopolitics and histories on the one hand and explore the U.S. encounter with the Asian Pacific in different religious, literary, and cultural forms on the other hand. How are transnational flows of religion, literature, and culture creating alternative networks across these regions? As a hub between East and West, between East and Southeast Asia, Singapore is positioned as a unique site for engaging critical exchanges and conversations on these topics. CONVENORS Prof Kenneth Dean Religion and Globalization Research Cluster Leader, Asia Research Institute Head, Department of Chinese Studies National University of Singapore E | chshead@nus.edu.sg A/P Yuan Shu Department of English, Director of Asian Studies Program Texas Tech University, USA E | yuan.shu@ttu.edu

Conference on America's Asia, Asia's America | 13-14 August 2018

3

13 AUGUST 2018 (MONDAY) 09:15 – 09:30 REGISTRATION

09:30 – 10:00 WELCOME & INTRODUCTORY REMARKS Jonathan Rigg | Director, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

Camille Dawson | Acting Deputy Chief of Mission, the U.S. Embassy in Singapore

Kenneth Dean | Leader of Religion and Globalization Cluster, Asia Research Institute,

National University of Singapore

Yuan Shu | Director of Asian Studies Program, Texas Tech University, USA

10:00 – 11:30 PANEL 1 – GEOPOLITICS, HISTORIES, AND TRANSOCEANIC AMERICAN STUDIES

Chairperson | Kenneth Dean | National University of Singapore

10:00 Geopolitics and Circulatory Histories: Networks, States and Power in Asia Pacific

Prasenjit Duara | Duke University, USA

10:30 The Transpacific and the Transatlantic in Édouard Glissant’s Theory of American Studies

John Carlos Rowe | University of Southern California, USA

11:00 QUESTIONS & ANSWERS

11:30 – 12:00 TEA BREAK

12:00 – 13:30 PANEL 2 – TRANSLATION, IDENTITY AND EPISTEMOLOGY

Chairperson | Kenneth Dean | National University of Singapore

12:00 The Three-Body Problem in the U.S: Computation, Translation, and Science Fiction

Wai Chee Dimock | Yale University, USA

12:30 Frank Chin in Singapore: Identity, History, and Epistemology

Yuan Shu | Texas Tech University, USA

13:00 QUESTIONS & ANSWERS

13:30 – 14:30 LUNCH

14:30 – 16:00 PANEL 3 – RE-IMAGINING ASIA PACIFIC, RE-THINKING AMERICA

Chairperson | Yuan Shu | Texas Tech University, USA

14:30 Transhemispheric and Crosstemporal: American Studies and Asian Pacific Culture

Paul Giles | University of Sydney, Australia

15:00 Asian America and Global Asias as Imaginable Ageography

Tina Chen | The Pennsylvania State University, USA

15:30 QUESTIONS & ANSWERS

16:00 – 16:30 TEA BREAK

16:30 – 18:00 PANEL 4 – EDUCATION, MODERNIZATION, AND THE TRANSPACIFIC AMERICAN IMAGINARY

Chairperson | Kenneth Dean | National University of Singapore

16:30 The Transpacific in a Major and Minor Key

Janet Hoskins | University of Southern California, USA

17:00 U.S. International Education Programs and Modernization in Chinese Societies

Madeline Y. Hsu | University of Texas–Austin, USA

17:30 QUESTIONS & ANSWERS

18:00 END OF DAY 1

18:30 – 20:00 CONFERENCE DINNER (For Speakers, Chairpersons & Invited Guests)

Conference on America's Asia, Asia's America | 13-14 August 2018

4

14 AUGUST 2018 (TUESDAY)

09:45 – 10:00 REGISTRATION

10:00 – 11:30 PANEL 5 – GEOGRAPHY, ETHICS AND DECOLONIZATION

Chairperson | Prasenjit Duara | Duke University, USA

10:00 Geography, Ethics, History: United States in the World

Tani Barlow | Rice University, USA

10:30 Religious Mobilities and Alternative Networks

Kenneth Dean | National University of Singapore

11:00 QUESTIONS & ANSWERS

11:30 – 12:00 TEA BREAK

12:00 – 13:30 PANEL 6 – BORDERWATERS, WATER SHAPE, AND ASIA’S AMERICA

Chairperson | John Carlos Rowe | University of Southern California

12:00 The Shape of Water: Rethinking Territory and Influence for American Studies in a Transnational Age

Steven Yao | Hamilton College, USA

12:30 Borderwaters: Indonesia’s Nusantara Principle and the US Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands

Brian Russell Roberts | Brigham Young University, USA

13:00 QUESTIONS & ANSWERS

13:30 – 14:30 LUNCH

14:30 – 16:30 PANEL 7 – POLITICS OF SPACE, TRANSNATIONAL LITERATURE, AND RE-IMAGINING OF AMERICAN STUDIES IN SOUTHEAST ASIA

Chairperson | Janet Hoskins | University of Southern California–Los Angeles, USA

14:30 Politics of Space and Poetics of Desire: Reading David Young’s Novels on Bangkok

Suradech Chotiudompant | Chulalongkorn University, Thailand

15:00 Writing America: Transnational Elements in Philippine Literature in English

Lily Rose Tope | University of the Philippines—Diliman, Philippines

15:30 ‘What's in it for us?’: An Indonesian Perspective on American Studies as a Field of Inquiry in the Trump Era

Bayu Kristianto | Universitas Indonesia

16:00 QUESTIONS & ANSWERS

16:30 – 17:00 TEA BREAK

Conference on America's Asia, Asia's America | 13-14 August 2018

5

17:00 – 18:00 ROUNDTABLE – SOUTHEAST ASIAN ASSOCIATION OF AMERICAN STUDIES: THOUGHTS, POSSIBILITIES, AND CHALLENGES?

Chairperson | Yuan Shu | Texas Tech University, USA

Bayu Kristianto | Universitas Indonesia

Brian Russell Roberts | Brigham Young University, USA

Janet Hoskins | University of Southern California, USA

John Carlos Rowe | University of Southern California, USA

Lily Rose Tope | University of the Philippines—Diliman, Philippines

Suradech Chotiudompant | Chulalongkorn University, Thailand

Wai Chee Dimock | Yale University, USA

18:00 – 18:30 CLOSING REMARKS

Kenneth Dean | National University of Singapore

Yuan Shu | Texas Tech University, USA

18:30 END OF CONFERENCE

Conference on America's Asia, Asia's America | 13-14 August 2018

6

Geopolitics and Circulatory Histories: Networks, States and Power in Asia Pacific Prasenjit Duara Duke University, USA prasenjit.duara@duke.edu

The flow of histories has always been more globally circulatory than the historical conceptions of nations as tunneled or linear, although institutional and local-national affairs certainly re-shape these developments. Nation-states are themselves global products and have had to constantly redefine the conceptual boundaries between the nation and the global conditions of its being and functioning. The current round of accelerating post-Cold War globalization reveals this process-retrospectively as well-more starkly. It also reveals the historical role of trans-border networks as important carriers of these circulatory historical processes. Spiritual and cultural movements have linked the USA with Asia communities and groups since the mid-19th century beginning with the Transcendentalist movement of Thoreau and Emerson. These civil society networks have become much greater and diverse and include a movement of environmental spiritualism. The emergent geopolitical world order is often seen as one where global power is becoming multi-polar. However, the acceleration of global-including infrastructural, commercial, media and destructive environmental-forces accompanied by the intensification of global interactive networks produce new conditions for rising nationalisms. Is it possible for these weak but resilient forces of global counter-hegemony to condition the rise of nationalisms so they can be held more accountable? Prasenjit Duara is the Oscar Tang Chair of East Asian Studies at Duke University. He was born and educated in India and received his PhD in Chinese history from Harvard University. He was previously Professor and Chair of the Dept of History and Chair of the Committee on Chinese Studies at the University of Chicago (1991-2008). Subsequently, he became Raffles Professor of Humanities and Director, Asia Research Institute at National University of Singapore (2008-2015). In 1988, he published Culture, Power and the State: Rural North China, 1900-1942 (Stanford Univ Press) which won the Fairbank Prize of the AHA and the Levenson Prize of the AAS, USA. Among his other books are Rescuing History from the Nation (U Chicago 1995), Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Rowman 2003) and most recently, The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future (Cambridge 2014). He has edited Decolonization: Now and Then (Routledge, 2004) and co-edited A Companion to Global Historical Thought with Viren Murthy and Andrew Sartori (John Wiley, 2014). His work has been widely translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean and the European languages.

Conference on America's Asia, Asia's America| 13-14 August 2018

7

The Transpacific and the Transatlantic in Édouard Glissant’s Theory of American Studies

John Carlos Rowe University of Southern California, USA johnrowe@email.usc.edu

Édouard Glissant is well known for his theorization of the Caribbean's key role in our understanding of the new American Studies, but little attention has been paid to his interest in the Pacific. This essay considers how his remarks on the Federated States of Micronesia and its economic and political dependence on the U.S. in the 1970s contribute to twenty-first century theories of Transpacific Studies and its importance for the broader field of American Studies. Glissant's interpretation of the influence of the United States in the Caribbean and Pacific anticipates contemporary scholarly approaches to the new American Studies. John Carlos Rowe is USC Associates’ Professor of the Humanities and Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. He is the author of ten books, more than 150 essays and reviews, and editor or co-editor of eleven books, including: Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism: From the Revolution to World War II (2000), A Concise Companion to American Studies (2010), Afterlives of Modernism (2011), The Cultural Politics of the New American Studies (2012), and Our Henry James (forthcoming, 2018).

Conference on America's Asia, Asia's America | 13-14 August 2018

8

The Three-Body Problem in the U.S.: Computation, Translation, and Science Fiction

Wai Chee Dimock Yale University, USA wai.chee.dimock@yale.edu

The paper discusses the work of translator Ken Liu in making this sci-fi novel the top pick for high-profile readers such as Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, both of whom have brought this book with them to the World Economic Forum in Davos. Wai Chee Dimock, William Lampson Professor of English and American Studies at Yale University, is the Editor of PMLA, and a film critic for the Los Angeles Review of Books. She also writes for Critical Inquiry, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the New York Times, and the New Yorker. Her scholarly books include Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time, and her lecture course, “Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner,” is available through Open Yale Courses.

Conference on America's Asia, Asia's America| 13-14 August 2018

9

Frank Chin in Singapore: Bad Subject, Railroad-building History, and Chinese American Epistemology Yuan Shu Texas Tech University, USA yuan.shu@ttu.edu

In this paper, in reading Frank Chin’s essay, “A Chinaman in Singapore,” in relation to his novel, Donald Duk, I argue that the author reflects upon the status of ethnic minority in both the United States and Singapore and offers new thoughts on the relationship between minority and majority in different historical and cultural contexts. He not only seeks to ground these identities in historical imaginaries but also shapes such imaginaries toward a possible ethnic American epistemology. Yuan Shu is Associate Professor of English and Director of Asian Studies Program at Texas Tech University. His research interest includes transpacific American studies and globalization theory, technology and discourse, as well as critical and comparative race studies. He has published essays in journals varying from Cultural Critique to MELUS. He has co-edited two essay volumes, American Studies as Transnational Practice (Dartmouth College Press, 2015) and Oceanic Archives, Indigenous Epistemology, and Transpacific American Studies (Hong Kong University Press, forthcoming). His monograph, Empire and Geopolitics: Technology, Transpacific Movements, and Chinese American Writing is under revision. He served as a Fulbright scholar at the National University of Singapore from 2017 to 2018.

Conference on America's Asia, Asia's America | 13-14 August 2018

10

Transhemispheric and Crosstemporal: American Studies and Asian Pacific Culture

Paul Giles University of Sydney, Australia paul.giles@sydney.edu.au

I would be looking at ways in which Asian space, including the South Pacific, have been represented in Western literature and culture, and how these have served to problematize normative models of time and space that have operated within an American context. In this sense, I will consider how normative U.S. configurations of spatial and temporal regulation become modified in what several American politicians have designated as "the Pacific century." Paul Giles is Challis Professor of English at the University of Sydney, Australia. His most recent books are Antipodean America: Australasia and the Constitution of U.S. Literature (Oxford UP, 2013) and Backgazing: Reverse Time in Modernist Culture (OUP, forthcoming).

Conference on America's Asia, Asia's America| 13-14 August 2018

11

Asian America and Global Asias as Imaginable Ageography

Tina Chen Pennsylvania State University, USA tina.chen@psu.edu

As Edward Said, Naoki Sakai, and others have noted, Asia is a place both real and imagined and its significance often derives from its deployment as a way of indexing relationality and positionality. Existing work on Global Asia/s has focused on the concept’s fictionality and narrativization (Chen and Hayot), its ability to encompass intra-Asian differences and to imagine alternatives to geopolitical realities (Spivak), and its subjection to overdetermination by historically constituted discursive structures that ironically create the conditions by which to undermine unified notions of what “Asia” might mean or represent (Chen and Chua). Exploring the ways in which contemporary Asian/American speculative fictions register the evolving imaginability of the worlds we inhabit, study, and create—and drawing on the possibilities of Asian America as an ageographic concept—I suggest the importance of conceptualizing Global Asias as imaginable ageography and explore the critical and aesthetic implications of such conceptualization. The paper will first focus on the theoretical possibilities of ageography before elaborating on the ways in which Asian/American speculative fictions offer new means of imagining into being the structural incoherence of Global Asias as both place and concept. Tina Chen is Associate Professor of English and Asian American Studies at The Pennsylvania State University and author of Double Agency: Acts of Impersonation in Asian American Literature and Culture, which was named a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title. Her national leadership roles include several stints as the co-Chair of the East of California caucus for the Association for Asian American Studies; serving on the Executive Board of the MLA's Division on Asian American Literature; being the Founding Editor of Verge: Studies in Global Asias—an award-winning journal published by the University of Minnesota Press; and directing the Global Asias Summer Institute and Global Asias biennial conferences at Penn State.

Conference on America's Asia, Asia's America | 13-14 August 2018

12

The Transpacific in a Major and Minor Key

Janet Hoskins University of Southern California–Los Angeles, USA jhoskins@usc.edu

The Transpacific is an idea that we have been trying to develop which would emphasize the mobility of people, cultural connections and capital across the Pacific Ocean, and would move between Asian Studies and Asian-American Studies. In this paper, I consider ideas of a “major” and “minor” Transpacific and question whether being part of the “major” in fact offers any advantage to populations of diverse origins struggling for some self-determination. In the United States, the populations of several states are described as “majority minority” (first Hawaii, and now California) which has unsettled earlier assumptions about how majorities and minorities negotiate their claims to be part of a “core” American culture. The heart of these controversies lies in the question of whether a “core” American culture is defined by race, by history, or by a series of values which might include ideas of diversity and tolerance. Transpacific movements have unsettled earlier patterns of racial dominance in higher education in the United States, but they have also awakened a new awareness of cultural plurality and the contributions of civilizations beyond those of Euro-America. I also look at the dynamics of Vietnamese immigrants who have settled in western countries (the U.S., Canada and Australia, “Little Saigons”) and those of the formerly socialist world (“Little Hanois”) trying to see if the idea of “major” and “minor” could also be applied to groups of diasporic populations. Janet Hoskins is Professor of Anthropology and Religion at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Her books include The Divine Eye and the Diaspora: Vietnamese Syncretism Becomes Transpacific Caodaism (2015), The Play of Time: Kodi Perspectives on History, Calendars and Exchange (1996 Benda Prize in Southeast Asian Studies, Association for Asian Studies), and Biographical Objects: How Things Tell the Stories of People’s Lives (1998). She is the contributing editor of Transpacific Studies: Framing an Emerging Field (with Viet Thanh Nguyen, 2014), Headhunting and the Social Imagination in Southeast Asia (1996), A Space between Oneself and Oneself: Anthropology as a Search for the Subject (1999) and Fragments from Forests and Libraries (2001).

Conference on America's Asia, Asia's America| 13-14 August 2018

13

U.S. International Education Programs and Modernization in Chinese Societies

Madeline Y. Hsu University of Texas–Austin, USA myhsu@austin.utexas.edu

A transnational lens on Asian American history explores the migrations of Asians who not only resettled permanently to become Americans, but also those who chose to return to their ancestral homelands. Celebrated waves of "brain drain" immigrants have in recent decades returned at increasing rates to their homelands where they have contributed to modernization particularly in economic development and educational institution-building. Such narratives complicate the celebratory "Nation of Immigrants" image associated with the United States, yet foreground how the circulations and exchanges of many kinds of representatives and agents have fostered key foreign relationships and collaborations, particularly during and after World War II. The mobility and choices of the internationally celebrated cosmopolitans, Hu Shi and Hang Liwu, illustrate these dynamics and the forms of institution-building enabled by their bicultural expertise and charisma. Madeline Hsu served as Director of the Center for Asian American Studies 2006-2014 and is currently a Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. She was born in Columbia, Missouri but grew up in Taiwan and Hong Kong between visits with her grandparents at their store in Altheimer, Arkansas. She received her undergraduate degrees in History from Pomona College and PhD from Yale University. Her first book was Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration between the United States and South China, 1882-1943 (Stanford University Press, 2000). Her most recent monograph, The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority (Princeton University Press, 2015), received awards from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association, and the Association for Asian American Studies. Her third book, Asian American History: A Very Short Introduction was published by Oxford University Press in 2016 and the co-edited anthology, A Nation of Immigrants Reconsidered: U.S. Society in an Age of Restriction, 1924-1965 is forthcoming in 2018 from the University of Illinois Press.

Conference on America's Asia, Asia's America | 13-14 August 2018

14

Geography, Ethics, History: United States in the World

Tani Barlow Rice University, USA barlow.tani@gmail.com

It is unlikely that geopolitical shifts in “America’s Asia, Asia’s America” are “driving” new truths. My paper analyzes leading U.S. historian’s writing about Asia. Of course we U.S. based historians reflect certain priorities. However, shifting geopolitical changes may or may not condition what and how we know “Asia.” It most certainly is conditioning how we understand the United States. That is why Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 essay "The End of History?" which repudiated Chinese socialism on grounds of geopolitics, seems, fifty years later, little but a genealogy of “neo-liberal globalization.” Critic Franco Moretti’s claim that context is something only machines can see helpfully problematizes causes and contexts. Like sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein, Moretti cannot help show us how to write truthful history. I take the following position in this paper. First, the United States in the World, its diplomatic history, makes clear that neither ideological entities like “One Belt, One Road” or the new Trumpian “trade war” against China are decisive. Each is seeking to intervene in much larger, longer, political economies. Moreover, these conditions are not “reflected” in policies and cannot (until we understand events in the longue and short duree) be grasped in full. I introduce a method I have called “re-regionalization.” It demonstrates how ideologically regions are drawn, redrawn, and further redrawn, sequentially over decades. Reregionalization is a constant process. It is reflected in U.S. diplomacy. It is also a process in Chinese geopolitics. Making claims about territory is ongoing, regions are always being redefined, and we need to pay attention to how this works but it cannot establish a larger understanding of either the United States’s “Asian” nor “Asia’s” United States. That requires researchers focus on historical forces over the last two centuries. Tani Barlow is George and Nancy Rupp Professor of History at Rice University. She recently began a new project entitled The Logic of Society, a history of sociological and social theory in late 19th and 20th century Chinese intellectual communities. Her previous monographs are the forthcoming In the Event of Women and The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism. Barlow is editor or co-editor of seemingly endless stream of edited volumes and is founding senior editor of the journal positions: asia critique. Barlow also co-founded the Chinese Commercial Advertising Archive with Professor Chen Jing, Nanjing University.

Conference on America's Asia, Asia's America| 13-14 August 2018

15

Religious Mobilities and Alternative Networks Kenneth Dean Asia Research Institute & Department of Chinese Studies, National University of Singapore chshead@nus.edu.sg

The spread of Eastern religions to the United States has been well studied, as has the role of American missionaries in the transmission of Christianity to Asia. This paper starts with an example of a folk Buddhist movement that spread from Singapore to the US, Australia and Malaysia. I then describe the formation of an alternative temple network within Southeast Asia that responds to both American missions and the Chinese ‘One Belt, One Road’ initiatives.

Kenneth Dean is Head of the Chinese Studies Department, National University of Singapore (NUS) and Research Cluster Leader for Religion and Globalisation, NUS. His recent publications include Chinese Epigraphy of Singapore, 2 vols. (with Dr Hue Guan Thye), Singapore: NUS Press 2017, Ritual Alliances of the Putian Plains, 2 vols. (with Zheng Zhenman), Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2010, Epigraphical Materials on the History of Religion in Fujian: Quanzhou prefecture (3 vols), Xinghua Prefecture, Fuzhou: Fujian Peoples’ Publishing House, 2004, 1995, Lord of the Three in One: The Spread of a Cult in Southeast China, Princeton: 1998; Taoist Ritual and Popular Cults of Southeast China, Princeton 1993; and First and Last Emperors: The Absolute State and the Body of the Despot (with Brian Massumi), Autonomedia, New York. 1992. He directed Bored in Heaven: A Film about Ritual Sensation (Dean 2010), an 80-minute documentary film on ritual celebrations around Chinese New Years in Putian, Fujian, China.

Conference on America's Asia, Asia's America | 13-14 August 2018

16

The Shape of Water: Rethinking Territory and Influence for American Studies in a Transnational Age

Steven Yao Hamilton College, USA syao@hamilton.edu

In response to the ever-shifting geopolitical seascape that seems such a basic feature of the Pacific Rim region these days, this paper elaborates three fundamental “oceanic” motions and their attendant conditions of historical possibility that seem useful for thinking through what a genuinely transnational American Studies might look like in an age of increasingly porous borders and multiplying transnational linkages: circulation/commerce; displacement/diaspora; and expansion/empire. As I will show, these conceptual dyads together outline a promising theoretical model for investigating the dynamics of religion, literature, and culture in complex transnational spaces and overlapping temporalities. Steven Yao is Edmund A. LeFevre Professor of Literature at Hamilton College. He is the author of two monographs, including Foreign Accents: Chinese American Verse from Exclusion to Postethnicity (Oxford University Press 2010), which was selected as the best work in Literary Studies by Association for Asian American Studies in 2012. He has also co-edited two volumes of essays on topics relating to the transpacific, Sinographies: Writing China (with Eric Hayot and Haun Saussy) and Pacific Rim Modernisms (with Mary Ann Gillies and Helen Sword).

Conference on America's Asia, Asia's America| 13-14 August 2018

17

Borderwaters: Indonesia’s Nusantara Principle and the US Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands

Brian Russell Roberts Brigham Young University, USA brianrussellroberts@byu.edu

In contrast to certain assumptions underlying borderlands frameworks that have become nearly ubiquitous in the field of American Studies during the past few decades, this presentation advances the image of an island-oriented United States of America that has engaged with other nation-states according to what I am describing as a borderwaters framework. Borderwaters have been interlinked with governmentality’s engagement in modes of non-Euclidean spatial perception in which the state’s imagination of borders has not been the evocation of, in Gloria Anzaldúa’s famous terms, an “unnatural boundary” but has rather been a partial function of the geological and hydrological materialities and processes to which governmentality has tended to affix water-based and water-dependent borders. Taking up the representation of islands and oceans in mid-twentieth-century art published in US magazines and metropolitan centers, this presentation examines some of the ways borderwaters have been produced, particularly surrounding the adjacent governmental entities of Indonesia and the US Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands. Brian Russell Roberts is Associate Professor of English and Director of American Studies at Brigham Young University. He has published on archipelagic topics and regions in journals including American Literature, Atlantic Studies, American Literary History, and PMLA. He is on the editorial board of Rowman and Littlefield’s Rethinking the Island series. His books include Artistic Ambassadors: Literary and International Representation of the New Negro Era (Virginia 2013) and, with Keith Foulcher, Indonesian Notebook: A Sourcebook on Richard Wright and the Bandung Conference (Duke 2016). He is the editor, with Michelle Stephens, of the collection Archipelagic American Studies (Duke 2017). He received African American Review’s 2009 Darwin T. Turner Award and was a 2015 Fulbright Senior Scholar in Indonesia. He is currently co-editing—with Hester Blum, Mary Eyring, and Iping Liang—a special forum on “Archipelagoes, Oceans, and American Visualities” for Journal of Transnational American Studies. His in-progress book, under contract with Duke, is titled Borderwaters: Amid the Archipelagic States of America.

Conference on America's Asia, Asia's America | 13-14 August 2018

18

Politics of Space and Poetics of Desire: Reading David Young’s Novels on Bangkok

Suradech Chotiudompant Chulalongkorn University, Thailand suradech.C@chula.ac.th

The essay aims to investigate how David Young, an American novelist, uses the city of Bangkok as an active platform to explore the psychological states of American expatriates and locals living there. Young’s novels, especially Sukhumvit Road and Khao San Road, tellingly use the street names frequented by American tourists in Bangkok not only to connote a sense of familiarity but also point towards how these places act as what Mary Louise Pratt terms “the contact zone”, in which different cultures and their accompanying beliefs, customs, expectations, and actions collide. While Sukhumvit Road is one of Bangkok’s main roads lined with such places as five-star hotels and go-go bars known to American tourists, Khao San Road is the main haunt for younger American travelers, especially the backpackers who take advantage of cheaper accommodation and restaurants located around that area and often use the road as a starting point for their journeys. Through the detailed analysis of how Young explores Bangkok in these novels, I hope to generate a context-sensitive reading in which the desires and psychologies of the American characters involved will be pitted against their spatial imagination. Suradech Chotiudompant is Associate Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature, Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University, Thailand. He has written widely on contemporary international and Thai literature as his main research interests include contemporary world literature and literary theory. His publications in Thai include Magical Realism in the Works of Gabriel García Márquez and 20-Century Literary Theory from the Western World. At present, he is interested in the application of contemporary social theory and such related topics as identity politics, consumer culture and urban studies, to literary works.

Conference on America's Asia, Asia's America| 13-14 August 2018

19

Writing America: Transnational Elements in Philippine Literature in English

Lily Rose Tope University of the Philippines–Diliman, Philippines lrtope@yahoo.com

America came to the Philippines in 1899 bringing with it American public education and the English language. Filipino writers, hungry for education, adapted to the English language readily and produced works in English within the first two decades. A period of imitation followed thereafter as American literary models were adopted through the public schools. This paper wants to investigate what has been kept after the period of imitation and where the English language has been taken by the Filipino writers. It also wants to see if there has been any difference in how the Filipino writer of today has adopted new forms, concepts, and thematic renditions from American writing. Lily Rose Tope is Professor and Current Chair of the Department of English and Comparative Literature, University of the Philippines, Diliman. She has a PhD from the National University of Singapore. She is author of (Un)Framing (Un)Framing Southeast Asia: Nationalism and the Post Colonial Text in English in Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines and co-editor of An Anthology of English Writing from Southeast Asia, published in Singapore. She has written various articles on Southeast Asian Literature in English, Asian literature in translation, Philippine Chinese literature, and Philippine Literature in English.

Conference on America's Asia, Asia's America | 13-14 August 2018

20

“What's in it for us?”: An Indonesian Perspective on American Studies as a Field of Inquiry in the Trump Era

Bayu Kristianto University of Indonesia baladewabayu@gmail.com

This paper seeks to answer the questions: How has the image of the United States in Indonesia changed after Trump rose to power? Is there a correlation between Trump’s controversial policies and an increased interest in American Studies among people and students in Indonesia? How can this phenomenon encourage us to think about the direction of American Studies in Indonesia, Southeast Asia, and Asia? In-depth interviews will be conducted with the new students in the American Studies Program at the University of Indonesia in order to identify the current trends in Indonesia that led to a rising interest toward the United States and American Studies in particular. The paper will also take into account the discourse of the location of American Studies in Asia and the meaning of the transnational turn in American Studies for Indonesia. Bayu Kristianto is an instructor and faculty member at the English Department, Faculty of Humanities, Universitas Indonesia. He is currently the head of American Studies Program (a Master’s program), the School of Strategic and Global Studies, Universitas Indonesia, where he is also an instructor. He earned his Bachelor’s degree in English from Universitas Indonesia, his Master’s degree in American Studies from the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo, and his PhD degree in Native American Studies from the University of California, Davis. His areas of interests are Native American Studies, American Studies, English and American literature, Cultural Studies, and film studies. He has published a number of articles in the form of literary and film criticism in several academic journals both in Indonesia and abroad, as well as given presentations grappling with various issues in literature and film studies.