Speaker Series: Minor Asias: Crossings beyond Nation

Join us for our Fall Speaker Series, Minor Asias: Crossings beyond Nation

Curated by Assistant Professor Erin Y. Huang, Department of East Asian Studies

What does it mean to think through the Minor—the status of marginality that at once encapsulates the power of domination and the will of resistance? How is “minor” a method and pedagogy of transnational thinking and doing? What new conversations and communities can we foster through a minor-to-minor dialogue, rather than the conventional minor-to-center approach? Critical to the study of empire, nation, race, gender, sexuality, and the environment, the “minor” has been a major method in mobilizing relational thinking, not only across geopolitical imaginings such as the West and the East, or the Global North and the Global South, but also minoritized gender and ethnic communities, major and minor languages, and humans and the sentient environments. The Minor Asias lecture series survey the fields twenty years after Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih’s seminal Minor Transnationalism that pioneered a horizontal method in transnational thinking. Featuring scholars situated in ethnic, gender, and sexuality studies, indigenous studies, and environmental studies, this series collectively explore heterogeneous approaches to minor as method and ask what it means to reimagine minor transnationalism in Asian studies, given the state of the field today.

China in 20th and 21st Century African Literature

Speaker: Duncan Yoon, Associate Professor, Gallatin School of Individualized Studies, New York University

September 5, 2024 (Thursday): 3:30-5:00pm

Unlearning Asia: The Minor Pedagogies of Nakahira Takuma’s Okinawa and Ishimure Michiko’s Minamata

Speaker: Franz Prichard, Associate Professor, Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics, Florida State University

October 11, 2024 (Friday): 2:00-3:30pm

Minor Visions: Korean Photography after the War

Speaker: Jung Joon Lee, Associate Professor, Department of Theory and History of Art and Design, Rhode Island School of Design

November 8, 2024 (Friday): 2:00-3:30pm 

Taiwan Extra and the Future of Sinophone Studies

Speaker:  Howard Chiang, Professor, East Asian Languages & Cultural Studies, UC Santa Babara

January 24, 2025 (Friday): 3:30-5:00pm

State of Dispossession: Politics of Land and Memory on the Sino-Kazakh Borderland

Speaker: Guldana Salimjan, SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Historical and Cultural Studies, University of Toronto

February 28, 2025 (Friday), 3:30-5pm