OTHER' WATERS: LIQUID METAPHORS OF DIFFERENCE IN ASIAN-AMERICAN ÉMIGRÉ WRITING

Panel Chair:

Juan Ignacio Oliva (U. La Laguna)

jioliva@ull.es

The liquid element has proved a very powerful metaphorical motif in literature ever since its epic origin. Water divided continents and was the physical space for journeying backward and forward, in search for odyssey and adventure (see Ulysses) to find new territories and a promising future (see Columbus' 'El Dorado'), or to settle down in a more natural and idyllic environment (see pastoral Arcadia). Also, water represents the path from one world to the other, the old and the new one, or, in a more transcendenta reading, from earthly existence to a deathly one (see Caronte or Ganga).

Being in itself a filter, a substantial element, it can mutate, become solid or evaporate in a warm atmosphere, thus showing its dreamy literary condition. This panel purposes to analyse the writing of Asian émigré writers to the New (nowadays First) world, the terms of endearment and detachment generated by this very fact and the ways in which the clashes between old wisdom and new technology, monsoon temperament and polite Puritanism are described via watery symbols and paradoxes. Especial emphasis will be put on those metaphors which directly or indirectly represent the chiasmic and oxymoronic distance originated in the mind of the émigrés, that show dislocating effects. Both realities, either separated or united by rivers, seas and oceans of ideology, identity and religion, will be made open by the critical clairvoyance of literature.

  Suggested topics :

- East/West socio-literary representations of water

- Water Metaphors as representations of Otherness

- Water landscapes and water 'mindscapes'

- Utopian/dystopian Waters

- Water as dividing line, water as communal symbol