Reorientations Group

An interdisciplinary group working towards building the scale and quality of reorientational studies, which is not the rewriting but the rethinking of dominant historical doxa in English literary criticism along a global, transnational and transpacific axis. Topics that reorientational studies take up include, but are certainly not limited to: Global English, Transpacific Nationalism, Global Commodities and Labor movements, Historicizing Globalization, Transnational Discourses and Bodies, Translation and Translingual Theory, Global Imaginaries, Virtual Worlds, Cosmopolitanism, Travel(ing) Texts, Pacific Island Studies, Orientalism(s), Sinology and Neo-Sinology, Western and Eastern Imperialism/ Literary Nationalism, Queer Asians/ Cosmopolitans, Theories of Geography and Space, and the role of the East in Contemporary Critical Theory. Projec ted activities include

• 1.) holding semester-long workshops for emerging dissertations that take up the framework of reorientation,
• 2.) bringing in a series of outside speakers who are leading figures in reorientational criticism, and
• 3.) helping to sponsor in-house conferences that deploy reorientational thinking as a methodology or theory.