Language, Mysticism, and Iconography: Exploring the Cultural Interface Between East and South Asia

American Comparative Literature Association Conference 2006
(Princeton University, March 23-26)

Seminar-panel
Language, Mysticism, and Iconography: Exploring the Cultural Interface
Between East and South Asia

Seminar Organizer(s) and Chairs: Helen Asquine Fazio, and V.G. Julie Rajan,
Rutgers University

Centuries of territorial conflict, shared tradition, and economic exchange
between the nations of East and South Asia have produced a wide-range of
hybrid cultural expressions influenced by the identity politics of both
regions. The evolution of Tibetan representations of the Indian-born Buddha
over the centuries, for example, displays Tibet's ongoing attempts to
integrate South Asian tradition into the hegemonic Chinese culture
dominating its territory. A plethora of travel writings, for example by
eighteenth-century British writers George Bogle and Samuel Turner and
modern-day Indian writer Vikram Seth, illustrate the various cultural
lenses, colonial, Western and postcolonial, non-Western, that have
speculated on the interpolation of East and South Asian cultures.
This panel explores how the social, political, economic, and religious
interactions between East and South Asia have influenced and produced a
wide-range of subjectivities framed by those regions, as expressed through
literary and cultural productions from the ancient through modern times.
Paper topics may address themes pertaining, but not limited, to: Reading and
Representing the "Subject"; Literature and Human Rights; Language and the
Human; Translation and Metamorphosis; Western Readings of Orientalism and
Otherness; Media and the Human; The Human and the Natural World; Philosophy,
Literature, and the Human; Gender and Transformation; Religion and
Globalism; Terrorism and Tradition; Monsters and Angels; and Temporal and
Spatial Expressions of Identity.

Paper proposal (maximum 250 words) and a brief bio should be submitted by
November 30, 2005, through the ACLA web-site:
http://webscript.princeton.edu/~acla06/site/?page_id=4
Inquiries may be directed to V.G. Julie Rajan, julie@rajans.org