Department of Comparative Literature

Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures
Book Launch – Borderwaters

Date: Wednesday, 28 July 2021
Time: 12NN HK Time (GMT +8)
Speaker: Brian Russell Roberts, Professor of English, Humanities College Professor, Brigham Young University
Via Zoom

Brian Russell Roberts proposes a new, watery. paradigm for thinking about the United States in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Roberts draws on literature, testimonies, visual arts from artists and writers who have felt the oceanic imperial reach of the United States, most notably in the archipelagos of the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean. Borderwaters remaps the US as an ‘archipelagic nation’, and argues for a new imagination of the US across the world.

Respondents: Brandy Nālani McDougall, Associate Professor at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa; Hsinya Huang, Distinguished Professor of American and Comparative Literature, National Sun Yat-sen University; Daniel Elam, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, The University of Hong Kong

About the Author
Brian Russell Roberts is Professor of English, Humanities College Professor, and Director of American Studies at Brigham Young University. In 2015 he was a Fulbright Senior Scholar at Universitas Sebelas Maret in Indonesia. Focused on expressive facets of US transnational and imperial cultures and on archipelagic thought as it has emanated from locales ranging from the Caribbean to Indonesia, his work has been published in such journals as American Literature, American Literary History, Modern Fiction Studies, and PMLA. His books include Artistic Ambassadors: Literary and International Representation of the New Negro Era (Virginia 2013), Indonesian Notebook: A Sourcebook on Richard Wright and the Bandung Conference (Duke 2016, co-edited with Keith Foulcher), Archipelagic American Studies (Duke 2017, co-edited with Michelle Ann Stephens), and Oceans of Longing: Nine Stories by Sitor Situmorang (Silkworm 2018, translated with Keith Foulcher and Harry Aveling). This year, he has also published Borderwaters: Amid the Archipelagic States of America (Duke 2021), which Wai Chee Dimock has described as “essential reading for all Americanists.”

About the Respondents
From Kula, Maui, Brandy Nālani McDougall, is of Kanaka ʻŌiwi (Hawaiʻi, Maui, and Kauaʻi lineages), Chinese and Scottish descent. Aside from her scholarship and poetry, McDougall is the co-founder of Ala Press, an independent press dedicated to publishing creative works by Indigenous Pacific Islanders. In addition, she currently serves on the American Quarterly board of managing editors as well as the board of the Pacific Writers’ Connection. McDougall is an Associate Professor at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa specializing in Indigenous Studies in the American Studies Department. She received a College of Arts and Humanities Excellence in Teaching Award in 2017. She is on sabbatical leave for the 2017-18 academic year. Her current research focuses on the rhetorics and aesthetics of Indigenous women’s activist fashion within land/water protection movements.

Hsinya Huang is Distinguished Professor of American and Comparative Literature, National Sun Yat-Sen University (NSYSU), Taiwan. She is former Dean of Arts and Humanities and Provost of Academic Affairs and Faculty Advancement, NSYSU, and served as Director General of International Cooperation and Science Education, Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan, 2018-19. She is the author or editor of books and articles on Native American and Indigenous literatures, eco-criticism, transnational studies, including (De)Colonizing the Body: Disease, Empire, and (Alter)Native Medicine in Contemporary Native American Women’s Writings (2004) and Native North American Literatures: Reflections on Multiculturalism (2009), Aspects of Transnational and Indigenous Cultures (2014), Ocean and Ecology in the Trans-Pacific Context (2016), and Chinese Railroad Workers: Recovery and Representation (2017). She serves on the Advisory Board of The Journal of Transnational American Studies and Routledge series on Transnational Indigenous Perspectives and on the Editorial Board of Transmotion: A Journal of Vizenorian Indigenous Studies. She is currently working on a book project, titled After Hiroshima: Radiation Ecologies in Trans-Pacific Indigenous Literatures (Routledge).

Dr. J. Daniel Elam is an assistant professor in Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. In 2018-2019, he was a Fellow in the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University. He has previously taught at the University of Toronto and was the Mellon Sawyer Seminar Postdoctoral Fellow in ‘Bibliomigrancy’ at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Daniel specialises in transnational Asian and African literatures in the twentieth century, modernism, postcolonial theory, and global intellectual history. He works on literature from the ‘global south’, with a focus on anticolonial movements in British Empire. He also works Black American anti-racist thought in the 1920s and 1930s, Third World solidarity movements during the Cold War, and anti-Apartheid activism in South Africa in the 1960s-1980s. He has written on Bhagat Singh, M.K. Gandhi, B.R. Ambedkar, W.E.B. Du Bois, Emma Goldman, and other figures. He has published essays in many journals, including Postcolonial Studies, Interventions, and PMLA. More information about his work can be found at www.jdelam.com

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Please register at https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_hdetail.aspx?guest=Y&ueid=77011 for Zoom details.