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[CFP]

Arrival Stories: Migration, Language, and Early East Asian Writing in America

MLA 2027 Convention, Los Angeles, CA

7-10 January 2027

This collaborative session between East Asian LLC and Asian American LLC Forums invites proposals examining the literary production of East Asian international students in the United States before 1950, with particular attention to how their work complicates and redefines the borders between Asian and Asian American literary, cultural, and intellectual histories. Many early writers from China, Japan, and Korea arrived in the U.S. as students—often through missionary, reformist, or modernizing educational pathways—and it is this phenomenon of student migration giving rise to unexpected literary production that the session seeks to theorize and explore. Notably, some later returned to their places of origin, re-entering Asian print cultures and publics. Their arrivals unfolded amid broader migration patterns and racialized political climates that shaped Asian representation and intellectual life.

While language is a pivotal lens for understanding these writers, it is only one factor that problematizes the Asian/Asian American divide. Their writing also emerged from transnational educational systems, missionary schooling, and cross-lingual intellectual networks that encouraged translation, code-switching, and hybrid forms of expression. These intersecting dynamics made possible forms of literary production that resist neat categorization within national, colonial, or diasporic frameworks.

The session welcomes comparative and cross-lingual approaches, including studies that bring Japanese, Chinese, and Korean contexts into conversation without requiring presenters to address all three. The session will be curated to place individual papers into conversation, emphasizing productive intersections, divergences, and resonances across linguistic, historical, and cultural frames. This session aims to rethink early transpacific literary formations and reexamine the distinction between “Asian” and “Asian American” literature.

Please submit a 250-word abstract and brief bio of 150 words by March 10, 2026 to Jina Kim jinak@uoregon.edu & Chris Eng caeng@umd.edu