In his One Hundred Years of Solitude, Márquez drops a hint that the indigenous populations of Latin America migrated from Asia, through the purported Bering Land Bridge, with the implication that a look towards the East can potentially reshape the pattern of globalization that had doomed Latin American communities since 1492. This symposium proposes to provide new thoughts on this question. We welcome papers that investigate literary means of remaking the world. Possible topics include: 1. How the literary imagine and reimagine international relations, trade patterns and global traffic of people, goods and ideas, merging general perspectives with detailed depictions of lived experiences. 2. How changes in patterns of globalization converge with the emergence of new literary genres or transformations of existing genres. 3. How literary works negotiate the dialectic of forcing group identifications (along social and ethnic lines) and maintaining individual mobility. 4. How media, communication technology, and material culture have facilitated new translocal or transnational networks of communication and action at significant historical moments. The symposium does not limit itself in regard to periods or languages, though we imagine most papers will focus on authors and texts from the early modern period onwards from a broad geographical and linguistic scope, including in particular literary/cinematic texts offering thoughts on Euro-Asian encounters, Asian diasporic experiences or cross-racial connections. Papers that consider the intersections of the material and media conditions of global exchange and literary conceptions of globalization are particularly welcome.

We have already recruited a number of participants. If accepted by the Congress, we would like to make it an open session and recruit more participants who we believe will bring interesting contributions.

Currently, the presentations already included in this panel fall into two time periods, the early period and the 20th-21st centuries. Topics range from the diversity of global imaginings in early modern European literature informed by Asian culture to colonial and postcolonial responses to Eurocentric models of globalization enabled by new technologies of mediation.

Prof. Jin (East China Normal University), Prof. Cheng (Fudan University), Prof. Gao (Beijing University), and Prof. Wang (Guangdong University of Foreign Studies) will present on early modern literature. Prof. Huh (Seoul National U niversity), Prof. Li (Fudan University), Liu (PhD student at Nottingham University) and Ni (PhD student at Nanyang Tecchnological University) will present on modern and contemporary topics.