Keynote Speakers
May 30, 2019
Danielle Wong is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia. Prior to joining UBC’s English Department, she was a postdoctoral associate in the Asian American Studies Program at Cornell University. Her research and teaching interests focus on historical and contemporary relationships between race, gender, migration, Empire, and “new” technologies. Her current book project examines Asian North American new media productions and performances, and traces a genealogy of “virtual Asianness” by analyzing how Asian North American racialization has, and continues to be, interwoven with social and academic conceptualizations of mediation and virtuality.
May 31, 2019
Jordan Abel is a Nisga’a writer from Vancouver. He is the author of The Place of Scraps (winner of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize), Un/inhabited, and Injun (winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize). Abel’s latest project NISHGA (forthcoming from McClelland & Stewart in 2020) is a deeply personal and autobiographical book that attempts to address the complications of contemporary Indigenous existence and the often invisible intergenerational impact of residential schools. Abel is finishing off a PhD at Simon Fraser University, and he is currently teaching Indigenous Literatures and Creative Writing at the University of Alberta.
Schedule
*Conference program is subject to change.
All attendees have access to wireless internet by connecting to “ubcvisitor” and following the prompts.
All events will be held at Coach House and Graham Room at Green College unless noted otherwise.
Thursday, May 30
9:30-10:30
Registration with coffee and snacks
Graham Lobby, Green College
10:30-11:50
Panel 1a: The Music and Lyrics of Resistance (Chair: Reed Clements), Graham Room
Natalie Shefler (Carleton University): “‘With his kiss the riot starts’: On Anaïs Mitchell’s musical Hadestown”
Christine Frim (University of British Columbia): “‘The Name of That Moment’: Resonating Intimacy in Jan Zwicky’s ‘Open Strings’”
Fiona Tinwei Lam (Simon Fraser University): “Moving the Message: Environmental Advocacy through Lyric, Concrete and Video Poems”
Panel 1b: Resistant Sexualities (Chair: Natalie Rostov), Coach House
Trigger warning: explicit sexual content, slurs, depression, homophobia
Simon Turner (Carleton University): “Ecstatic Death as Biopolitical Resistance in E. M. Forster’s ‘Dr. Woolacott’
Ariel Kersey (University of Toronto): “Monsters in the Closet and Closeted Monsters: Queerness, Monstrosity, and De(con)struction”
Gordon J.R. Cork (University of Toronto): “FISTING FOR FREEDOM: An Investigation of Sex Clubs”
12:00-1:00
Lunch
Served in Coach House
1:00-2:20
Panel 2a: Nations, Borders and Diaspora – Part 1 (Chair: Torin McLachlan), Coach House
Trigger warning: racism, intergenerational trauma, internment, social exclusion
Eury Colin Chang (University of British Columbia): “Disrupting ‘Archival Ghosts’ in The Japanese Problem”
Daniel J. De Paola (University of Western Ontario): “‘This is you girl’: Orientalism, Diaspora, and Identity in Dionne Brand’s No Language is Neutral, Land to Light On, and A Map to the Door of No Return”
Prateek Paul (University of Delhi): “Reading the Resistance of the Resilient Dalits: Analysing the disruptions in Hindi literature through dalit writer Ajay Navaria”
Panel 2b: Critical Race Movements and Failure in Resistance (Chair: TBD), Graham Room
Trigger warning: sexual violence, racism
Dylan Bateman (University of British Columbia): “(Non-)Disruption and (Anti-)Resistance: Erasing Resilience in The Secret Life of Pets”
Sylvanna Baugh (University of British Columbia): “Anarchic Vitality of a Failed Resistance in Dambudzo Marechera’s ‘Black Sunlight’”
2:30-3:50
Panel 3: Resistant Voices from Body to Tongue (Chair: Bradley Jackson), Coach House
Trigger warning: transphobia, sexual violence, misogyny, incest, political violence, rape, trauma
Gage K. Diabo (University of British Columbia): “Fucking Your Fear: (Un)learning How We Listen to Trans Voices with Gwen Benaway’s Holy Wild”
Oliver Bedard (University of Victoria): “The Uncertain Body in Radcliffe’s Corpus”
Amber Moore (University of British Columbia): “Pulping poetic refuse: On staying with the trouble of creating ‘upset’ in art”
3:50-4:20
Break
4:30-5:30
Keynote Address, Coach House
Danielle Wong (University of British Columbia): “The Disruptive Virtuality of Asian Sleep”
Abstract: This talk examines how the online circulation of photos and videos depicting Asians napping in public spaces brings neoliberal notions of agency to their limit. I suggest that the “biologically impossible” body of the Asian sleeper visualizes techno-Orientalist genealogies of Asian/North American racialization, but also offers a mode of theorizing Asianness in the margins of the autonomous subject. I analyze Asian sleep as a performance of waking dreams and consider how such temporalities foreground the virtuality–the undetermined, unintended and mediated processes–of racial formation.
6:00-8:00
Reception
The Gallery Patio & Lounge, Level Four of The Nest
Complimentary hors d’oeuvres and one free drink with ticket (valid for draught, cider, single hi-balls, and all non-alcoholic).
Walking directions from Green College to The Nest
Friday, May 31
All events will be held at Coach House and Graham Room at Green College unless noted otherwise.
10:00-10:30
Registration with coffee and snacks
Graham Lobby, Green College
10:30-11:50
Panel 1: Disrupting Humanity post-WWII (Chair: Roisin Boyle), Coach House
Dorothee Leesing (University of British Columbia): “Layered Ruptures – the Fall, the Fire, the Frequency in Early Handheld Gaming”
Roisin Boyle (University of British Columbia): “Resisting Entropy: Dark Humour in Thomas Pynchon’s V.”
12:00-1:00
Lunch
Served in Coach House
1:00-2:20
Panel 2a: Nations, Borders and Diaspora – Part 2 (Chair: Maddie Reddon), Coach House
Trigger warning: settler colonialism, genocide
Andrew W. French (University of British Columbia): “Disrupting Canadian Nationalism: Why Regional Poetry Means Canadian Poems Do Not Exist”
Maša Torbica (University of Waterloo): “Fault Lines: The ethics and poetics of textual approaches to contested territories”
Taylor Ableman (McMaster University): “Colonization As (Not) a Metaphor: On the Gentrification-Settler Colonialism Analogy”
Panel 2b: The Disruptive Mythos of Time and Scale (Chair: Sarah-Nelle Jackson), Graham Room
Trigger warning: death of children
Molly Dawe (University of Toronto): “Folklore, Myth, and Ecological Forgetting in George Eliot’s Adam Bede”
Scott Russell (University of British Columbia: “The Inhuman Present of the Human Yet to Come: The Mutational Futures of John Langan’s “The Fisherman”
Frank Easterlin (Independent): “Giants, Violence and the Quotidian: A Theory of Relief from the Poetry of Nick Laird”
2:30-3:50
Panel 3: Shakespearean Resistance and Resilience (Chair: Richard Bergen), Coach House
Trigger warning: sexual violence
Danilo Caputo (University of California, Irvine): “Marina’s Resilience”
Miriam Helmers (University of British Columbia): “Shakespeare and the Epistle of James: The ‘Catholic Question Mark’ in The Taming of the Shrew”
Brenna Goodwin-McCabe (University of British Columbia): “’Shall I Speak for Thee?’: The Legacy of Philomela, Shakespeare’s Lavinia, and the Nightingale”
3:50-4:20
Break
4:30-5:30
Keynote Address
Jordan Abel (University of Alberta): “NISHGA: An Artist Talk
In this artist talk, Jordan Abel will discuss his latest work NISHGA–a project that attempts to illuminate the history of residential schools in Canada and the realities of intergenerational trauma–in relation to issues in Indigenous Literary Studies, Digital Humanities, and Conceptual Poetics. While NISHGA is an autobiographical project, the work here also occupies the often overlapping and converging spaces of concrete poetry, photography, scholarly research, and research-creation. This artist talk will be accompanied by a performance of the work.
Endnotes 2019 