Approach and Aim of Conference
The organizing committee hopes that this event will engender unconventional dialogues concerning the widely studied yet, it would seem, deliberately elusive corpus of transnational texts produced from the colonial to the contemporary period. In particular, we are interested in whether scholarship on transnationalism might better align itself with the corresponding artistic and social phenomena by shifting its focus away from the various binarisms that materialize when we emphasize borders, and toward an examination of the more indeterminate border-spaces in which so many transnational texts unfold. By reevaluating transnationalism in these terms, we hope also that this conference will generate novel approaches to the pervasive motif of discontent, a state of mind that in transnational works frequently arises when established borders give way to mutable thresholds of experience.
Keynote - Yōko Tawada
Yōko Tawada is an acclaimed author of novels, short stories, plays, essays, poetry, readings with music, and lectures in Japanese and German. Tawada's prolific career stretches decades and continents. She has published twenty-five volumes in Japanese and twenty-two volumes in German. Throughout her work, Tawada has challenged physical, artistic, and social borders in novel and enlightening ways.
She is the winner of multiple awards for literature, including the Akutagawa, Murasaki Shikibu, and Yomiuri prizes in Japan, as well as the Adelbert-von-Chamisso Prize and the Goethe Medal in Germany. She has been writer-in-residence at Literaturhaus Basel, Washington University in St. Louis, Stanford University, Cornell University, and the Sorbonne in Paris.
She is the winner of multiple awards for literature, including the Akutagawa, Murasaki Shikibu, and Yomiuri prizes in Japan, as well as the Adelbert-von-Chamisso Prize and the Goethe Medal in Germany. She has been writer-in-residence at Literaturhaus Basel, Washington University in St. Louis, Stanford University, Cornell University, and the Sorbonne in Paris.
Documentary Screening - A Home Within Foreign Borders
Levy Hideo (1950-) is the first Westerner to write novels full-time in Japanese. A Home Within Foreign Borders follows Levy as he returns to Taichung, Taiwan, for the first time in half a century. Prompted by an invitation to speak at Taichung’s Tunghai University, he makes the journey accompanied by poet Keijiro Suga, producer of the film, and Wen Yuju, former pupil and fellow author (herself a Taiwan-national writing in Japanese). Keiko Ōkawa’s camera captures Levy without reserve as he dares to step into the space he once called “home”, at times fumbling uneasily, at times a joyous child reborn.
Directed by Keiko Ōkawa.
Directed by Keiko Ōkawa.