Lopez of Literature serves as lead panel discussant in literary confab in Taipei

Assoc. Prof. Ferdinand Lopez (2nd from left, 3rd row) posing for a group picture with the participants of the 2015 Summer Institute in Asian American Studies

Assoc. Prof. Ferdinand Lopez, a Literature faculty member, from the Faculty of Arts and Letters became a lead panel discussant in Taiwan’s Summer Institute in Asian American Studies held in National Taiwan Normal University, from July 16 to 19, 2015. Organized by Taiwan’s premiere institutions of higher education, which include National Taiwan University, National Tsing Hua University, National Chiao Tung University, and Academia Sinica, the Summer Institute envisioned to make Taiwan a platform for transpacific and inter-Asian inquiry.

Funded by Taiwan’s Ministry of Science and Technology, this event featured four plenary lectures delivered by Asian American studies senior scholars who presented intersecting discourses based on the theme “The Subject of Human Rights.”  Prof. Christopher Lee from the University of British Columbia, presented a paper titled “Of Refugees and Relatives:  Narrating Chinese Canadian Subjectivity, circa 1949.”  This account was complemented with another historical discourse from the lecture of Prof. Cathy Schund-Vials of the University of Connecticut who dealt with “The Subject(s) of 1948: Human  Rights, Civil Rights, and Asian America.  In another plenary speech, Prof. Madeleine Thien who represented Nanyang Technological University used  graphic images and symbols to creatively  approach  her lecture   “Sensorial Axes of Sounds and Silences as Articulations of the Subjects of Human Rights Violations.” Meanwhile, Prof. Collen Lye from University of California, Berkeley used  Ed Park’s realist novel Personal Days to illustrate the the rise of Asian crony capitalism, formation of Asian Bourgeois, and collapse of the American economic system.

These plenary lectures were further enriched with roundtable discussions that highlight the following subthemes: “Sexuality, the Nation, and Human Rights”; “Difficult Histories: (Re)Engaging the Past”; “Framing Human Rights: The Politics of Knowledge Production”; and “Program Building: Challenges and Opportunities.” Lopez was featured in one of these panel discussions, where he presented his take on the human rights violation involving the marginal  “Bakla” subjects, which were perpetrated by homophobic militarized institutions of power during the Martial Law regime. After an emotionally charged and thought provoking presentation, Lopez, who was the culminating speaker of the session,  was commended by the audience,  no less than the plenary speakers who appreciated the amount of ethnographic research involved in the paper as well as his performative delivery of the discourse.

The Summer Institute in Asian American Studies in Taiwan is known for its select group of delegates who have to compete for the fellowship slots to be able to represent their institutions in this elite gathering of scholars, writers, and academicians. In the recently concluded Summer Institute, there were forty delegates who came from prestigious universities in Asia and Pacific. Invited panel discussants came from National Chiao Tung University,  University of Utah,  Hitotsubashi University,  Doshisha University,  George Mason Unviersity, Queen Mary University of London, Ehwa Women’s University, National  Taiwan Normal University, Seoul National University, Georgetown University, Qatar, New York Institute of Technology, Nanjing,City University of Hongkong, National Cheng Kung University, and University of Santo Tomas – Manila.