Querying queer cultural politics: partial, composite, contaminated English
Amie PARRY
The politics of queer literature can be exceptionally problematic when it comes to its engagement with compressed modernity. I would like to bring this problematic politics, which I find fascinating and instructive, into productive dialogue with the ongoing cultural projects of Inter-Asia. Over the last ten years, Inter-Asia has been commendable in its politics, taking up new and varied issues as they emerge in different sites. In addition to putting scholars located in diverse parts of Asia into direct dialogue with each other, what Inter-Asia has also accomplished is the creation of an inter-regional forum for scholars working on social movements. Most important is that in this inter-regional forum, what counts as a social movement, or as cultural or knowledge production relevant to social movements, is a question that has been explicitly addressed. It could have been different, considering that when social movements have been vigorously suppressed in knowledge-producing institutions, what are perceived as more highbrow venues of cultural or intellectual production, especially the literary and even the theoretical, tend to come to be seen as irrelevant or even opposed to historically responsible research for scholars on the left. However Inter-Asia has kept the question open, alive and context based.
Author’s biography
Amie Parry teaches in the Department of English, and is also a member of The Center for the Study of Sexualities, atNational Central University, Chungli, Taiwan. She is the author of Interventions into Modernist Cultures: Poetry from Beyond the Empty Screen (Duke University Press, 2007) and, jointly with Jen-peng Liu and Naifei Ding, Penumbrae Query Shadow: Queer Reading Tactics (Center for the Study of Sexualities, 2007).