Assistant Professor of Japanese Kyoko Omori presented a paper at the Association for Asian Studies held in Chicago on March 31-April 3. The title of her paper was "'We Japanese in Japan Should Find Our Own English': Migrancy, Identity and Language(s) in Itô Hiromi's Recent Prose." This paper discussed the migrant poet/novelist Itô Hiromi, migrates between Japan and the U.S. and stories that explore the generative possibilities of interlingual oral/aural communication in everyday life. Itô's current work, Omori argues, offers a way to imagine a "Japanese" literature that moves beyond the borders of a parochial nationalism and monolingualism to take on the manifold linguistic and cultural challenges of our contemporary global existence.
According to the association website (http://www.aasianst.org/aboutaas.htm), "The Association for Asian Studies (AAS)—the largest society of its kind in the world—is a scholarly, non-political, non-profit professional association open to all persons interested in Asia. It seeks through publications, meetings, and seminars to facilitate contact and an exchange of information among scholars to increase their understanding of East, South, and Southeast Asia. The AAS was founded in 1941, originally as publisher of the Far Eastern Quarterly (now the Journal of Asian Studies)."
Posted April 5, 2005
