Alison Klayman (alisonklayman.com)

Alison Klayman is a journalist who, while living in China from 2006-2010, produced radio and television for news sources such as  NPR’s “All Things Considered,” AP Television, Voice of America, Current TV, and CBC. She is the director of the documentary film Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, which won the U.S. Documentary Special Jury Prize for Spirit of Defiance at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. I spoke with Alison at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah about the film’s trajectory, the role of social media in making bringing this story to life, and her working relationship with China’s most notorious artist and filmmaker. Thanks to Alison and her team for their cooperation.

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dGenerate Films: Can you talk a little about the origins of your working relationship with Ai Weiwei and how the project got started?

Alison Klayman: I had been living in Beijing for about two years when my roommate, Stephanie Tung, who was working at Three Shadows [Photography Center, a gallery and cultural center in Caochangdi, Beijing] got me involved in an exhibition they were doing of Ai Weiwei’s photos from New York. The photos are kind of a“greatest hits” series of contemporary cultural figures in China and provided an interesting window into this cross-cultural understanding of New York that I was really drawn to. I was kind of underemployed at the time and Stephanie suggested I make a video to accompany the exhibition. Rong Rong [photographer and Three Shadows director] gave me the okay and I went from Three Shadows to Weiwei’s house with the camera already rolling. It was really natural and organic. I didn’t just show up at Weiwei’s door and say “I’m fascinated by you, I want to film you.” We finished the video and Weiwei liked. I think it showed who he really is—very charismatic and engaging, fun-loving, doesn’t take himself too seriously. And then projects just kept coming up, so I feel compelled to keep filming. That’s kind of the beauty of Beijing—it’s very open and you can easily fall into these kinds of projects unexpectedly.

dGF: The film opens with a very loaded quote about Ai Weiwei’s cats and the fact that, if one of his many cats hadn’t learned to open the front door, no one would know that cats were capable of opening doors. This opening seems to speak both to Ai’s status as a maverick and also brings to mind Deng Xiaoping’s famous declaration that “it makes no difference if a cat is black or white so long as it can catch mice.” Can you discuss this opening?

AK: We tried out a million different openings. I was really uncertain how I wanted to open the film—we even had a different beginning at the screening at Art Basel. I wanted to audience to meet Weiwei first as an artist, one on one. Ultimately, I felt this opening gave the film somewhere to go and gave momentum to many of the storylines, especially the projects related to the Sichuan earthquake. It’s also telling because Weiwei’s house is just filled with cats—animals everywhere.

On the level of allegory, I think this represents the idea that Weiwei is part of a generation of like-minded people, but he’s still a unique case. It’s this fact that makes the film engaging, the fact that he’s completely unique and kind of one-in-a-generation.

dGF: How did you conceive of your audience as you were editing, in terms of their knowledge of China and of Ai Weiwei?

AK: I did post in New York with an editor who had no background in China and no Mandarin language skills, so this gave me perspective on what people know and don’t know about China. I really had no idea beforehand. I designed the film to add value for those who are familiar with Weiwei and get to know him in a new way, but I made the overall assumption that people didn’t really know anything about him.

Now, after his detention, I have to question what people really do know. Sure, people are more aware of Ai Weiwei, but I think this creates more of an appetite for information than a preconception. After the detention, I contemplated changing the film to open with this story-line, but I now see the film as a chronicle of everything leading up to the detention. We had no need to reverse engineer the film.

dGF: In the film, [Chinese art scholar and curator] Karen Smith says of Ai Weiwei’s art “because it’s Chinese, it becomes political.” This seems like a telling description of how even without a topic as politically divisive as Ai Weiwei, any story about China can be politically charged these days. How did this idea inform your storytelling or approach to the film’s inherent politics?

AK: This was an entry point to a lot of aspects of the film. I’ve seen Ai Weiwei interact with a lot of journalists and react to people’s expectations. I think these expectations are what Karen is alluding to. I think people applied the term “dissident” to describe him far before it was applicable. On a certain level, it has to do with anticipating expectations—of existing on a public stage—even though he’s on a public stage all of the time with twitter and press coverage.

Also, there’s an emphasis on what is real vs. fake in Weiwei’s art, so I was curious to know to what degree his politics are genuine. I wanted to know if his political convictions are genuine or more strategic. I’m convinced now that he’s genuine. He puts forth a set of values rather than a plan for political reform and it’s these values that make him a popular figure.

from "Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry"

dGF: Social media has played a huge role in the film’s existence, from Ai Weiwei’s use of twitter to the kickstarter campaign to help finance the documentary. How do you hope social media will be used in the distribution and future of the film?

AK: Social media has been crucial so far. [Twitter founder] Jack Dorsey is a supporter of Ai Weiwei and we’ve had messages from twitter employees saying that Weiwei is an inspiration for what they do. We’ve had meetings in New York and San Francisco, but it’s all still really new, so it’s hard to say how we’ll work to promote the message. It’s a message that’s about much more than just promoting a film. In some ways, the film is a contribution to the history of social media. There aren’t a lot of historical twitter films—this may be the first. I think it’s a challenge for filmmakers regarding how to go forward with telling social media stories and giving a physical presence to these platforms that aren’t physical.

It’s also worth mentioning that I was really struck when I asked Weiwei what, to him, was a watershed moment in his life and he said “the internet.” At first I though, of course, the internet was a big deal for everyone, but this was a truly profound development for him. It wasn’t just a sidenote.

dGF: Can you talk about your experience with Ai Weiwei’s detention? How did this impact you personally and how did it impact the film?

AK: I actually found out through social media, maybe an hour or so after he disappeared, but before his studio was raided. I was in New York and stayed up until maybe 5am, skyping with studio assistants. They were tweeting from his account, acknowledging that it wasn’t him writing the tweets. It was really an all-sides attack on twitter, so I stayed up following [the assistants’] good flow of information.

By Monday morning, it was a big story and I had emerged as a go-to person who was an expert on Ai Weiwei, was in New York, and had strong personal feelings about what was happening. I think I probably had two years worth of media training in a few weeks.  As far as the film is concerned, I took a week long-break from the footage after he was detained. When I came back to editing, I felt a sense of obligation to just finish telling the story. It was tough—a lot of the footage from happy times felt really sad. For a while, it wasn’t looking good. We feared he was going to come up against Subervsion charges, but I really couldn’t stop working. I just wanted to get the film out into the open, to create awareness, so we were just rushing forwards. The day he was released was really the best day ever. It was just so great. The things that’s funny is that, after everything, Weiwei still had the same cell phone number. There was a tweet about a text message he had sent from that number. I later heard from [UCCA director, featured in the film] Phil Tinari and he said he’d just given Weiwei a call and he answered. So I did the same.

dGF: Speaking generally, how do you—as an American—conceive of yourself as the person telling this story? Additionally, you interview a group of people—both expats and Chinese—who occupy a fairly specific echelon of Chinese artistic culture. How does this influence the way the story is told?

AK: First of all, I never saw this movie about someone who doesn’t have a voice. It’s not a story that hasn’t been told and I never set out to speak for someone else. I wanted to present a good, honest, behind-the-scenes portrait of someone who belongs to the world. I spoke with some of Weiwei’s friends who thought he was an American citizen, but in fact, he’s let his green card lapse. As far as the community represented is concerned, I really just want to feature good storytellers telling a good story. I wanted to stick to people with real cred, who know Weiwei, who are close to the world he lives in. In any case, it’s clear that Ai Weiwei is really a global figure.

"Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry" (dir. Alison Klayman)

The documentary Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, which was directed by Alison Klayman and won the U.S. Documentary Special Jury Prize for Spirit of Defiance at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, is a story about an artist and filmmaker, about a tug-of-war between an activist and his government, and a portrait of modern China—but it’s also a story about cats. In the film’s opening sequence, Ai, whose propensity to speak in metaphor is evident throughout the film, discusses the many cats he keeps milling around his home and studio. “One cat out of forty has learned to open the door,” he reports, remarking that if that one cat hadn’t succeeded in opening the door, no one would even know that cats were even capable of opening doors. A charming moment later we see this apparently exceptional cat leap up, open the studio door, and free himself. Welcome to the world of Ai Weiwei.

A portrait of any artist—even one as dynamic and controversial as Ai – is no simple profile to capture, but Klayman’s obvious closeness to her subject and the impressive roster of experts she’s brought on board present a thorough, well-structured chronicle of the artist’s life and times. For Ai, it’s clear from the first frames that every day exists on a public stage: in the international media, on the government surveillance cameras surrounding his home and studios in Beijing, and, most significantly, online. While Never Sorry is an account of how one poet’s son became an international figure for artistic mega-projects and political subversion, it is also a story that explores and champions social media in a way rarely seen on film. From his daily Twitter activity to the “Cao ni ma, zuguo” (Fuck you, motherland) internet meme that launched a thousand gasps, the internet has played—and continues to play—a crucial role in Ai’s international reach as an artist and the practitioner of a broad political message.

The film presents a linear account of Ai’s life, from his family’s years being “re-educated” in Western China to his early artistic career in the New York in the 1980s, the emergence of the Beijing underground art scene from a collective post-Tiananmen depression, and the myriad projects that have ensued over the past few decades. Offering a contemporary narrative touchpoint is Ai’s endeavor to collect the names of all the children killed in the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake. The collection of names, while affecting as a eulogy for an unspeakable tragedy, seems to drive at the crux of Ai’s message. This project, like so many of his artistic crusades, is about calling for government transparency, examining what is real vs. what is fake, about making bold statements and damning the consequences—no matter how personally damaging they might be.

Clashes between Ai and the Chengdu police offer some  of the film’s most compelling footage, providing behind-the-scenes access to the making of Ai Weiwei’s Sichuan-based documentaries Hua Lian Ba Er (Dirty Faces) and Lao Ma Ti Hua (Disturbing the Peace). The altercations suffered during the Sichuan project come to a visual, if not physical climax, with the documentation of a kind of digital camera shoot-off between Klayman and Ai’s assistants and the Chengdu police during a heated confrontation. Ultimately, it’s the momentum of the Sichuan project and ensuing violent entanglements with the Chengdu police that leads the story to the moment Ai is now best known for: his eighty-one day disappearance and detention at the hands of Chinese authorities in 2011.

Birds in flight: flipping in solidarity at the Sundance Awards cenemony

While weaving together the various threads that compose Ai’s story, Klayman employs no singular narrator, but relies on the expertise of a community of artists and scholars who are intimately acquainted with Weiwei and his world, such as Chinese art experts Karen Smith and Philip Tinari, New Yorker correspondent Evan Osnos, director Gu Changwei, artist Chen Danqing, and Ai Weiwei’s mother and his wife, the artist Lu Qing. This assembly of de facto narrators may not represent a broad range of Chinese or even expat attitudes but speak to a specific intellectual culture of galleries and museums, the spaces that house, but do not necessarily typify, the tangible pieces of Ai’s message.

There’s no denying that Ai Weiwei is a film constructed for non-Chinese audiences whose potentially cursory acquaintance with Ai’s story will be well-served by Klayman’s clear, if occasionally somewhat didactic style of reporting. There may remain, however, a few gaps in the audience’s understanding after the credits roll. The final credits sequence is accompanied by a video of Ai singing along to the Cao Ni Ma song. This Chinese internet sensation that plays on the characters Cao Ni Ma (meaning, ostensibly, “Grass Mud Horse”) being phonetically identical to the characters for “Fuck Your Mother” has come to represent the internet’s usefulness to in expressing superficially-apolitical sentiments below government radar.

The meaning of this epilogue was lost on numerous members of the Sundance audience, baffled that such a trenchant piece of reporting—while certainly light-hearted at moments—would end on such a silly-seeming note. Indeed, Ai’s opening story about his cats is broadly allegorical, but bears even more significant weight when one considers Deng Xiaoping’s famous declaration that “it makes no difference if a cat is black or white as long as it catches mice.” So much of Ai Weiwei’s work and life is devoted to wading through the black and white of ethical and political behavior, not to mention tangling with the often indiscriminate “mouse-catching” of the Chinese government, to present the quote without this deeper context seems somehow to weaken it.

Overall, the Spirit of Defiance award seems highly appropriate for this film that promotes in its subject an undeniable spirit of rebellion. In Ai Weiwei’s world, there’s the rebellion of creation in a country fixed in an endless cycle of destruction and development, the rebellion of using social media to subvert the restraints of local geography, and the thrilling rebellion of an outstretched middle finger—a gesture of solidarity adopted by the Sundance awards ceremony audience—to show the world just what he’s made of.

The Association for Asian Performance (AAP) invites submissions for its
18th Annual Adjudicated Panel to be held during the Association for Asian
Performance annual conference in Washington, D.C., August 1-2, 2012, which
precedes the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) conference.

Anyone (current and recent graduate students, scholars, teachers, artists)
early in their scholarly career or who has not presented a paper at an AAP
conference before is welcome to submit work for consideration. To qualify
one need not necessarily be affiliated with an institution of higher
learning, although this is expected. Papers (8-10 double-spaced pages) may
deal with any aspect of Asian performance or drama. Preparation of the
manuscript in Asian Theatre Journal style, which can be gleaned from a
recent issue, is desirable.  Up to three winning authors may be selected
and invited to present their papers at the upcoming AAP conference.
Paper and project presentations should be no longer than twenty minutes. A
$100 cash prize will be awarded for each paper selected, to help offset
conference fees. AAP Conference registration fees are waived for the
winners, who also receive one year free membership to AAP.

The Emerging Scholars Panel Adjudication Committee is chaired by Dr. Kathy
Foley, Editor of Asian Theatre Journal.  Selected papers will be strongly
considered for publication in ATJ, which is an official publication of AAP
and the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE). Those
interested in submitting work for review should mail four (4) copies of
their paper to:

Kathy Foley, Professor, Theatre Arts
1156 High Street
Theater Arts Center, UCSC
Santa Cruz, CA 95064
and by e-mail attachment to: email:kfoley@ucsc.edu

Deadline for Submissions: February 15, 2012
Winners will be notified by April 15, 2012

A separate cover sheet detailing the author’s contact information-address,
phone number, and email address (for both academic year and summer
holiday) must accompany each submission. The author’s name should not
appear on the text proper.

AAP is proud to sponsor this adjudicated panel. Not only is it a chance
for students and emerging scholars to get exposure and recognition for
their work, but it also provides an opportunity to meet and make contacts
with others who are interested in similar fields of research.

Please direct any inquiries regarding the emerging scholars panel to Dr.
Foley.
To find out about the benefits of becoming an AAP member, please check out
our website at http://www.yavanika.org/aaponline

In a country where what’s shown on screen is guarded by the government, online video websites such as Youku and Tudou are revolutionising the way people view film and television. In 2010, the number of Chinese watching video online was 284 million. By the end of 2012 the figure could pass 445m, according to CMM Intelligence, a Beijing-based market research firm.

In addition to providing a channel to an enormous Chinese audience, online distribution is also proving key for artistic ventures that would otherwise remain underground and largely unseen.

…Online platforms are opening up opportunities for filmmakers that cinematic release would stifle. “Our biggest priority is to have as many people as possible watch our films”, says Xiao Yang, one half of film-making duo the Chopsticks Brothers, whose debut short film Old Boys has been watched by 42 million people. “If Old Boys had only been shown through traditional channels, both budget constraints and the plot would have affected the number of people who saw it. On the internet it came alive.”

For film-makers wanting to release in theatres, there are substantial censorship considerations. Last month the state council of legislative affairs drafted three new rules to add to the list of ten cinematic no-nos – which are designed to “promote the prosperity and development of the film industry and enrich the cultural life of the people” – banning the promotion of drug use, hurting people’s religious feelings and “playing up” horror, among others.

“We wanted to make a film that might have challenged censors, and if that was the case we were shutting ourselves off from television and cinema” says Melanie Ansley, producer of Red Light Revolution, a Beijing-based comedy about a cabbie who opens a sex shop – content too racy to pass China’s cinema censors. After release on Tudou last week, the Chinese-language film has had over 1.2 million views. “I think the internet offers a place for stuff that takes a little more risk,” says Ansley. “Some of the comments from viewers of our film say ‘how did this get past the censors? I can’t believe that I’m watching this, that this is up on Tudou’.

"Old Dog" (dir. Pema Tseden)

By Maya Eva Gunst Rudolph

At the Slamdance Film Festival, where Pema Tseden’s elegiac 2010 feature Old Dog made its US premiere last week, filmmakers are asked to share their “war stories”—the trials and tribulations of producing Slamdance’s class of often low-budget, off-the-grid films. While battling budget woes and zany locations mishaps is common among Slamdance filmmakers, Old Dog arrived in Park City with a self-evident “war story,” a sense of the political and poetic enmeshed in each highly emblematic frame of this story of an aging Tibetan herder and his eponymous mastiff.

Though Tibetan director Tseden was educated at Beijing Film Academy and cooperates with SARFT, Old Dog (the “uncensored” director’s cut screened at Slamdance) is a textually and contextually uncompromising film, laying bare a family’s struggle for integrity and tradition in a Tibetan mountain village. Tseden’s filmmaking—calm, measured, unafraid of long takes and wide, vacant shots—is certainly resonant with that of his Chinese contemporaries working in the independent sphere; identifiable as part of an aesthetic movement devoted to digital photography, stolid pacing, and a belief in the revelation of truth through minutiae. Indeed, as with many Chinese independent filmmakers of the past few decades, the juxtaposition of urban and rural, the geography of “development,” is crucial within Tseden’s lens both as a visual and social device.

Old Dog opens with Gonpo putting slowly into town on a scooter, dressed in customary Tibetan herder’s clothes with his raggedy mastiff trotting alongside the bike. The surrounding mountains are tremendous, almost disappearing into the sky. In contrast, the town is a pipsqueak. With its nondescript building flats and muddy roads, the town appears as a cracked root brought to life only by a few tiny details: pool players outside a small shop, kids (human) and kids (goats) playing together, goats watching a kind of urban tumbleweed (a plastic bottle container) blowin’ down Main Street. Gonpo has come to town to deliver yak butter to friends and family, including his police officer cousin, but he ends up in negotiations with Lao Wang, a Chinese trader who offers to buy the mastiff for a handsome sum. From the initial sale of the dog, the story stretches out with the efforts of Gonpo’s father, Akhu, to reclaim and protect the scruffy pup from further acquisition by traders or thieves looking to make a bundle selling the dog to wealthy mainlanders who keep Tibetan mastiffs as pets, as status symbols. It is Akhu’s struggle, both moral and physical, to keep the dog safe that drives the plot to an unexpected crescendo of violence and desperation, but Old Dog is remarkable for the textures that fill up the story and its seemingly empty spaces.

From the opening sequence of Gonpos’ sojourn into town, we encounter an aggressive, busy soundscape. The clink and roar of construction; the shrill call of pop music blaring from stores; the hum of a scooter’s motor; the bleating of goats; wind and insects; even the screechy blather of a Mandarin-language TV station in the family’s otherwise tranquil mountain home. Tseden is frugal with the movement of his camera and subjects and tends to hold a shot long after the frame is vacated by humans and animals, but the cacophony of sounds often overwhelms an abandoned landscape. In the film’s climactic moment, a prolonged event of mercy and brutality, the audience can look away if they choose, but the choked noises of this violent act are impossible to ignore.

Though the allegorical hand governing Old Dog can be heavy at times, even the most loaded metaphor is artfully incorporated into the style and narrative. Gonpo and his wife Rikso’s inability to bear children may suggest an heirless future for Tibetan traditions on a broad scale, but there’s no denying the uniquely human pain in Rikso’s face as she looks out on a courtyard of children playing. In a characteristically composed shot, Rikso and Gonpo stand symmetrically on either side of a school gates; her gaze is on the children, his out towards the distant mountains. The symbolic heart of the film may be the dog and a nomadic legacy being eradicated and somehow appropriated by the mainland, but what reverberates is this family’s desire for freedom. The few POV shots afforded the characters are almost all directed upwards, at the mountains or even the flimsy-looking police station that occupies the second floor of shoddy downtown building. This landscape, after all, is one of ups and downs, the topography that separates town and country and draws the fault lines between these two worlds.

In the end, Pema Tseden has crafted a roughly graceful film that exposes a world not often seen and, in a wash of flatly silvery light and pained expressions, leaves behind a sense of powerlessness before both the grandly natural and also that which is manipulated by man.  The film’s final moments are wide, sweeping shots of Akhu moving steadily through an incredible mountain terrain and disappearing over a hill; the sound of his breathing steady, heightened, and then fading.

"Fujian Blue" (dir. Weng Shuoming)

Robin Weng Shuoming‘s award winning feature Fujian Blue is available rent for all Comacast Cable on demand subscribers only until the end of January. Don’t miss a rare chance to see Chinese independent filmmaking on US cable on demand!

Fujian Blue is a thrilling narrative portrayal of reckless youth, corruption, and heartache in of southern China’s most telling social environments.

A full review by Mike Fu can be found here:

“Subtropical reveries of money, sex, and power dominate the golden triangle of southern China in this gritty neorealist drama from Robin Weng (Weng Shouming). Featuring idyllic natural landscapes side by side with Fujian province’s urban sprawl, Weng’s narrative follows a group of young hoodlums circulating carefree in a vapid nightlife of karaoke bars and dance halls. By day, they pursue a more malicious endeavor to extort money from local housewives, whose husbands have made their fortunes abroad and left them floundering at home. The film opens contrasting rows of decrepit houses with breathtaking mansions, reminiscent of a southern Californian suburb, glistening beneath the sun. Already the dichotomy of contemporary Chinese society becomes apparent: the rift between haves and have-nots threatens to grow ever wider, and the stakes only become higher for a younger generation willing to risk everything.”

"Old Dog" (dir. Pema Tseden)

The Sundance and Slamdance Film Festivals are starting to wind down, but not before a score of China-related films and discussions have made their mark on Park City.

While no films by mainland filmmakers were programmed at the festivals this year, both narrative and documentary projects focused on China have revealed diverse impressions of Chinese life, art, and even filmmaking practice. In Sundance’s US Documentary competition is Alison Klayman‘s Ai Wei Wei: Never Sorry, a through investigation into the artistry, activism, and philosophy of China’s most notorious artist and documentary filmmaker. Representing a different facet of Chinese documentary subjects is China Heavyweight, Yung Chang‘s story of aspiring boxers in Sichuan Province. A co-production between China and Canada, China Heavyweight entered Sundance in the World Documentary competition.

Pema Tseden‘s Old Dog made its Slamdance premiere last night as part of a special screening series. The film, shot in Tibet with a largely Tibetan cast and crew, presents an allegorical narrative of a Tibetan farmer reluctant to relinquish his beloved mastiff to a Chinese trader. Also screening at Slamdance today were a series of independent shorts from Iran—seven films smuggled out of a country with a system of controlling and censoring filmmakers closely reminiscent of that currently governing the work of Chinese filmmakers.

More coverage on many of these films and events, plus interviews with filmmakers, are forthcoming!

Police on duty at Guangzhou Railway Station in early 2012. Image: eChinacities.

On his blog Screening China, Dan Edwards reviews two new films by the prolific documentary maker Zhou Hao, whose films Using and The Transition Period are distributed by dGenerate.  Zhou’s new films Cop Shop and Cop Shop II are both about the daily operations of the police station at Guangzhou Railway Station, one of the busiest public transport hubs in China. Edwards writes, “Without explicitly making the point, the Cop Shop films present a pretty damning view of the vagaries of China’s bureaucratic administration, which impacts negatively upon both the police and the swirling masses outside.”

Edwards goes on to describe how the events depicted in these films reflect the larger social conditions affecting contemporary China:

Unfettered capitalism, in an environment completely dominated by government business monopolies and a weak rule of law, has turned Chinese people against one another and reduced daily life for many to the level of an animalistic struggle for survival. With no effective systems or institutions in place to deal with these issues, the police of the Cop Shop films spend their days fobbing off an endless parade of the distressed and disenfranchised… The Cop Shop films, especially Cop Shop II, are an engrossing look at the myriad pressures and problems faced by uniformed officers in China, as they deal with the front line victims of what has become a cut-throat, highly stratified society.

Read the full article at Screening China.

To watch an in-depth study of the lives of Chinese policemen, watch Zhao Liang’s acclaimed film Crime and Punishment.

Plan NOW to participate in NYCAS 2012!

EARLY submission of panels and papers is encouraged!
The deadline for submitting proposals is May 15, 2012.

The State University of New York at New Paltz will host the 48th annual
meeting of the New York Conference on Asian Studies (NYCAS) on September
28-29, 2012

The NYCAS 2012 program committee invites proposals for panels,
roundtables, and individual papers on all aspects of Asian and
Asian-American history, culture, and contemporary life,representing
disciplines in the humanities, social sciences, and professional schools.
Interdisciplinary proposals are also welcome.

The theme for NYCAS 2012 at SUNY New Paltz is CONTESTING TRADITION. We
invite scholars working in all areas and disciplines of Asian Studies and
Asian American Studies to submit proposals for individual papers, panels,
and roundtables that engage this theme in innovative and provocative ways.
Graduate students and scholars working in the areas of South and Southeast
Asia are especially encouraged to apply.

Topics may include, but are by no means limited to, the following:

? Interrogation of tradition-bound social and gender roles in Asian
political and economic discourses, art and popular media
? Resistance to established canons and epistemological models in all areas
of knowledge and cultural production or social science
? Contested religious, philosophical or cultural traditions, religious
sites, or cultural properties across borders
? Invented traditions and their political, social, historical, or cultural
repercussions

The deadline for all paper, panel, and roundtable submissions is May 15,
2012.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:
Please submit proposals to: NYCAS2012@gmail.com. Individual paper
proposals should include the name, institutional affiliation, and e-mail
address of the presenter, the title of the paper, and an abstract not
exceeding 250 words in length. Panel and Roundtable proposals should
include a cover sheet listing the title of the panel/roundtable, the
names, institutional affiliations, and e-mail addresses of the chair,
discussant, and presenters, and, in addition to the paper proposals, a
panel abstract not exceeding 250 words.

INDIVIDUAL PAPER proposals should include the full title and a brief
abstract of 250 words or less. Individual papers will be assigned by the
NYCAS 2012 program committee to a panel according to topic and should be
short enough to present in 15-20 minutes. Word-for-word reading of papers
is discouraged.

A PANEL consists of 3 or 4 papers organized around a common topic or
theme, and a chair (who may also be one of the panelists). All panel
proposals should include a title and brief abstract of the panel (250
words or less), and a title and brief abstract of each paper. Panels will
run for 90 minutes, and paper presentations should be short enough to
allow for questions and discussion. Creative panel formats that encourage
discussion and exchange are especially welcomed.

ROUNDTABLE format may vary, but could include introductory remarks by each
roundtable participant, followed by comments and discussion among
participants and the audience. All roundtable proposals should include a
title, content summary, and description of the anticipated contributions
of each roundtable participant.

NYCAS 2012 website: http://www.newpaltz.edu/asianstudies/nycas/ (check for
updates)

Please address all inquiries to the co-chairs David Elstein and Akira
Shimada: nycas2012@gmail.com

PLEASE FORWARD TO OTHERS WHO MAY BE INTERESTED IN PARTICIPATING IN NYCAS
2012 AT SUNY NEW PALTZ