Home and Homeland in Asian Diaspora

While many of us may strive to locate a sense of identity and belonging expressed via a home or ancestral homeland; today, however, this connection is no longer, if it ever was, a straightforward identification. This collection aims at mapping narratives or art work of home/homeland that present shared, private, multifaceted, and often contested experiences of place, especially in the context of today’s migrations and upheavals, along with alarming degrees of increased nativism, racism, and anti-Asian violence. This volume includes papers by artists, filmmakers, and comparative scholars from diverse disciplines of literature, cinema, art history, cultural studies, and gender studies. Our goal is to help literary and art historian scholars in Asian diaspora studies, better decolonize and open up traditional research methodologies, curricula, and pedagogies. Kyunghee Pyun is Associate Professor of History of Art at the Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York. Her scholarship focuses on history of collecting, reception of Asian art, diaspora of Asian artists, and Asian American visual culture. She wrote Fashion, Identity, Power in Modern Asia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) and will publish a monograph entitled School Uniforms in East Asia: Fashioning Statehood and Self in 2022. Her two new books, Interpreting Modernism in Korea Art: Fluidity and Fragmentation and American Art from Asia: Artistic Praxis and Theoretical Convergence came out in 2022 (Routledge). As an independent curator, she has collaborated with contemporary artists in New York since 2013 for exhibitions such as The Lineage of Vision: Progress through Persistence and Violated Bodies: New Languages for Justice and Humanity. Pyun co-edited Interpreting Modernism in Korean Art: Fluidity and Fragmentation and American Art in Asia: Artistic Praxis and Theoretical Divergence. She is writing a monograph Forceful Exoticism: Self-censorship and Predicament of Diasporic Artists from Asia. Jean Amato is an Associate Professor in the English and Communication Studies Department and coordinator of the Asian Minor at Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Oregon. Jean has also studied and conducted graduate research in Mainland China and Taiwan for over six years. Working in Chinese and English, her research centers on theories of nationalism, gender and the ancestral home and homeland in Twentieth Century Chinese, Diasporic and Chinese American Literature and Film. In 2014, she received the State University of New York (SUNY) Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching.