November 3, 2017/ 8:00 AM - 6:30 PM

UCLA Faculty Center Sequoia Room

Liminal Anxieties: Marginal Communities and Politics of Resistance

The 22nd annual UCLA Japanese Studies Graduate Conference is a discussion on the creation, maintenance, and subversion of ‘margins’. The term margin itself points towards an ambivalent boundary, used as a means of self-definition, or imposition of identity. Hegemonic discourses of margin and oppression are never exclusively established in a vertical fashion, but include the participation of multiple social, cultural and political factors and equally diverse contributors. Such instances include, but are by no means limited to ‘Otherization,’ the formation of subjectivities, natural and man-made disasters, traumatic memories, and perpetuated inequity in post-imperial or postcolonial contexts. Our conference aims to challenge the oversimplified notions or narratives of violence and discrimination directed towards extant or imagined ethnic, gender, social, political and cultural minorities. We invite participants to rethink how such concepts are often shaped reflexively, involving issues such as resistance, self-victimization, or marginalization’s effects on individual or collective identity, which can either challenge or confirm our dominant conceptions of the human.

The title ‘Liminal Anxieties’ represents the complex interactions among such vertical and horizontal definitions of ‘Otherness’, and the affective reaction of communities towards politically, socially, culturally exclusive policies of hierarchization. Attending to our conference theme, we encourage papers that engage with scholarship that probes beyond conventional definitions of physical exclusion and marginalization and reassesses our understandings of the universal and the particular.

The Keynote Speaker for the 22nd Annual Conference is Dr. Naoki Sakai
Goldwin Smith Professor of Asian Studies, Cornell University

Additional information available here.

Download file: Flyer-1-al-s42.pdf