Adventures at the ACLA (the con post) part 1
Finally starting to recover my energy from the long weekend and long travel days, so here is your ACLA con report.
Thursday was pretty much a travel day. I woke at 4am, grabbed coffee (which Jay had programmed for me, whattaguy) and my already packed up stuff, and hit the road for Albany. Driving in the early dark morning is something I enjoy, strangely enough. The streets are clear and everything's quiet. I had REM's new album on repeat (as I have had for a good week now), and it was smooth sailing.
Security was relatively painless and quick; there's not a whole lot of traffic at Albany International Airport at 5:30 am on a Sunday. I found my gate, and settled in with my netbook (free wifi, yay!) and my Kindle (started the Dresden Files, yay!)
One thing I have learned about planning air travel from this trip is to try and find a happy medium between cheap and quick. This is the first time I planned my own flights all by myself, and in the interest of cheapness, I ended up with two layovers in each direction. Chicago-O'Hare is lovely for connections (this is something I already knew, actually) LAX and LaGuardia are not, especially if you're switching airlines. With both of them I had to leave the secure area and go back through security. In LA at around 4 in the afternoon, this is not an inconsequential task. I did, however, have longish layovers (about 2 hours at each airport), so I was never late for any flight.
The Albany-Chicago plane was an express, and rather small, though not as small as the LaGuardia-Albany one on the way home (propellers!) The Chicago-LAX plane was a big 757 and quite comfy, especially because the seat between mine at the window and the sweet older lady on the aisle was empty. She chatted me up quite a lot about where I was going, and where I was coming from. It turned out she and her husband were from New Hampshire, and he's a retired college instructor who had also taught high school, and she had many sweet stories to tell me about raising kids while writing a dissertation. On a typewriter, and keeping your copy in the freezer just in case.
The Air Canada plane from LAX to Vancouver was my favorite, and had the individual entertainment options in the back of the seat in front of you, so I was able to finally watch Deathly Hallows part 1, yay!
After arriving in Vancouver, which has a truly gorgeous airport which I quickly realized was because of the recent Olympics, I had to clear customs. Unlike my dear colleagues and roommates who crossed the border in Toronto, I didn't have to explain "literature conference" to the customs officials. He asked what I was there for, I said "conference," he said, "ACLA?" Yup. about 1800 people attended, so I imagine he saw a lot of us.
YVR has a skytrain stop right outside the airport (also an Olympics addition, I believe), which is super convenient. I first went out without exchanging any money; I had about $5CAN on me, and lots of US cash and my cards, but it turned out the ticket was almost $9CAN, and it wouldn't read my cards or take US dollars, so I went back in to exchange some money. Not too bad. I rode the train all the way to the end of the line, which took me to the waterfront downtown, and our hotel was only about two blocks away. I was the first of our party to arrive, and I quickly got started on editing my paper for reading length and noting the pronunciation of the Mandarin and Hindi vocabulary in my case study stories (which I didn't really end up needing, sadly.) My colleagues arrived about an hour later, and one of us went out to the welcoming reception while the other three of us just went downstairs to the sports bar next door for food. Tired. Went to bed earlyish, after figuring out where my panel would be meeting, as I was giving the first paper at 8am the next morning.
Friday we got up bright and early. I had taken a shower the next before, fearing that we wouldn't get 4 showers in before it was time to go. This resulted in my hair being less-than-optimal for my presentation. Oh well. I dressed in my "academic drag" as my panel mod would later cheerfully call our collective attire, and had breakfast in the hotel's breakfast room in the basement with one of my roomies. There were clearly a lot of ACLA folks at this hotel, even though it wasn't one of the "official" ones. I slowly came to realize, over the course of the day, that there were many more grad students than professors at this thing. It makes sense, in retrospect. We have much more need to make our work known at the stage we're at.
I got an early start to the Wosk Centre, which was actually just around the corner from our hotel. On that day, our panel was a bit concerned that we had been marginalized by being placed there instead of at one of the two hotels where the rest of the conference was being held, but there were several panels at the Wosk, as well as Damrosch's presentation of the PBS show, and the rooms really are much nicer than the ones at the hotel were.
I was the first one there, and started going through my paper, handouts, and pronunciation guides. Other people trickled in, all double-checking that they were in the right place. All but one member of my panel were grad students, and the few audience member we had, as well. When our moderator arrived, she told us about the mention in the Sun, and got us started.
My paper went well. As I suspected, the majority of the panelists were not fans, and had work that was only tangentially related to the fan-centered panel description. So my fandom 101 and racefail 101 elements were important and well-received. Unfortunately, I didn't have as much time to talk about the fic itself as a result. I had to blast through it and summarize, instead of reading all the quotes I wanted to share. The paper had the intended effect, however, of presenting fandom as an intense, heterogeneous place where fantastic transformative work was happening. The moderator and I were jointly answering questions about fandom in general, and we also both made sure to mention the OTW a few times, as well as encourage folks to look at/submit to the TWC. She's already been published there; I've submitted.
The second paper, by Sangeeta Marwah, was on "Eastern Winds of Change: Embracing Melodramatic Self-Reflexivity in Indian Crossover Cinema." She was concerned that her paper didn't fit in with the fandom theme, but the panel also covered "Forms of Devotion" in other ways, and her paper was also very media-centered. She spoke on the role of mass-media in the identity of diaporan Indians. She focused on movies that have been made by Indians in the diaspora about their crossover identity, and how they use and subvert tropes of traditional Bollywood film. She showed us clips from "Where's the Party, Yaar?" and "American Desi," and referred to other films such as "Bend it Like Beckham," "American Chai," and "It's a Wonderful Afterlife."
This may be one of my favorite examples of what she was talking about (and not just because of my love for Kal Penn:)
She also talks about how the crossover films have their own set of tropes, like the set of characters that include the "FOB," (fresh off the boat, an Indian character who travels to the US and is a bit of a nerdy doofus,) the "ABCD," (American-born confused Desi, such as Kal Penn's character in the clip above, who has tried hard to assimilate and resist his parents' culture), the domineering father, the long-suffering mother, etc. Ultimately, she argues that the crossovers' use of these tropes, especially melodrama, fit a very specific kind of film at a very specific place and time as second-generation filmmakers are telling their stories at the crossroads of their generation.
The third paper given Friday morning (we were supposed to have 4, but one dropped out without letting anyone know, which was rather unfortunate and unprofessional) was given by our panel moderator, Regina Yung Lee. She was speaking on "The Recap as Translation in English-Language K-Drama Fandoms." She began by giving us some context on K-Drama and its fandom, specifically the website dramabeans. Regina is looking specifically at the intersection between the translation that the recappers do from Korean to English, while at the same time, translating the source (the original show) into a recap. For many English-speaking fans of K-drama who are not also fluent in Korean, and who span the globe, the recaps have become their source text. Regina is trying to deconstruct the issues of accessibility in such a dynamic, especially when a recap becomes more than simply a by-the-facts summary of a show-- which, as we all know, is a boring-as-hell recap to read. When you read a recap that is infused with the writer's interpretation and bias-- and cannot also access the original source text because of a linguistic barrier-- what effect does that have on your understanding? It's a complicated issue, especially because the recaps at dramabeans are clearly very well done. Regina didn't have a clear conclusion to this tension she detects. She brought the paper to the panel, I think, with the goal of getting some feedback on the issue, and on the question of whether she should be doing more ethnographic work, as her chapter readers appear to think. I suggested that if she wanted to focus on just the translation issues, a textual analysis should be sufficient, but that if she wanted to delve into the accessibility issue, ethnographic analysis might serve her well there.
After the presentations there was discussion time. We had a lot of questions about fandom in general, which Regina and I answered together or in turns. We introduced some vocab, like "harshing my squee," or just "squee" in the first place. Everyone was very receptive and interested, and also very respectful, in my opinion. I think it helped that the discourse was immediately put in terms of "fandom as academia, or academia as fandom." Regina started us out by stating that what she wanted to do, in proposing this panel, was to create a place where we could talk about the thinks we love, and analyze, and deconstruct, but with the love that comes from within a fandom community.
After our panel was over, I walked with Regina and Sangeeta to the Hyatt so I could register. I perused the book room and purchased a book of articles on Rushdie's work, which looked especially useful since it contains articles written by scholars who aren't exclusively British or American. Since I missed the beginning of the B-strand panels, I walked back to the hotel to decompress and change into jeans, comfy shoes, and throw my hair into a ponytail. One of my colleagues came back to the room, and we loafed around with our laptops until lunch, which was free at the conference that day, provided you listened to a tiny bit of ACLA business and voted on a constitutional change in the structure of the leadership (which sounded like a good idea, and was approved unanimously.)
After lunch I attended a panel on "Theorizing Translation and World Literature Through Fiction," largely because it was co-moderated by one of the translation studies professors at SUNY Binghampton, who was very interested in my talk the last time I was there, and who I also quote in this paper. Unfortunately, her father died a week ago, so she was missing the conference. A former student of hers-- also of my acquaintance because of the Bingamherst conferences-- read her paper and his own, which were both interesting. His especially, which was a look at one of the few Borges short stories about translation that I didn't already know (hers, btw, was mostly about one of the ones I do know: "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote." Ben's paper was on "The Gospel According to Mark,", in which the illiterate family of the foreman of an Argentine ranch reenacts the Gospel literally after the rancher's cousin begins reading them the Gospel nightly. Borges liked to push the boundaries of what constitutes a translation, or question the definition of a "good" translation. Both of these stories are extremely interesting and thought-provoking, and I recommend them if you haven't read them before.
I skipped after-4:30 programming, still a bit knackered, and rested in my room until it was time for dinner with sajia. We had dinner at the sports bar next door, as it was easy for me to find and she could get herself to me easier than I could get myself to her, I think. :) We had a lovely dinner and conversation, and she came along with me to the graduate student reception back at the Hyatt, at which we only hung out with the people I already know (as you tend to do at these things, yes?) Then Sajia went home and my roomies and I, and also two more of our UMass contingent, plus one of our department who had just finished and left us for a post-doc in Pennsylvania (I'm still not sure exactly where) went out for one more drink before heading home, giggling like we were at a slumber party, and finally falling asleep.
Wow, that got really long. I'll post at the halfway mark here, then, and get back to the conference some other time. I should do some other, actual academic work today as well. :)
Also posted at http://kouredios.dreamwidth.org/182632.html ; feel free to comment there if you so choose: add comment/
comments.
Thursday was pretty much a travel day. I woke at 4am, grabbed coffee (which Jay had programmed for me, whattaguy) and my already packed up stuff, and hit the road for Albany. Driving in the early dark morning is something I enjoy, strangely enough. The streets are clear and everything's quiet. I had REM's new album on repeat (as I have had for a good week now), and it was smooth sailing.
Security was relatively painless and quick; there's not a whole lot of traffic at Albany International Airport at 5:30 am on a Sunday. I found my gate, and settled in with my netbook (free wifi, yay!) and my Kindle (started the Dresden Files, yay!)
One thing I have learned about planning air travel from this trip is to try and find a happy medium between cheap and quick. This is the first time I planned my own flights all by myself, and in the interest of cheapness, I ended up with two layovers in each direction. Chicago-O'Hare is lovely for connections (this is something I already knew, actually) LAX and LaGuardia are not, especially if you're switching airlines. With both of them I had to leave the secure area and go back through security. In LA at around 4 in the afternoon, this is not an inconsequential task. I did, however, have longish layovers (about 2 hours at each airport), so I was never late for any flight.
The Albany-Chicago plane was an express, and rather small, though not as small as the LaGuardia-Albany one on the way home (propellers!) The Chicago-LAX plane was a big 757 and quite comfy, especially because the seat between mine at the window and the sweet older lady on the aisle was empty. She chatted me up quite a lot about where I was going, and where I was coming from. It turned out she and her husband were from New Hampshire, and he's a retired college instructor who had also taught high school, and she had many sweet stories to tell me about raising kids while writing a dissertation. On a typewriter, and keeping your copy in the freezer just in case.
The Air Canada plane from LAX to Vancouver was my favorite, and had the individual entertainment options in the back of the seat in front of you, so I was able to finally watch Deathly Hallows part 1, yay!
After arriving in Vancouver, which has a truly gorgeous airport which I quickly realized was because of the recent Olympics, I had to clear customs. Unlike my dear colleagues and roommates who crossed the border in Toronto, I didn't have to explain "literature conference" to the customs officials. He asked what I was there for, I said "conference," he said, "ACLA?" Yup. about 1800 people attended, so I imagine he saw a lot of us.
YVR has a skytrain stop right outside the airport (also an Olympics addition, I believe), which is super convenient. I first went out without exchanging any money; I had about $5CAN on me, and lots of US cash and my cards, but it turned out the ticket was almost $9CAN, and it wouldn't read my cards or take US dollars, so I went back in to exchange some money. Not too bad. I rode the train all the way to the end of the line, which took me to the waterfront downtown, and our hotel was only about two blocks away. I was the first of our party to arrive, and I quickly got started on editing my paper for reading length and noting the pronunciation of the Mandarin and Hindi vocabulary in my case study stories (which I didn't really end up needing, sadly.) My colleagues arrived about an hour later, and one of us went out to the welcoming reception while the other three of us just went downstairs to the sports bar next door for food. Tired. Went to bed earlyish, after figuring out where my panel would be meeting, as I was giving the first paper at 8am the next morning.
Friday we got up bright and early. I had taken a shower the next before, fearing that we wouldn't get 4 showers in before it was time to go. This resulted in my hair being less-than-optimal for my presentation. Oh well. I dressed in my "academic drag" as my panel mod would later cheerfully call our collective attire, and had breakfast in the hotel's breakfast room in the basement with one of my roomies. There were clearly a lot of ACLA folks at this hotel, even though it wasn't one of the "official" ones. I slowly came to realize, over the course of the day, that there were many more grad students than professors at this thing. It makes sense, in retrospect. We have much more need to make our work known at the stage we're at.
I got an early start to the Wosk Centre, which was actually just around the corner from our hotel. On that day, our panel was a bit concerned that we had been marginalized by being placed there instead of at one of the two hotels where the rest of the conference was being held, but there were several panels at the Wosk, as well as Damrosch's presentation of the PBS show, and the rooms really are much nicer than the ones at the hotel were.
I was the first one there, and started going through my paper, handouts, and pronunciation guides. Other people trickled in, all double-checking that they were in the right place. All but one member of my panel were grad students, and the few audience member we had, as well. When our moderator arrived, she told us about the mention in the Sun, and got us started.
My paper went well. As I suspected, the majority of the panelists were not fans, and had work that was only tangentially related to the fan-centered panel description. So my fandom 101 and racefail 101 elements were important and well-received. Unfortunately, I didn't have as much time to talk about the fic itself as a result. I had to blast through it and summarize, instead of reading all the quotes I wanted to share. The paper had the intended effect, however, of presenting fandom as an intense, heterogeneous place where fantastic transformative work was happening. The moderator and I were jointly answering questions about fandom in general, and we also both made sure to mention the OTW a few times, as well as encourage folks to look at/submit to the TWC. She's already been published there; I've submitted.
The second paper, by Sangeeta Marwah, was on "Eastern Winds of Change: Embracing Melodramatic Self-Reflexivity in Indian Crossover Cinema." She was concerned that her paper didn't fit in with the fandom theme, but the panel also covered "Forms of Devotion" in other ways, and her paper was also very media-centered. She spoke on the role of mass-media in the identity of diaporan Indians. She focused on movies that have been made by Indians in the diaspora about their crossover identity, and how they use and subvert tropes of traditional Bollywood film. She showed us clips from "Where's the Party, Yaar?" and "American Desi," and referred to other films such as "Bend it Like Beckham," "American Chai," and "It's a Wonderful Afterlife."
This may be one of my favorite examples of what she was talking about (and not just because of my love for Kal Penn:)
Click to viewShe also talks about how the crossover films have their own set of tropes, like the set of characters that include the "FOB," (fresh off the boat, an Indian character who travels to the US and is a bit of a nerdy doofus,) the "ABCD," (American-born confused Desi, such as Kal Penn's character in the clip above, who has tried hard to assimilate and resist his parents' culture), the domineering father, the long-suffering mother, etc. Ultimately, she argues that the crossovers' use of these tropes, especially melodrama, fit a very specific kind of film at a very specific place and time as second-generation filmmakers are telling their stories at the crossroads of their generation.
The third paper given Friday morning (we were supposed to have 4, but one dropped out without letting anyone know, which was rather unfortunate and unprofessional) was given by our panel moderator, Regina Yung Lee. She was speaking on "The Recap as Translation in English-Language K-Drama Fandoms." She began by giving us some context on K-Drama and its fandom, specifically the website dramabeans. Regina is looking specifically at the intersection between the translation that the recappers do from Korean to English, while at the same time, translating the source (the original show) into a recap. For many English-speaking fans of K-drama who are not also fluent in Korean, and who span the globe, the recaps have become their source text. Regina is trying to deconstruct the issues of accessibility in such a dynamic, especially when a recap becomes more than simply a by-the-facts summary of a show-- which, as we all know, is a boring-as-hell recap to read. When you read a recap that is infused with the writer's interpretation and bias-- and cannot also access the original source text because of a linguistic barrier-- what effect does that have on your understanding? It's a complicated issue, especially because the recaps at dramabeans are clearly very well done. Regina didn't have a clear conclusion to this tension she detects. She brought the paper to the panel, I think, with the goal of getting some feedback on the issue, and on the question of whether she should be doing more ethnographic work, as her chapter readers appear to think. I suggested that if she wanted to focus on just the translation issues, a textual analysis should be sufficient, but that if she wanted to delve into the accessibility issue, ethnographic analysis might serve her well there.
After the presentations there was discussion time. We had a lot of questions about fandom in general, which Regina and I answered together or in turns. We introduced some vocab, like "harshing my squee," or just "squee" in the first place. Everyone was very receptive and interested, and also very respectful, in my opinion. I think it helped that the discourse was immediately put in terms of "fandom as academia, or academia as fandom." Regina started us out by stating that what she wanted to do, in proposing this panel, was to create a place where we could talk about the thinks we love, and analyze, and deconstruct, but with the love that comes from within a fandom community.
After our panel was over, I walked with Regina and Sangeeta to the Hyatt so I could register. I perused the book room and purchased a book of articles on Rushdie's work, which looked especially useful since it contains articles written by scholars who aren't exclusively British or American. Since I missed the beginning of the B-strand panels, I walked back to the hotel to decompress and change into jeans, comfy shoes, and throw my hair into a ponytail. One of my colleagues came back to the room, and we loafed around with our laptops until lunch, which was free at the conference that day, provided you listened to a tiny bit of ACLA business and voted on a constitutional change in the structure of the leadership (which sounded like a good idea, and was approved unanimously.)
After lunch I attended a panel on "Theorizing Translation and World Literature Through Fiction," largely because it was co-moderated by one of the translation studies professors at SUNY Binghampton, who was very interested in my talk the last time I was there, and who I also quote in this paper. Unfortunately, her father died a week ago, so she was missing the conference. A former student of hers-- also of my acquaintance because of the Bingamherst conferences-- read her paper and his own, which were both interesting. His especially, which was a look at one of the few Borges short stories about translation that I didn't already know (hers, btw, was mostly about one of the ones I do know: "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote." Ben's paper was on "The Gospel According to Mark,", in which the illiterate family of the foreman of an Argentine ranch reenacts the Gospel literally after the rancher's cousin begins reading them the Gospel nightly. Borges liked to push the boundaries of what constitutes a translation, or question the definition of a "good" translation. Both of these stories are extremely interesting and thought-provoking, and I recommend them if you haven't read them before.
I skipped after-4:30 programming, still a bit knackered, and rested in my room until it was time for dinner with sajia. We had dinner at the sports bar next door, as it was easy for me to find and she could get herself to me easier than I could get myself to her, I think. :) We had a lovely dinner and conversation, and she came along with me to the graduate student reception back at the Hyatt, at which we only hung out with the people I already know (as you tend to do at these things, yes?) Then Sajia went home and my roomies and I, and also two more of our UMass contingent, plus one of our department who had just finished and left us for a post-doc in Pennsylvania (I'm still not sure exactly where) went out for one more drink before heading home, giggling like we were at a slumber party, and finally falling asleep.
Wow, that got really long. I'll post at the halfway mark here, then, and get back to the conference some other time. I should do some other, actual academic work today as well. :)
Also posted at http://kouredios.dreamwidth.org/182632.html ; feel free to comment there if you so choose: add comment/
comments.