Co-Productions: Literature, Media and Diaspora in the Japanese Transpacific

John Kim
Comparative Literature
UC Riverside

Setsu Shigematsu
Media and Cultural Studies
UC Riverside

The symposium “Co-Productions: Literature, Media and Diaspora in the Japanese Transpacific” is a two-day event of discussions and debate involving scholars from both Japan and the UC system to take place at UCR in Spring 2021. It brings together scholars of Japanese studies and Japanese American studies around the theme of “transpacific co-production” and breaks from the area studies model that renders nation-states discrete rather than theorizing their shared problematics. In so doing, this symposium foregrounds the notion of co-production as a critical analytic for articulating the dynamic, heterogeneous and hybridized assemblages that traverse the Pacific Ocean and constitute what have been commonly understood as separate national identities. In addition to its panels around transpacific co-productions, it includes a keynote dialogue among three prominent critics of area studies and theorists of race and postcoloniality as well as a segment on how Japanese American history in Riverside had global reverberations beyond the US, in Japan and post-World War I Europe. Not only are such cases historically co-produced from multiple sites, they also can only be studied through scholarly “co-production.”