Imagining Ourselves
Featured Becoming Diaspora: Deleuzian Readings of Vahé Oshagan's Oeuvre, a 20th Century Poet Writing in Western Armenian View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Karen Jallatyan
While the 20th century cultural production of the Armenian diaspora has been in the past decades subjected to studies from Foucauldian discourse analytical, psychoanalytic and Derrida-inspired post-structuralist approaches, little has been done to study the former from relational and new materialist perspectives inspired most notably the by work of Gilles Deleuze. This paper strives to close this gap by presenting an interpretation of the prominent diaspora Armenian poet, writer and intellectual Vahé Oshagan (1922-2000). Oshagan's prolific archive and global life itinerary traversing Europe, the Middle East, North America, Australia and Armenia present a perfect opportunity to theorize the dynamics of the 20th century diaspora Armenian chronotopes from Deleuzian relational and new materialist perspectives. The latter will enrich the ways in which the Armenian diaspora has been studied so far as well as suggest innovative ways of thinking about diasporas in general. More specifically, I argue that a Deleuzian reading of the work of Oshagan allows us to theorize a specific kind of post-catastrophic affective temporality and materiality that text-centered interpretations may not necessarily register. It would be also particularly apt to present on Vahé Oshagan for the first time in the Sorbonne University. Oshagan lived in Paris from 1946 to 1952, studied in and obtained a doctorate in Comparative Literature from the Sorbonne in 1966.
(Un)taming Mulan: Representation, Tradition and Discourse View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Liying Wang
According to Foucault, discourse is a set of practices producing and reinforcing certain forms of knowledge but also a site of resistance and subversion. This paper illustrates how a dominant literary tradition has been invented, stabilized but also unsettled in the historical discourse, by analyzing the representations of Mulan (the famous Chinese heroine joining the army by cross-dressing as a man) as a cultural practice. Firstly, this paper reveals that the representations of Mulan has been confined in a tradition that emerged during the Qing Dynasty and keeps gaining vitality from the later transmedia adaptations (such as novel, opera, film, textbook, children’s picture book and propaganda): a tradition that has been associating Mulan’s feminism with nationalism so as to tame her female agency for the Chinese nationalistic agendas. However, by spotlighting an undiscussed short film “Hua Mulan/Moonlight” (2020), this paper argues that such normalized literary practice is unsettled by this adaptation in the sense that it tries to free Mulan from the nationalist agenda and disassociate feminism from nationalism by providing an alternative interpretation for Mulan’s story. Such effort can be perceived as an indicator of the possibility that after being domesticated by and for the chronologically changing national narratives in China, female agency is becoming untamed in the era of identity politics. This paper further argues that it is this possibility that triggers the contemporary reframing of feminism as “toxic” to national security by the very national discourse that used to frame it as healthy to its construction.
Rereading Libra: Beyond a Historiographic Metafiction View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Lijun Wang
Coined by Linda Hutcheon, historiographic metafiction refers to self-reflexivity-featuring historical novels that blur the boundary between fiction and history. One of the representative works in this genre is Don DeLillo’s Libra (1988), a fiction based on the JFK assassination. In weaving the incident into an imaginary CIA conspiracy, the fiction defies the official theory of the assassin Lee Oswald as the lone gunman. Firstly, this paper reveals that the research paradigm on Libra has been confined to analyzing its entanglement with the JFK assassination-related historical materials including the Warren Commission report. As a consequence, DeLillo’s portrayal of the Orient has been neglected. This paper spotlights these rarely-discussed Oriental elements to unveil that in Libra DeLillo installs but eventually by imaging a reversed Orientalism subverts the postwar American discourse where the U. S.-Japan alliance is Orientalized as the romance between an American man and a Japanese woman or as parenthood with America as a mature adult and Japan as an immature child. This study further argues that the fiction can be perceived as an antipyretic that reduces the fever of the American century, i.e., deconstructing the narcissistic ideology that celebrates the political, economic, and cultural domination of America as one of the two superpowers following the end of World War II. Finally, this paper, by resituating Libra in the context of American discourse on Japan in the 1950s, unsettles the prevailing research paradigm of historiographic metafiction and provides an alternative context to that of the JFK assassination for interpreting Libra.
