[About a month ago Vaughn and I had the chance to attend and present at the 57th Northeast Modern Language Association Convention, held this year in Pittsburgh. So as I’ve done with almost every NeMLA conference for the last decade-plus (I wasn’t able to attend last year’s), I wanted to recap some of the stand-out moments here, leading up to a special weekend post on why this organization matters more than ever in 2026!]
Takeaways from the three great papers on the panel I chaired (and on which I also briefly talked about Carlos Bulosan and America is in the Heart).
- Una López-Caparrós Jungmann on Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic (2011): Una got us started with a compellingly multilayered take on mobilities in Otsuka’s historical novel about Japanese “picture brides” at the turn of the 20th century. Her connection of mobility themes to the novel’s first-person plural narrative voice and how it moves the audience through different perspectives was particularly thoughtful, and a great model for how close readings of form can also open up a text’s ideas more fully. But as I prepared to drop the second season of my podcast, I was even more struck by Una’s concluding points about the novel’s conclusion, which brings its characters up to the period of Japanese incarceration.
- Zhuang Du on Kuang’s Babel, or the Necessity of Violence (2022): Zhuang kept us going with a beautifully structured argument about four ways that Kuang’s historical fantasy epic inverts the ideologies of empire and colonialism (despite being set almost entirely at Oxford, rather than in the China of the Opium Wars that is its backdrop). Her analysis of Kuang’s use of Chinese characters and idioms was a great way to push beyond the simple fact of a multilingual text and really consider the role those languages play. But as someone who teaches an Intro to Sci Fi and Fantasy regularly, I was particularly struck by her convincing argument for how fantasy can help audiences envision other abstract concepts like ideologies.
- Brittani Mroz on Murakami’s Unicorns: Brittani concluded this fantastic trio of papers with a compelling take on a pair of parallel novels—1985’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and 2023’s The City and Its Uncertain Walls—that represent two takes by this modern master on some of the same stories, settings, and themes. Her overarching analysis of unicorn imagery, mythos, and legends helped provide a vital context for these specific (and quite strange) versions of the creatures, whom Murakami only calls “the beasts.” But as someone who has loved Murakami since a visiting scholar introduced a teenage me to “The Elephant Vanishes” (1991), I especially enjoyed the chance to hear a NeMLA paper focused on his work for the first time—and it was worth the wait, as Brittani’s phenomenal analysis concluded a thoroughly enjoyable session.
Next recap tomorrow,
Ben
PS. If you were at the conference, feel free to share your thoughts too!
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