Conference ProgrammeBooklet

ASLE-ASEAN WORKSHOP‘GLOBAL IN THE LOCAL’: SCHEDULE

Monday, 1 August, 20168.00-9.00am RegistrationAS7 Lobby

9.00-11.00am Launch of ASLE-ASEAN & First PlenaryAS7 #01-17 Welcome Address by Prof Lionel Wee, Vice Dean, Research, Faculty

of Arts & Social Sciences, NUS. Introductory Speech by Chitra Sankaran, Chair, ASLE-ASEAN Coordinating Committee. Launch of ASLE-ASEAN by Prof Slovic and Prof Lionel Wee. Plenary 1: “Singularity: Implications of the Arithmetic of Compassion for Ecocriticism.” Prof. Scott Slovic, Founder President, Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (USA). (Chair: Chitra Sankaran)

11.00-11.30am TEA BREAKAS7 Lobby Poster Presentation (1) by Chong Seng Tong, Zainor Izat Zainal, Yap

Boon Kar, Ng Yu Jin; UNITEN and University Putra, Malaysia.

11.30am-1.00pm Plenary 2: “Nature Writing: The Radical, the Traditional, theAS7 01-17 Transnational.” Prof. Yuki Masami, Vice President, Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (Japan). (Chair: Chitra Sankaran)

1.00-2.00pm LUNCH & Book Launch – Prof Yuki Masami. (Contact Person: Cassandra

AS7 Lobby Teo)

PAPER PRESENTATIONS [THREE PARALLEL SESSIONS]

2.00-3.30pm Session A: Everyday Realities: Gardens, Cuisine & Nature Societies.

AS7 #01-17 (Chair: Aparna Shukla)

Klyth SH Tan Divided as One: MNS and NSS –A Tale of Two (or more) Nature Societies. Nature Society, Singapore.

Rina Garcia Chua Living Limestones and the Move to Refuse Resilience. University of Santo Tomas, Manila, Philippines.University of British Columbia, Kelowna, Canada.

Vanessa Ting Botanic Gardens and the Search for Postcolonial Identity.University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Vo Thien Sa Globalisation and the Preservation of Vietnamese CuisineVietnam National University, Ho Chin Minh City, Vietnam.

2.00-3.30pm Session B: Animals, Women, Gardenscape and Nature AS7 #01-19 (Chair: Shafiqah Song)

Gurpreet Kaur Women, Animals and Violence: Anita Desai’s Fire on the Mountain and Lee Yew Leong’s “Honey, I’m Off to be a Jellyfish Now.”University of Warwick, UK.

Chi P Pham Postcolonial Nation-Building and Environment: Reading the Novel Buddha, Savitri and I by Ho Anh Thai.Vietnam Institute of Literature, Vietnam Academy of Social Science.

Dang Thi Thai Ha The Voice of Nature: Nguyen Huy Thiep and the Ecological Turn in Vietnamese Contemporary Literature.Institute of Literature, Vietnam Academy of Social Science.

Darin Praditta-sanee Gardenscape and the Art of Japanese Gardening in Tan Twan Eng’s

The Garden of Evening Mists.Chulalongkorn University, Thailand

2.00-3.30pm Session C: Ecopoetics, Music and Utopias. (Chair: Kim Su Min)AS7 #01-06

Lin Qi Feng Music and the Relationship between Development and the Environment in Two Riverine Writings.Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

Alan Marshall Green Utopia in Southeast Asia? Mahidol University, Thailand.

Uma Jayaraman Ecopoetics and ‘the Bestial’: Negotiating Female dignity in Contemporary Short Stories from Singapore and Malaysia.Independent Scholar, Singapore.

Chaiyon Tongsuk-Kaeng The Literary Geography of the Japanese Army Camp in Chang-Rae

Lee’s A Gesture Life. Mahasarakham University, Thailand.

3.30-4.00pm TEA BREAKAS7 Lobby Poster Presentation (2) by Le Thi Luu Oanh, Hanoi University of Education, Vietnam & Tran Thi Anh Nguyet, Duy Tan University, Vietnam.

4.00-5.00pm Eco-Readings by Singaporean Creative Writers. (Chair: Meira Chand)AS7 #01-17

Poet: Madeleine LeeNovelist: Suchen Christine Lim Poet: Prof Edwin Thumboo

-------End of Day Programme (Day 1) ------

Tuesday, 2 August, 2016

PAPER PRESENTATIONS (THREE PARALLEL SESSIONS)

9.30-11.00am Session D: Ecofilm and Ecotheatre (Chair: Cassandra Teo)AS7 #01-17

Nisara Wangrata-nasopon Representation of Ecological Consequences of Human Activities in

Thai Documentary Films.Chiang Mai University, Thailand

Miguel Escobar Varela The Mouse-Deer and the Captured Princess: The Reinterpretation of

Javanese Literary Characters in Ecological Theatre Performances.National University of Singapore.

Catherine Diamond Reanimating Forest Myths in Lao Performance.Soochow University, Taipei, Taiwan.

9.30-11.00am Session E: Ecological Discourses (Chair: Aparna Shukla)AS7 #01-19

Arka Mondal Imagining Oneness: Charting Ecological Currents in Edwin Thumboo’s Poetry.National University of Singapore.

Thanya Sangkha-phanthanon From Isan Poetry to the Discourse of “Isan”: Constructions of the

Meaning of Nature and the Environment in North Eastern Thai Literature.Mahasarakham University, Thailand.

9.30-11.00am Session F: Ecological Imaginations (Chair: Gan Sujia)AS7 #01-06

Apple Audrey L. Noda Reconstructing the Wilderness: Finding Identity, Culture and Values in Filipino Children's Literature. Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines.

Nguyen Thi Dieu Linh The Sense of Place, the Sense of Home and the Sense of Self: Ecological Imagination in Hoang A Sang's The Dreams of Chestnut Colour. Hanoi National University of Education, Vietnam.

Agnes SK Yeow Grafting a “New Breed of Humanity”: Eco-materialist Readings of the Posthuman in the Short Fiction of K.S. Maniam. University of Malaya, Malaysia.

11.00-11.30am TEA BREAKAS7 Lobby Poster Presentation (3) by Tran Thi Phuong Phuong, University of

Social Sciences and Humanities, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. (Contact Persons: Kim Su Min and Matthias Ang)

11.30-1.00pmAS7 #01-17 Plenary 3: “Ecological Immunity: Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312 and the Biopolitics of the Anthropocene.” Hannes Bergthaller. Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, National Chung-Hsing University. (Chair: Chitra Sankaran)

1.00 – 2.00pmAS7 Lobby LUNCH & ASLE-ASEAN Elections.

PAPER PRESENTATIONS (TWO PARALLEL SESSIONS)

2.00-3.30pm Session G: Through the Ecological Lens (Chair: Matthias Ang)AS7 #01-17Tin Tin Win The Journey of an Environmental Novelist

Writer, Myanmar.Phan Thi Thu Hien Nguyen Huy Thiep’s The Salt of the Forest (Vietnam) in Comparison

with Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (America) through an Ecological Lens. Vietnam National University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

Beatrice Tulagan The Disaster Gaze: Gendering Violence, Vulnerability and Resiliency in Philippine Narratives.The Climate Reality Project, Philippines.

2.00-3.30pm Session H: Ecological Homes (Chair: Shafiqah Song)AS7 #01-19

Lily Rose Tope Land Speaks: “Land Articulations in Selected Southeast Asian Agricultural Novels.”

University of the Philippines.

Lu Zhengwen The Garden, the City and the Garden City in From Walden to Woodlands

National University of Singapore.

Chitra Sankaran Apocalyptic Vision in Laotian Short Story “The Roar of a Distant War”.

National University of Singapore.

3.30 – 4.00pm TEA BREAK AS7 Lobby Poster Presentation (4) by Zainor Izat Zainal, Chong Seng Tong, Yap Boon Kar & Ng Yu Jin; UNITEN & University Putra, Malaysia. (Contact Persons: Matthias Ang and Kim Su Min)

4.00PM -6.00PM ECOTOUR (Optional). Please sign up at the Registration Desk if you are interested.

-----------------End of Programme--------------

Plenary Sessions

Scott Slovic, English Department, University of IdahoSingularity: Implications of the Arithmetic of Compassion for Ecocriticism

ABSTRACTWe live in an era of too much information and too little caring. Following up on the work of Numbers and Nerves: Information, Emotion, and Meaning in a World of Data (2015), Professor Slovic will turn his attention in this talk to various “imaginaries” (trans-scalarity, vulnerability, and, in particular, singularity) as a way of suggesting how ecocriticism can overcome intrinsic human insensitivity to information about large, slow, distant phenomena. This talk will emphasize ecocriticism as a field deeply associated with information management and communication.

BIONOTEScott Slovic, who co-founded ASLE-US in 1992 and served as the organization’s first president until 1995, is professor of literature and environment and chair of the English Department at the University of Idaho, USA. He has edited ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment since 1995, and his most recent books include the co-edited collections Ecocriticism in Taiwan: Identity, Environment, and the Arts and Ecocriticism of the Global South.

Yuki Masami, Kanazawa UniversityNature Writing: The Radical, the Traditional, the Transnational

ABSTRACTThis talk attempts to “rediscover” the significance of nature writing, which is by no means popular any more. When the second and then the third waves of ecocriticism came with the environmental justice movements and global environmental concerns, nature writing was considered naive for its perceived blindness to social aspects of environmental issues. Yet, it is too simplistic to disregard nature writing for its seemingly romantic disposition. Modern nature writing did kindle and fuel environmental imagination in the twentieth century. Also, while Euro-American traditions are dominant, this literary genre involves a cross-cultural traffic of ideas and thoughts, which was recognized at the earliest stage of the discipline but has not been discussed much. Observing the trans-Pacific traffic of literary ideas and practices, mostly American influences on nature writing in Japan, this talk delineates the development of nature writing at local and transnational levels. Some specific topics will include Henry David Thoreau’s legacy in Japan, trans-Pacific interactions of environmental-minded thoughts and practices in the 1960s, and the subtle yet ingrained consequence of the counterculture movement as it is recognized in Japanese nature writing. For the last hundred years, nature writing has nurtured what may be called a “radicalize consciousness” towards human relationships with the environment, a consciousness which accompanies an interest in and recuperation of the traditional, more environmental thoughts and practices. This talk examines some landmark works of contemporary nature writers in the U.S. and Japan and illustrates a newly fashioned web of thoughts in which the radical and the traditional meet.

BIONOTEYuki Masami is Professor of Human and Socio-Environmental Studies at Kanazawa University, Japan, and is the Vice President of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment in Japan (ASLE-Japan). She has been publishing books and articles on environmental literature with special focus on topics such as literary soundscapes, urban nature, rural ecology, discourses on food and toxicity, biocultural diversity and food culture, and cultural-natural environments called “satoyama.” Her books include Foodscapes of Contemporary Japanese Women Writers (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015; Japanese original in 2012), Mizu no oto no kioku [Remembering the Sound of Water: Essays in Ecocriticism, 2010], and co-edited Ishimure Michiko’s Writing in Ecocritical Perspective (Lexington, 2016). Living in a “satoyama” countryside with her husband and two teenage children, Yuki is an avid gardener who is also enthusiastic about practicing eating where she lives.

Hannes Bergthaller, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, National Chung-Hsing UniversityEcological Immunity: Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312 and the Biopolitics of the Anthropocene

ABSTRACTIn this paper, I will propose the notion of “ecological immunity” as a useful conceptual tool for thinking about the Anthropocene. The term refers to a basic condition of all life: in order to flourish, an organism must insulate itself from its environment and maintain what Claude Bernard referred to as a “milieu intérieur,” i.e. a stable interior space which can support the organism’s vital functions, immunizing it against the dangerous flux of its ecological environment. The history of the human species can be written as a process by which this internal environment is progressively explicated and exteriorized: from the cave to the air-conditioned shopping mall, humans have created ever more sophisticated shells for their collective existence. The philosopher Peter Sloterdijk has described these protective envelopes as collective immune systems, spaces which enabled humans to turn their attention away from the ecological environment and toward the on-going effort of self-domestication and “auto-plastic refinement.” The Anthropocene marks the historical moment when these strategies for immunization reach an absolute limit: as the biosphere is itself revealed to be a finite interior, the outside disappears. It is no longer sufficient to immunize the human collective against the ecological environment; instead, the challenge becomes the maintenance of the biosphere as a whole, now understood as the last immunitary container. Kim Stanley Robinson’s science fiction novel 2312, I argue, can be read as an extended allegory of the problem of ecological immunity and a perceptive exploration of its biopolitical implications.

BIONOTEHannes Bergthaller is an associate professor at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at National Chung-Hsing University, Taiwan. He is a founding member and past president of the European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture, and the Environment (EASLCE), and book review editor for the journal Ecozon@. His research interests are focused on environmental philosophy, ecocritical theory, and the literature and cultural history of US environmentalism. Among his recent publications are a guest-edited cluster on ecocriticism environmental history in Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment (2015) and a guest-edited theme section on ecocriticism and comparative literature in Komparatistik (2014).

Creative Eco-Writers

Madeleine LeeMadeleine Lee, 53, has 7 books of poetry, published by FirstFruits Publications: “a single headlamp” (2003) and “fifty three/zero three” (2004), “y grec” (2005), co-written with Eleanor Wong: “synaesthesia” (2008), “one point six one eight” (2013) and “pantone 125” (2013). In 2015, she was Writer-in-Residence at the Singapore Botanic Gardens and published her 7th book “flinging the triplets” in Nov 2015, a volume of nature and botanical inspired poems. She is currently working on her 8th

volume of poems based on a mathematical theme, as well as a Chinese translation of her works.As a member of the Steering Committee of Singapore Writers’ Festival 2005, she conceived ‘2nd Link’–a 2hr performance of Singapore/Malaysian literature, performed in Singapore & Kuala Lumpur. In 2003, Madeleine initiated NORA (National Library Online Repository of Artistic Works), an e-repository of Singapore literature launched in Jan 05 by National Library. She has spoken on many panels on Singapore poetry/literature and has conducted many poetry workshops at many schools in Singapore and Hong Kong. In Oct 09, an interpretation of her poetry into visual art was shown at The Old School. She has been a mentor in the Mentor Access Programme of NAC. In conjunction with SWF2011, she revived “MOVING WORDS”, a poetry-on-the-MRT campaign with SMRT, NAC and The Literary Company, which culminated in an anthology of new and old Singaporean poems in English, Chinese, Malay and Tamil.

Suchen Christine LimIn her latest novel, The River’s Song, Suchen Christine Lim writes:Pipa girls used to sing in the teahouses and music halls along the Singapore River and in Chinatown. Thousands would come each night to gawk at these girls. They floated like butterflies in their silk qipao, gliding up the stairs.The novel explores identity, love and loss amidst the mass eviction of boatmen and hawkers along the Singapore River. In 2015, The River’s Song, was selected by Kirkus Reviews (US) as one of 100

Best Books of 2015. In 2012 Suchen was awarded the Southeast Asia Write Award for her body of work, which includes Fistful Of Colours (which won the Inaugural Singapore Literature Prize) Rice Bowl, Gift From The Gods, A Bit Of Earth and The Lies That Build A Marriage, and a non-fiction work, Hua Song: Stories of the Chinese Diaspora. A short play, The Amah: A Portrait in Black & White, also received a Merit Prize. Awarded a Fulbright grant in 1996 she was an International Writing Fellow at the University of Iowa and in 2000 its writer-in-residence. In 2011 she was the Visiting Fellow in Creative Writing at the Nanyang Technological University of Singapore. Other residencies include the UK, Australia, South Korea, Myanmar and the Philippines. She has been a prolific documenter of the inner lives of undersung Singaporeans, from vendors living in poverty to women struggling for independence to the inner yearnings of the migrant. In 2015, The Straits Times selected her novel, Fistful Of Colours, as one of 10 classic Singapore novels.

Edwin Thumboo

Edwin Thumboo’s poetry includes Rib of Earth (1956), Gods Can Die (1977), Ulysses by the Merlion (1979), A Third Map: New and Selected Poems (1993), Still Travelling (2008), 35 for Gothenburg (2009), Singapore Word Maps (2012), The Best of Edwin Thumboo (2012) and Word-Gate (2013). A Tamil translation of his poems, The Banyan Tree, appeared in June 2016. The main studies of his work are Ee Tiang Hong, Responsibility and Commitment: The Poetry of Edwin Thumboo (1997), Peter Nazareth, Edwin Thumboo: Creating a Nation Through

Poetry (2007/2008), Essays on Edwin Thumboo (ed. Jonathan Webster, 2009), the December 2013 issue of Asiatic (ed. Mohammed Quayum), and Jonathan Webster Understanding Verbal Art: A Functional Linguistic Approach (2015). The National Library Singapore published Edwin Thumboo: Time-Travelling – A Select Annotated Bibliography in conjunction with an exhibition (Sept 2012 – Mar 2013) on his works.

Paper Presenters

Klyth Tan, Nature Society SingaporeDivided as One: MNS & NSS --- A Tale of Two (Or More) Nature Societies

ABSTRACTNature Society Singapore (NSS) celebrated its Diamond Jubilee (60th Year) in 2014, producing a commemorative double issue of its Nature Watch magazine, which recounted some aspects of its history. I was involved in various small NSS teams that co-edited and co-wrote the content, and also co-interviewed numerous members who reflected on their past experiences.While officially formed in 1991/2, NSS had been the Singapore Branch of Malayan Nature Society (MNS) from 1954 till then. If one wants to retrace further to the 1920s, there was even a forerunning Singapore Natural History Society (SNHS). All in all, while ecologically Singapore is very much still considered a part of the Malayan nature region today, MNS’s and NSS's histories went through a series of socio-political as well as economic turns that contributed to their split.This paper focuses on the issue of "Nature without Boundaries --- Intervention and Restraint" (one of the recommended categories of this inaugural ASLE-ASEAN Ecocriticism Workshop), as it concerns SNHS, MNS (primarily the Singapore Branch) and NSS, globally and locally. On top of sharing materials from the above-mentioned NSS commemorative double issue of Nature Watch, showing how (inter)national agendas can affect natural boundaries, I also make references to Greg Garrard's bioregionalism in Ecocriticism (Routledge, 2004) and articles in Tony P. Barnard's edited Nature Contained: Environmental Histories of Singapore (NUS Press, 2014). Relevant to this context and in conjunction with the recent good news of an increase in wild tiger population worldwide, additionally, I will discuss ecocritical matters relating to the species in both Malaysia (critically endangered) and Singapore (nationally extinct), which may be called "A Tale of Two Ferocities", on revisiting Blake's immortal poem.

BIONOTEKlyth S. H. Tan, always a learner of Literature, works freelance in editing, proofreading, writing, research and some translating. Among others, he is the editor of Nature Society (Singapore)'s magazine, Nature Watch. His interest in ecocriticism has been shaped by different sources at various times, including such studies done when he was a student of Edith Cowan University.

Rina Garcia Chua, Faculty of Arts and Letters, University of Santo TomasLiving Limestones and the Move to Refuse Resilience

ABSTRACTOften described as “resilient,” the Philippines has weathered storm after storm in its archipelago of roughly seven thousand islands. Every year, as lives are devastated by the almost quarterly onslaught of natural disasters, the solutions to sustaining the Philippine environment may not be in its people’s “resilience,” but in a paradigm shift that can be ignited through the ecological literacy of Philippine ecopoetry. Using selected ecopoems from the first anthology of Philippine ecopoetry entitled “Sustaining the Archipelago,” this paper will interrogate how these ecopoems are defining and redefining what an archipelago is in local literature through the concept of “living limestones.” Here, the archipelagic landscape of the Philippines will be mapped out through its poetry, and will be used in the attempt to answer the following questions: First, how does ecopoetry erase the boundaries between/among communities to form a unified literary ecosystem? Second, how does laying out the model for “living limestones” foster sustainability within the literary academe and those outside of it? Third, what can living in an archipelago teach the world about sustainability? In doing so, ecopoetry contributes to democratizing literature not only for human beings, but for all species here and everywhere else.

BIONOTERina Garcia Chua completed her degree of Master of Arts in Language and Literature, major in Literature from the De La Salle University – Manila. Her manuscript was awarded a gold medal for Outstanding Thesis and all of its chapters have been presented in international and national conferences. She also has been a fellow in several national writers’ workshops, was accorded the International Membership Grant by ASLE, and has been published in/written for the University Press of First Asia, Philippine Daily Inquirer, Manila Bulletin, Philippines Graphic, Chicago Review of Books, Dapitan, Kritika Kultura, Tomás Literary Journal, and Green Letters - Studies in Ecocriticism. She is the editor of the first anthology of Philippine ecopoetry, “Sustaining the Archipelago,” which is forthcoming with the University of Santo Tomas Publishing House this 2016 and will be taking up her MA and PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies this September in the University of British Columbia under the supervision of Dr. Greg Garrard.

Vanessa Ting, Department of English, University of MalayaBotanic Gardens and the Search for Postcolonial Identity

ABSTRACTThe first botanic gardens were established in Europe with the systematic discovery of tropical plants enabled by the expansion of colonial power. Plant collection and classification were extensively undertaken for botanical research and as a sign of imperialist power. The early tropical botanic gardens initially functioned as collection stations for European gardens. These became major centres researching economically important crops, reinforcing the colonial hold over the land. By commodifying the tropical landscape, botanic gardens were perceived as aesthetic manifestations of the power of the empire.Kuala Lumpur’s Rimba Ilmu Botanic Garden is unique from other major Malaysian and Singaporean botanic gardens. Rather than a symbol of British imperialism, Rimba Ilmu was established during a time of national identity searching post-Independence and post-nationhood. Set on a former rubber plantation (a British-introduced economic crop), Rimba Ilmu’s forest was regenerated over 40 years with mostly native species. Today, Rimba Ilmu is an ex situ conservation site for Malaysian and other tropical plants, as well as a space for nature education in the city.This paper seeks to examine the differences between the colonial and postcolonial botanic garden in Malaysia and Singapore, and to explore the continued relevance of botanic gardens in the modern world.

BIONOTEVanessa Ting was previously involved in urban and rural healthcare services, and most recently has worked for The Rimba Project, an urban biodiversity and conservation project based in the Rimba Ilmu Botanic Garden, University of Malaya. She is currently pursuing her Master of Arts in English Literature in the University of Malaya. Her research interests are in ecocriticism and urban ecology.

Vo Thien Sa, Faculty of German Studies, University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Ho Chi Minh CityGlobalisation and the Preservation of Vietnamese Cuisine

ABSTRACTIn the last decade, the culinary culture in Vietnam has been gaining more and more popularity both nationally and internationally. Originating mostly from the street food culture, Vietnamese cuisine has a firm basis of coordination and balance, in which dishes are created by combining ingredients from different taste groups. The Vietnamese culinary scene has also served as the inspiration to many writers, including Vu Bang (b. 1931, d. 1984) with his work “Mieng ngon Ha Noi” (“Delicious bites of Hanoi”). The dishes portrayed in his work are of high delicacy and not only do they reflect the eating habit of the Vietnamese people, but also showcase a part of the Vietnamese culture as a whole.Economically speaking, Vietnam is also among the developing countries facing many issues, including environmental problems. One of the very current problems that are being discussed daily is food sanitation, as it has both instant and long-term effects on people’s health. It is a rather new but necessary question of how the Vietnamese people preserve their culinary culture while dealing with food sanitation issues.

BIONOTEVo Thien Sa has recently graduated from and is currently teaching German language at the Faculty of German Studies, University of Social Sciences and Humanites. He represented the Vietnam National University in Thammasat Seminar 2015 held at Thammasat University, Thailand, on the topic "ASEAN Youth in the ASEAN Community and the Global Community". He also had an exchange semester at Bielefeld University, Germany and participated in seminars about German culture and linguistics. He received the scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) for an international summer course on the topic of European culture and Germanistic at Bremen University of Applied Science, Germany.For 3 years, he has also been working as a food editor for VcCorporation. His published works are targeted to bring the attention of young audience in Vietnam to international cuisines, to both concrete and new gastronomical definitions and to our own culinary values. Currently, he is in charge of a video project called "Xem la doi" (“Watch it and get hungry”), with the aim to bring Vietnamese cuisine to an international audience.

Gurpreet Kaur, Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of WarwickWomen, Animals and Violence: Anita Desai’s Fire on the Mountain and Lee Yew Leong’s Honey, I’m Off To Be A Jellyfish Now

ABSTRACTThis paper looks at the link between women, animals and violence through a lens of material postcolonial ecofeminism. Not much attention has been paid to this topic under the rubric of ecofeminism, especially in tandem with postcolonial issues. Anita Desai’s novel Fire on the Mountain (1977) provides an opportunity to re-think some of the postcolonial issues espoused in the fiction of male writers through a gendered perspective while simultaneously considering the specific processes that align women and animals into inferior and stereotyped positions. The research and analysis done in this paper foregrounds a comparative approach where Desai’s Fire on the Mountain is the lens through which Lee Yew Leong’s short story Honey I’m Off To Be A Jellyfish Now (2010) is read. The notion of violence is key in exploring patriarchal oppressions of both women and animals in both Desai’s novel and Lee’s short story.A key argument that is furthered in this paper is that the “other” in the form of women and animals are centred in both the novel and short story although both women and animals are removed and distanced from society. The woman becomes the mediator through which animals can be read. In turn, the identity politics and relationships between men and women are mediated through the figure of the animal. The position of ambivalence is then at the heart of the protagonists in both the stories here where these women neither belong to the cultural or the natural, and defy any romantic or celebratory categorizations of women with the natural sphere that includes nonhuman animals.

BIONOTEGurpreet Kaur is a PhD candidate at the University of Warwick, UK. She has completed her B.A (Hons) and M.A (Research) degrees in English Literature from the National University of Singapore (NUS). She has teaching experience in both NUS and University of Warwick, and has relevant working experience with NGOs and women-related issues.

Chi P. Pham, Vietnam Institute of Literature, Vietnam Academy of Social SciencesPostcolonial Nation-Building and Environment: Reading the novel Buddha, Savitri and I (2009) by Hồ Anh Thái

ABSTRACTHồ Anh Thái (1960-) is a prominent contemporary novelist of Vietnam, he is the most famous for his series of writings that are set in India. Much scholarship examines how globalization has destroyed the existence of a nation-state in terms of social and moral values. Less fellowship looks at the destructive dangers of globalization towards a nation’s natural landscapes and resources. This lack stems from the ignorance of nature as an aspect of a national identity. This research fills this gap by examining the complex and dynamic interconnections between natural calamities, nation-building and modernization in Indian settings in Hồ Anh Thái’s novel Buddha, Savitri and I. Analyzing how natural resources are exploited and how women become “barren” due to the rising presence of Western companies, the paper argues that the novel is an indirect attack of the officially favored globalization process in Vietnam, which subverts the strict censorship in Vietnam that prevents authors from writing social critiques. The paper aims to open up theoretical discussion on environment as an essential factor of postcolonial nation-building

BIONOTEChi Pham is a researcher at the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences (Institute of Literature). She has been studying Vietnamese presentations of Indian literature and culture, including Ramayana, Rabindranath R. Tagore, Gandhi, Hindu temples, Muslim mosques and graveyards, for years. Her current research interests include the Indian diaspora in Vietnam, nationalism and the novel, Indian literature in English, Southeast Asian literature in English and postcolonial theory.

Tran Ngoc Hieu, Philology Department, Hanoi University of EducationDang Thi Thai Ha, Institute of Literature, Vietnam Academy of Social ScienceThe Voice of Nature: Nguyen Huy Thiep and the Ecological turn in Vietnamese Contemporary Literature

ABSTRACTIn Vietnam, the environment was destroyed seriously throughout 30 years of wars in the 20th century (1945-1975) and then it still has been impacted by the forces of the market economy during globalization. The environmental literature has formed itself as a new trend in Vietnamese literary landscape since the late 1980s. However, this literary trend has been ignored largely in most of the literary studies undertaken by scholars from both inside and outside Vietnam. In this article, by introducing some short stories written by Nguyen Huy Thiep – a considerable author of Vietnamese Literature of The Renovation Period, we intend to put forward three major points that the Vietnamese environmental literature emphasizes in general: 1- the voice of nature as the questioning of the official interpretations of the meaning of the wars and the power of economy; 2 - the resanctification of the nature and the ambiguities in the discourses of anthropocentrism; 3- the representations of the pastoral and the wilderness as the refuges for the modern man and the tragic sense of “lost paradise” in the times of globalization and climate change. In conclusion, through an in-depth analysis of Nguyen Huy Thiep’s works, our article aims to discuss the applicability of ecocriticism in local contexts.

BIONOTESTran Ngoc Hieu has worked as a lecturer in Hanoi National University of Education since 2001. He earned his doctoral degree in Literary Theory in 2012. His research interests include literary theories, contemporary arts and Vietnamese modern literature. His articles and essays have been published in literary and several national magazines such as Literary Studies Journal (Nghiên cứu văn học), Foreign Literature (Văn học nước ngoài), Culture and Arts Journal (Tạp chí Văn hóa nghệ thuật). He also works as a translator for some theoretical writings.

Dang Thi Thai Ha is a researcher at the Institute of Literature, Vietnam Academy of Social Science, and is studying the relationship between Modern Asian Literature and physical environment of Asia. She took part in some national and international seminars and conferences: Vietnamese Literature of The Renovation Period – Situations and Prospects (Hanoi, 2014), Reception Aesthetic and Vietnamese Literature (Hue, 2014), Literary Practices in Innovative Period of Vietnam (Hanoi, 2015), Indo-Vietnam Cultural Relations: Retrospect and Prospect (New Delhi, 2016). Her co-authored books include: Vietnamese Prose Work Dictionary, Reception Aesthetic and Vietnamese Literature. Her articles and essays are published in literary and several national magazines such as: Journal of Theory and Criticism, Journal of Military Art and Literature, Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences Journal, Journal of Contemporary Knowledge.

Darin Pradittatsanee, English Department, Chulalongkorn UniversityGardenscape and the Art of Japanese Gardening in Tan Twan Eng’s The Garden of Evening Mists

ABSTRACTThis paper aims at examining gardenscape and the human-nature relationship in the art of Japanese gardening as portrayed in Tan Twan Eng’s The Garden of Evening Mists (2012). Drawing upon the aesthetics of Japanese gardening and Michael Pollan’s view of gardening in Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education, I will argue that the novel suggests the complementarity of nature and human artifice in gardening. More specifically, Japanese gardening which is founded upon the Taoist concept of yinyang, the Zen Buddhist notions of impermanence and asymmetry or imperfection, as well as the principle of shakkei (borrowed landscape) suggests the combination of anthropocentric and ecocentric relationships with nature. Furthermore, as Japanese aesthetics is interwoven with ways of living, the paper will examine how the female protagonist’s apprenticeship to a Japanese gardener in the Cameron Highlands of Malaya transforms the interior landscape of her mind and opens up ways for her to cope with her traumatic experience in a Japanese internment camp during the Occupation where her sister was used as a comfort girl and she herself was tortured and later able to escape but forced to leave her sister behind. My paper will argue that the act of gardening, together with the gardenscape, which embodies Taoist and Buddhist philosophy, awakens the protagonist’s mind to the hidden and delusional nature of reality, moral ambiguities in human life, and the dialectics of memory and forgetting as a means necessary for her to live with her painful past.

BIONOTEDarin Pradittatsanee is an assistant professor of English at the Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand. She received a B.A. in English from Chulalongkorn University, and she earned an M.A. and Ph.D in English and American Literature from University of Oregon, USA, under the auspices of the Ananda Mahidol Scholarship. Her interests include literature and spirituality, especially Asian religious thoughts in English literature, ecocriticism, and nineteenth-century American literature. She is the author of In Search of Liberation: Buddhism and the Beat Writers (2007). Her forthcoming book is Reflecting upon Environmental Problems Through the Lens of Contemporary American Literature (written in Thai).

Lin Qi Feng, Part-time Lecturer in Environmental History, Nanyang Technological UniversityMusic and the Relationship between Development and the Environment in Two Riverine Writings

ABSTRACTOne of the themes of postcolonial ecocriticism is the relationship between development and the environment (Huggan and Tiffin 2015). The river and its watershed provide a rich setting for writers to explore these themes. I compare the riverine writings in two texts, A Sand County Almanac (1949) by Aldo Leopold and The River’s Song (2013) by Christine Suchen Lim. Both authors described the original lives of the river’s human inhabitants and used the music metaphor to describe the riverine environment and the impact that arises from economic development. Leopold, an American wildlife ecologist and conservationist, described in a non-fictional essay a figurative song of the Rio Gavilan watershed in northern Chihuahua, Mexico. According to Leopold, this inaudible “vast pulsing harmony” could only be sensed by long-time human inhabitants who were sensitive enough (Leopold 1949, 149). Lim, a Singaporean author, used music in the metaphorical and literal sense to describe the life of human inhabitants of the Singapore River after independence. While the River was a major factor in the British colonisation of the Singapore, the lives of the people on the river were uprooted following development policies of the Singapore government during the 1970s and 1980s. I interpret these two writings as critiques of development from a western (Leopold) and non-western (Lim) perspective, as well as articulating what Huggan and Tiffin (2015) had identified as two types of human relationship with the environment—belonging and entitlement.

BIONOTELin Qi Feng's research interests lie primarily in the history of environmental thought. In particular, he is keen on studying the concept of the human self in relation to the environment, and has pursued this subject in the context of Progressive conservation movement in the United States, the American conservationist Aldo Leopold, and Daoist thought. He is a part-time instructor with the History Division at NTU, where he lectures on environmental history. Besides history, he is also keen on studying ecocriticism and environmental ethics. He completed his PhD in Renewable Resource at McGill University in 2016, and had earlier studied at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies and the National University of Singapore, where he majored in statistics.

Alan Marshall, Environmental Social Science Programme, Mahidol University

Green Utopia in South East Asia?

ABSTRACT

In celebration of the 500th anniversary of (Sir/Saint) Thomas More's 'Utopia' book, published in Europe in 1516, the Ecotopia Project selected 100 cities worldwide (including many East Asian and South East cities) and presented scenarios of their imagined Utopian futures via artistic depiction with textual support. Their futures are presented in eco-utopian terms, whereby each city is projected to exist within peaceful socio-ecological harmony. In the vein of previous Utopian imaginings, some explanation about how each city can get to this Utopian status is offered, along with a description about the social, political and economic background that may be present then and there. The future of the chosen cities is presented in the form of ‘scenario art’, a new and developing methodology that crosses disciplinary boundaries between art/geography/politics to conceptualize the future of real geographical areas and landscapes. This type of methodology is predicated on reviews and knowledge of both local environmental settings as well as the unique histories and cultures of the chosen cities. This paper will concentrate on some of the many South East Asian and East Asian cities chosen for the project (including Singapore, Dawei City, Hanoi, Shanghai, Beijing, Tokyo, Thimphu, Phnompenh, Yiyang, Lanzhou, and Macau) and it will also discuss the research and teaching methods used within the Project and for the 'environment and society' course at my university in South East Asia. 

BIONOTE

Alan Marshall is a New Zealand scholar employed as a lecturer within the Environmental Social Science program at Mahidol University, Thailand. His fields of expertise include the social study of technology and also environmental art. His projects have studied the social, philosophical, ethical, artistic, and historical background of a number of the environmental problems around the world.

Dr Marshall is an international researcher having conducted projects in institutes and universities all around Europe and in the Asia-Pacific region, like: NIREX, the IAS-STS, KUSTAR, Massey University, Prešov University, AIT and Mahidol University, and Wollongong University and Curtin University of Technology. 

In 2015, he was the recipient of the "Kenneth E. Roemer Innovative Course Design Award" from the 'Society for Utopian Studies.' Marshall's forthcoming book, Ecotopia 2121, (Arcade Books: NY) will be launched in 2016 on the 500th birthday of Thomas More's 'Utopia'. The list of Asian cities selected for the Ecotopia 2121 project can be found at this website: www.ecotopia2121.com

Uma Jayaraman, Independent Scholar, SingaporeEcopoetics and ‘the Bestial’: Negotiating Female Dignity in Contemporary Short Stories from Singapore and Malaysia

ABSTRACTHumans often revel in their self-proclaimed ability to identify interactive possibilities between people and their environment despite common knowledge that Nature does not need humans but they need Nature. There are significant instances of writing about human’s relationship with Nature, and the scientific as well as spiritual potential of this relationship that may eventually lead to a sustainable Earth. Correspondingly, creative writing is also increasingly preoccupied with mimicking ecological processes that sustain Earth. Jonathan Skinner has noted “how certain poetic methods model ecological processes like complexity, non-linearity, feedback loops, and recycling.” Yong Wei Wei’s “The National Bird of Singapore” demonstrates Skinner’s point in attempting to question human desire to align behavioural patterns of birds to shaping a nation’s identity. This, for me, is an instance of ecopoetics. Ecopoetics is a much contended term in contemporary theory and has been subjected to multiple definitions. In this paper, I apply the term to ‘green discourse’ in general and read representations of women in four contemporary Southeast Asian short stories through the ecopoetic lens to explore how female dignity can be salvaged from the debris of urban anonymity.

BIONOTEUma Jayaraman is an active researcher in South and South East Asian literatures in English, and has published consistently on the subject. Her publications include scholarly articles, interviews and book reviews. She also writes short stories and plays about active and latent cultures of the region. Uma Jayaraman lives and teaches in Singapore.

Chaiyon Tongsukkaeng, Department of Western Languages, Mahasarakham UniversityThe Literary Geography of the Japanese Army Camp in Chang-Rae Lee’s A Gesture Life

ABSTRACTMost studies on Chang-Rae Lee’s A Gesture Life heavily focus on questions relating to diasporic Asian-American citizenship and cultural assimilation. However, not many critics have examined the geography of the Imperial Japanese Army Camp in Southeast Asia, particularly in Burma, where the tropical environment is significantly represented in Lee’s novel. This paper seeks to discuss Andrew Thacker’s idea of literary geography in the novel in order to engage with historical dynamism and the brutality of World War II through the plight of ‘comfort women’. The novel portrays Doc Hata, a retired Japanese-American medical supplier, whose past experience as a paramedic officer in Burma haunts a problematic relationship with his adopted, fallen daughter in an American context. As Lee depicts, the representation of the infirmary, the comfort house, and the clearing epitomises the savagery of the army camp in connection with Doc Hata’s identity crisis. I argue that Lee’s memory of war challenges and resists forms of political ideology and its perpetrators that dehumanise the victims. This reveals shame, guilt, and loss – the savagery in the local landscape that embeds the global historical significance.

BIONOTEChaiyon Tongsukkaeng graduated B.Ed. and M.A. English from Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand. Then he was granted the Thai government’s scholarship to pursue M.A. and Ph.D. English at University of Leeds, UK (2010-2016). He is currently a lecturer of English in the Department of Western Languages, Mahasarakham University, Thailand. His Ph.D. thesis explores Ted Hughes’ poetry, the idea of ecopoetics, and animal studies. Chaiyon published articles on Hughes in Thoughts (“The Use of Sexual Imagery in Ted Hughes’ Crow”, 2008: “Geographical Memory, Machine Technology, and the Ecopoetics in Remains of Elmet”, 2014), and on R.S. Thomas in ASR Chiang Mai University Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities (“R.S. Thomas and Localism: The True Wales of his Imagination and Cultural Landscapes”, 2015). He recently presented a paper, 'The Eco-poetics and Environmental Consciousness in Angkarn Jantatip's Poetry' at the 5th Southeast Asian Studies Symposium: Human and Environmental Welfare, 14-16 April 2016, Oxford University.

Nisara Wangratanasopon, English Department, Chiang Mai University Representation of Ecological Consequences of Human Activities in Thai Documentary Films

ABSTRACTThe study will focus on the ecocritical issues portrayed in Thai documentary films. It is aimed at studying how the crisis in nature is narrated through the cinematography in the Thai context, the impact of ecohorror in Thai documentary films, and the activism of the filmmakers against the possible disastrous ecological consequences of human activity. The study will be done in a comparative analysis perspective applying deep ecology and ecohorror framework to analyze two selected documentary films: “By the River,” (2014) by Nontawat Numbenchapol, and “Smoke : A Crisis in Northern Thailand,” (2016) by Marisa Marchitelli. The former reflects the fate of the habitants of Klity, in Kanchanaburi, Thailand, whose river is contaminated by the lead from a mineral processing factory. The film won a Special Mention award from Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland but the villagers had to fight for 16 years to win the the court case in 2014. The latter introduces problems of haze in Chiang Mai city featuring concerns of Chiang Mai people. While the aesthetics of the film are the key to sensitizing viewers, the film’s recognition is also achieved via social dialogues. Besides, ecohorror films are dynamic; they act as a wake-up call for the rights of local people since the film functions as an artistic construct reflecting the actual circumstances of the affected community. Ecohorror film directors are inevitably filmmakers-cum-activists who create a forum for raising awareness for social changes.

BIONOTENisara Wangratanasopon's background spans the fields of translation and interpretation studies and intercultural studies. She is a graduate of Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University with a degree in English and a Masters in Translation and Interpretation Sudies and a student at the Summer School of Translation Studies 2012 at University of Edinburgh. She is now a lecturer at Chiang Mai University. Her courses include Translation for Communication Breakthrough, Introduction to Interpretation, and Views of Modern Society. Her specific interests are literary translation, postcolonial translation, ASEAN literature, eco feminism, deep ecology and Buddhist ecology. Her research interests include An Approach to Translate Postcolonial Literature: A Way in the World by V.S. Naipaul, The Study of Title Function in Walt Disney's Theatrical Animated Film Title Translation, Translationese, ASEAN Literature Translation, Translator's Visibility and Thainess.

Miguel Escobar Varela, Department of English Language and Literature, National University of SingaporeThe Mouse-Deer and the Captured Princess: The Reinterpretation of Javanese Literary Characters in Ecological Theatre Performances

ABSTRACTTwo cases studies are used to understand how the characters and stories of wayang kulit (Javanese shadow puppetry) are used by Javanese dalang (narrators/puppeteers) to re-imagine global ecological challenges through a distinctly Javanese cultural framework. Kancil, the mouse-deer, is a familiar character in many Southeast Asian folktales and literary works. Javanese puppeteer Ledjar Soebroto has dedicated his life to reinterpreting the legends associated with Kancil within the wayang kulit tradition. In Soebroto’s re-interpretation, Kancil –the trickster – has an ecological mission. In new plot twists to narratives taken from the 19th century Serat Kancil, the mouse-deer uses his tricks to rethink the connection between tradition, environment and technology. Similarly, Slamet Gundono’s Wayang Tanah [Wayang of the Soil], casts the familiar characters of the Ramayana in a new light. In his performance, where all the 'puppets' are made of mud and leaves, Sinta's abduction by Rahwana becomes a metaphor for the destruction of the environment.

BIONOTEMiguel Escobar Varela has worked as a theatre scholar, translator and software programmer in Mexico, The Netherlands, Singapore and Indonesia. He is currently Assistant Professor of Theatre Studies at the National University of Singapore. His main research interests are the performing arts of Indonesia and the Digital Humanities. His academic articles have appeared or are forthcoming in Theatre Research International, Contemporary Theatre Review, Asian Theatre Journal, New Theatre Quarterly, The Drama Review, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities and Performance Research. His online project on contemporary Javanese puppet theatre, wayangkontemporer.com was awarded the Wang Gungwu Prize and Medal in 2015 and an Honourable Mention in the 2016 Excellence in Digital Theatre and Performance Scholarship Award (American Society For Theatre Research). More information is available at miguelescobar.com

Catherine Diamond, Department of English, Soochow UniversityReanimating Forest Myths in Lao Performance

ABSTRACTTraditional Southeast Asian performance abounds with nature imagery. The modern spoken drama in the early twentieth century centered on conflicts between generations and genders, their changing social values and political structures in the cities, marginalizing rural arts. The current Southeast Asian postmodern theatre often merges theatrical aspects of the traditional with the socio/political concerns of the modern, but has not take up contemporary environmental issues. I will use the example of some performances in Laos to explore the use of applied theatre to deal with environmental issues and to consider why SE Asian dramatists seem so unwilling to connect the dots between their consumer culture in the cities and the environmental devastation just outside the city borders.

BIONOTECatherine Diamond, a professor of theatre and environmental literature at Soochow University, Taipei, is the author of Communities of Imagination: Southeast Asian Contemporary Theatres (2012) and Actors are Madmen and Spectators are Fools: Taiwan Theatre 1988-98 (做戲瘋，看戲傻—十年所見台灣劇場, 2000). She is the playwright/director of the Kinnari Ecological Theatre Project in Southeast Asia.

Arka Mondal, Department of English Language and Literature, National University of SingaporeImagining Oneness: Charting Ecological Currents in Edwin Thumboo’s Poetry

ABSTRACTEco-poetry is a special kind of expression that affects an imaginative unification of human mind and the non-human natural world, thereby leading/guiding the former to an alternative way of being in the world. It is an efficient system for recycling the richest thoughts and feelings of a community; an artwork that evinces the interrelatedness of all life forms and preservation of landscapes. Keeping this in view, this paper examines the unexplored poems of Edwin Thumboo to accentuate how these serve the aforementioned functions, with inconsistencies in the poet’s environmental psychology/philosophy notwithstanding. It discusses Thumboo’s continuous engagement with the more-than-human natural world; his identification with other life forms and non-human spaces, despite occasional problems with his idea of constructive coexistence, i.e., his objectification of “nature” as an independent, healthy place and having spiritual significance, and projection of culture-nature, city-country/wilderness dualisms.

BIONOTEArka Mondal is a PhD scholar-cum-Teaching Assistant at the Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore, Singapore. His doctoral project investigates British and Indian romantic poets in an ecological context. It aims to contribute to the apprehension of the role that literature plays in imagining viable ecological communities and furthering the cross-cultural understanding of the links between British and Indian literatures. His paper “Indigenous Languages in Conserving Biodiversity and its Implication to Tribal Communities in India”, was awarded as the best poster and published in the proceedings of the International Conference on Conserving Biodiversity for Sustainable Development (INCCBSD- 2013). He has also organised various environment related events and delivered several lecture series in high schools on “Developing Environment Friendly City through Literature”, under the International Rotary Club.

Thanya Sangkhaphanthanon, Department of Thai and Oriental Languages, Mahasarakham UniversityFrom Isan Poetry to the Discourse of ‘Isan’: Constructions of the Meaning of Nature and the Environment in North Eastern Thai Literature.

ABSTRACTThe poem “Isan”, (“The North East”) composed in 1939 by Asani Phonlachan (pseud. Nai Phi) is one of the most highly regarded pieces of Thai literature for its presentation to the wider world of the hardship faced by the people of the North East region of Thailand (also known as Isan) and its vast infertile lands. Such images have subsequently been reproduced countless times in scores of Isan-related literatures. This article studies and analyzes the concept of nature and the environment found in Nai Phi’s poem “Isan”, with reference to ecocriticism, discourse analysis, and theories of social construction. It concludes that nature and the environment as presented in two of Nai Phi’s poems—“Isan” and “Isan lom” (“Isan is wrecked”) are imbalanced: while in some sections of these poems nature is depicted as being extraordinarily plentiful, in others the environment is poor, infertile and uninhabitable. The poet masterfully presents this image through the use of symbolic language and signs. This reflects the social construction by which nature dictates people’s way of life. Furthermore, the fact that the poet selectively presents an image of nature as imbalanced echoes the influence of Marxist ideology on his work. Nature in both these poems constitutes the primary cause of people’s hardship, consequently leading to their exploitation by corrupt political elites. It is argued here that both of Nai Phi’s poems have served in the construction of a discourse of the North East region, portraying it as a “land of hardship and famine.” Since that time, this discourse has been reproduced in more recent Isan literary works. When carefully considered, the concept of nature and the environment which underlies Isan discourse is based on that of ecocentrism. It places emphasis on the greatness of nature and stresses that nature is far beyond human control. Nevertheless, due to the fact that both Nai Phi’s works referred to here are proletarian poems, the poet might see nature as a mechanism which potentially influences people’s way of life in similar senses to other social mechanisms.

BIONOTEDr Thanya Sangkhapanthanon is an Associate Professor at Mahasarakham University, Thailand. He completed his BA in Thai Literature from Srinakarinwirot University (Songkhla) (1980) and MA in Thai Literary Criticism from Srinakarinwirot University (Phitsanuloke) (1984). He then received his PhD in Thai Literature from Naresuan University (2008). His research interest focuses on ecocriticism in Thai classic and contemporary literature . His most recent books are Green literature: Paradigm, Discourse and Ecology in Thai Literature (Nakhon, 2013) and Phoo Ying Ying Reua : Ecofeminism in Thai Literature (Nakhon, 2013). Alongside his academic researches, Thanya has been working on creative writing since 1981. He won S.E.A. Write award in 1986 from his compilation of short stories Ko Kong Sai (Building the sandpile) and recently the Mekong River Literature Award in 2016. He also assumes courses on Thai

contemporary literature and fiction writing at Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Mahasarakham University, Thailand.

Apple Audrey L. Noda, Literary and Cultural Studies, Ateneo de Manila UniversityReconstructing the Wilderness: Finding Identity, Culture and Values in Filipino Children’s Literature

ABSTRACTIn children's literature, more specifically in the Philippine setting, the symbolism of wilderness and the elements therein constitutively influences the intrinsic wildness of children. The literary wilderness becomes an exploratory platform where the stages of development that children undergo are better understood – from exploring childhood freedom to encountering a sense of self and culture. Coming from this, the research particularly focuses on the effect of the ‘essential wildness’ on children as facilitated by the images of the wilderness and its elements in Filipino children’s literature. The notion of wilderness (or wildness) ultimately shifts the idea of losing one's self in danger to a sense of self-discovery and individuation. To concretize and show the effects of one’s encounter with the natural world through environmental children’s literature, this study presents an ecocritical reading of the best short stories of Severino Reyes in his Lola Basyang collection in order to grasp a conception of wilderness within the context and culture of Filipino identity. This analysis will also attempt to redirect the general understanding of the concept of inner wildness, reconstructing it from an articulation of danger and peril towards a creative exploration of one’s growth and sensibilities.

BIONOTEApple Audrey Noda is a Filipino writer interested in literature, theory and criticism, and cultural studies. She received her B.F.A. degree in Creative Writing from the Ateneo de Manila University in 2012. She is currently taking her M.A. degree in Literary and Cultural Studies in the same university. She aims to focus her scholarly work on ecocriticism, memory and trauma studies.

Nguyen Thi Dieu Linh, Faculty of Philology, Hanoi National University of EducationThe Sense of Place, the Sense of Home and the Sense of Self: Ecological Imagination in Hoang A Sang's The Dreams of Chestnut Colour

ABSTRACTThe Dreams of Chestnut Colour is a collection of articles by Hoang A Sang, a Vietnamese writer and journalist, which were published in print and online newspapers from 2007 to 2012. Being a member of the Tay ethnic group, the author grew up at Cao Bang province where the Tay people live in the valleys and the mountains. At the age of 18, he moved to Hanoi for his tertiary education, subsequently starting his career as a painter, writer and journalist. The Dreams of Chestnut Colour is divided into two parts which are named “Woodland” and “City” and can be read as a metaphorical journey enacted between these two spaces. The ecological imagination is associated with the urbanization process, environmental changes, and the cultural conflict between the minority Tay people and the majority Kinh people.

BIONOTENguyen Thi Dieu Linh, Lecturer at Hanoi National University of Education, Faculty of Philology, Foreign Literature Section. Address: No 136, Xuan Thuy Street, Cau Giay District, Hanoi, Vietnam. Qualifications: Bachelor of Arts (Hanoi University of Education, 2001), Master of Asian Literature (Hanoi University of Education, 2004), PhD of Chinese Contemporary Literature (East China Normal University, 2012). Research interests: Asian literature and culture; Chinese Contemporary Literature; Comparative Literature; Literary Translation; Vietnamese culture and language.  

Agnes S. K. Yeow, Department of English, University of MalayaGrafting a “New Breed of Humanity”: Eco-materialist Readings of the Posthuman in the Short Fiction of K. S. Maniam

ABSTRACTIn K. S. Maniam’s speculative short story “Project: Graft Man”, a sinister social and biological experiment is afoot to create a new species of human which is completely subservient to the administration’s manipulation and control. As political allegory, the story is a scathing critique of state-sponsored social and environmental engineering as well as the obsession with economic development and enrichment. In this paper, I show that stories like “Terminal”, “Project: Graft Man”, “Parablames” and “Removal from Pasir Panjang” depict a brave new world replete with dubious citizens and institutions bent on modifying and policing a sense of the human, of place, and of culture. More crucially, I argue that a close scrutiny of Maniam’s dystopian, posthuman universe reveals a deliberately visceral representation of soil, water, air, energy, animals, toxic waste and landscape. I show how the focus on the materiality of the futuristic postcolonial land opens up new possibilities for agency, transformation, resistance and justice.

BIONOTEAgnes S. K. Yeow teaches at the English Department, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Malaya, and her research interest is in ecocritical approaches to colonial and postcolonial literature.

Tin Tin Win, Writer, MyanmarThe Journey of an Environmental Novelist

ABSTRACTBeing a novelist who travels around the country, I have witnessed severe deforestation over two decades. Under the military regime, Myanmar has become one of the most vulnerable countries to natural disasters in the world.Since environmental protection is as urgent and important as reforming education, health care and economy, it is clear that every citizen is obliged to know their rights, responsibilities and solutions to current problems that we are facing collectively.As a novelist, I believe that art is a tool for shaping people's hearts and minds and that storytelling can help create a wind of change. Therefore, taking advantage of my influence as a writer, I introduce readers to the subject of deforestation in a short story called “The Lover of Earth” (1995). This was a significant step in a long journey as an environmental novelist.Presenting stark facts about environmental disasters in fiction can impede narrative flow, but despite the challenge, I feel that it is an exciting endeavour.

BIONOTEBorn in 1958, Tin Tin Win (penname Ju) is a medical doctor by training: a profession she no longer practices. Her first novel A Hmat ta ya (Remembrance) published in 1987 was an instant best seller. Generally the theme throughout her fiction is about young women standing on their own feet without much dependence on men in their lives, which reflects reality of many Myanmar women, as by tradition they never had any restrictions on education or work. She has published seven short story collections and twenty novels, many of which were made into box-office hit movies. She has written numerous articles on the environment, and is a keen advocate of keeping the world clean and green.

Phan Thi Thu Hien, Faculty of Korean Studies, Vietnam National University of Social Sciences and Humanities Nguyen Huy Thiep’s The Salt of the Forest (Vietnam) in Comparison with Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (America) through an Ecological Lens

ABSTRACTErnest Hemingway is an American famous modern writer who received the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and the Nobel Prize in 1954. Nguyen Huy Thiep is a Vietnamese talented contemporary writer who received the Medal of Arts and Literature (France) in 2007 and the Premio Nonino award (Italy) in 2008. Nguyen Huy Thiep is also considered as a Vietnamese worthy of nomination for the Nobel Prize.This paper is a comparative study of the short story "The Salt of the Forest" by Nguyen Huy Thiep and the novel The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway from the ecological perspective. There are many interesting similarities (about plot, character, environment image, structure, view point, voice ...) between "The Salt of the Forest" and The Old Man and the Sea, though their inspirations are quite different. Through the same projection, the interdependence between the ecological theme and the theme of "grace under pressure" in both Ernest Hemingway and Nguyen Huy Thiep’s works is perhaps revealed.

BIONOTEPhan Thi Thu Hien is Professor, Dean of Faculty of Korean Studies, Vietnam National University of Social Sciences and Humanities – Ho Chi Minh City. Her research areas are Asian Literatures and Cultures, Comparative Literature and Culture, with special focus on Literary and Cultural Relation between India and Southeast Asia. Approximately 10 books (monographs, textbooks, anthologies…) and 60 research papers of hers have been published in Vietnam, India and Korea. Many of her papers have also been published in international conference proceedings in Vietnam, India, Korea, America, Spain, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines and Cambodia.

Beatrice Tulagan, Philippine Literature and Poetics Department, Kalayaan College

The Disaster Gaze: Gendering Violence, Vulnerability and Resiliency in Philippine Narratives

ABSTRACT

The world’s gaze shifted to the Philippines in 2013 when Haiyan slammed the nation as delegations to the United Nations Climate Conference in Warsaw, Poland gathered to negotiate curbing global emissions. Every year since, extreme weather events hit the country during or immediately following the most important annual climate conference as if a persistent reminder of the reality on the ground. With global reportage persistently depicting climate impacts in the fifth most vulnerable country to climate change, does fiction published post-Haiyan capture gender-based violence and gender-specific recuperation? The objective of this study is to examine how women are portrayed in light of clockwork destruction and rehabilitation in the interest of bringing into light women’s issues that drown in the face of overwhelming statistics and international headlines. Six stories are analyzed using concepts of feminist and Marxist critique. The intersectional approach revealing women to be among the most dramatically affected by natural disasters is stressed as invaluable in understanding vulnerability as the degree to which a subject is “susceptible to, and unable to cope with, adverse effects of climate change” (IPCC) -- and unless there is a shift both in policymaking and rolemaking, women will be perpetually rendered twice vulnerable to extreme climate impacts.

BIONOTE

Beatrice Adeline Chua Tulagan is a Literature undergraduate of Kalayaan College in Manila, Philippines. Her literary research is on nativist poetics and the politics of Philippine literary canon-making, eco-Marxism and the work of Filipino writer and critic Edel Garcellano.

She currently works as Policy Research and Advocacy Director of The Climate Reality Project Philippines, a non-profit founded by Nobel Laureate Al Gore, specializing on youth campaigns, energy policy, vulnerability and human rights.

Tulagan’s poetry and fiction have also been published in the Philippines. She writes on climate, disaster and gender.

Lily Rose Tope, Department of English and Comparative Literature, University of the PhilippinesLand Speaks: Land Articulations in Selected Southeast Asian Agricultural Novels

ABSTRACTLand is soil and soil is called the skin of the earth. Land supports organisms, and most of all, man. In Southeast Asia, land is sacred; its cultures show the intimate relationship between land and humans. Modernity has somehow broken that bond but agricultural novels where peasants continue the affinity with the land, show that the conversation is still ongoing. This paper will attempt to interpret the conversation in scientific terms. It will look at the response of the soil to human intervention and how culture has adopted this language. Selected Southeast Asian novels will be used to foreground “landspeak.”

BIONOTELily Rose Tope is professor and current department head at the Department of English and Comparative Literature, University of the Philippines. She has a PhD from the National University of Singapore. She is author of (Un)Framing Southeast Asia: Nationalism and the Post Colonial Text in English in Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines as well as several articles on Southeast Asian literature in English, Philippine Chinese literature in English, and ethnicity in Southeast Asian literature. She is co-editor of the Anthology of English Writing from Southeast Asia.

Lu Zhengwen, Department of English Language and Literature, National University of SingaporeThe Garden, the City and the Garden City in From Walden to Woodlands

ABSTRACTThis paper analyses a selection of ecopoetry from the interfaith anthology of Singaporean environmental poetry titled From Walden to Woodlands (2015), focusing on the notion and epithet of ‘garden city’ which is commonly used to describe Singapore. The paper argues that these poems embody the interconnections and tensions which inhere to the seemingly contradictory notion of a ‘garden city’, resulting in an ambivalent portrayal of the relationships between humanity and nature. On the one hand, both entities coexist in past, present and future geographies within the contexts of both the cityscape and nationalistic consciousness of Singapore. On the other, the poetry from the anthology also suggests—through linguistic play and ideological ambiguity—that the notion of such reconciliation is tenuous at best, especially given Singapore’s status as a cosmopolitan urban city-state, characterised by rapid development and globalisation.

BIONOTELu Zhengwen is a current Masters student at the National University of Singapore. His research interests include ecocriticism, postcolonial studies, gender studies, SF and metafictions. He is currently working on a Masters thesis on the 18th century author Margaret Cavendish and hopes to examine issues surrounding ecocriticism and Singaporean literatures in the near future.

Chitra Sankaran, Department of English Language and Literature, National University of SingaporeApocalyptic Vision in Laotian Short Story “The Roar of a Distant War” by Viliya Ketavong

ABSTRACT“The Roar of a Distant War” begins with a picnic in Southern California on the fourth of July. However, for Nanda, the fireworks display brings back memories of the civil war in Laos that was known to the rest of the world as the Vietnam War. Nanda’s kneejerk reaction to the fireworks display is to drop to the ground, since, as she confesses, she was “a child of war”. The narrative traces the trials faced by a family in Laos caught between communist forces and the American army. This paper examines the statement made by Martha F Lee that “In all its forms, environmentalism is – at least marginally – apocalyptic” (p.ix). It goes on to argue that unlike traditional apocalyptic narratives that are mostly ‘user-oriented’ - a term used by Herbert Gans to discuss the fantastical nature of apocalyptic fictions and to point to the distance that mostly exists between history and apocalyptic narratives - Ketavong’s apocalyptic short story is based on history, real politics and human instrumentality.

BIONOTEChitra Sankaran is an Associate Professor in the Department of English Language & Literature, NUS. Her research interests include South and Southeast Asian fiction, feminist theory and ecocriticism. In 2012 she published with SUNY Press, History, Narrative and Testimony in Amitav Ghosh’s Fiction. Her other publications include monographs, edited volumes on Asian Literatures, chapters in books and research articles in IRJs including Journal of Commonwealth Literature, ARIEL, Theatre Research International, Journal of South Asian Literature, Australian Feminist Studies and Critical Asian Studies. She is an invited contributor to the Oxford History of the Novel in English (OHNE) series. She is currently working on ecofeminism in South & Southeast Asian fictions.

Poster Presenters

Zainor Izat Zainal, Universiti Putra MalaysiaSeng Tong Chong, Universiti Tenaga NasionalBoon Kar Yap, Universiti Tenaga NasionalYu Jin Ng, Universiti Tenaga Nasional

ABSTRACTSENGINEERED DEVELOPMENT AND ENVIRONMENT IN SELECTED MALAYSIAN NOVELS IN ENGLISHDevelopment has become Malaysia’s overriding priority and ideology, engineered largely by the state. In this research, we analyse how the state’s development ideology is treated in K. S. Maniam’s Between Lives (2003), Chuah Guat Eng’s Days of Change (2010) and Yang-May Ooi’s The Flame Tree (1998). The main environmental effects include the insurmountable costs of development borne by the powerless and defenseless and the advocacy for active environmentalism. Profound implications for future development include treating social justice, democracy and cultural sustainability with the utmost seriousness in planning and decision-making that involves the land.

ENGINEERING ENVIRONMENTAL IDENTITY AND MALAYSIAN CHINESENESS IN LITERARY TEXTSThis paper discusses the notions of biological environment, metaphors and cultures, and the constructions of Malaysian Chineseness within the broader perspective of the Malaysians. It examines the construction of the categorical ethnic group “Malaysian Chinese” in literary texts written by Malaysian Chinese authors. It foregrounds the notion of Malaysian Chineseness in the context of engineered Malaysian environment using data from contemporary literary texts such Tash Aw’s The Harmony Silk Factory (2005), Chong Seck Chim’s Once Upon a Time in Malaya (2005), Ho Thean Fook’s God of the Earth (2003), Tan Twan Eng’s The Gift of Rain (2007) and Khoo Keng-Hor’s Nanyang (2007).

BIONOTESZainor Izat Zainal (PhD) is a faculty member at the Department of English, Faculty of Modern Languages and Communication, Universiti Putra Malaysia. She teaches literatures in English, particularly those from Malaysia and Southeast Asia. Her research interests include postcolonial ecocriticism and Eco-Marxism.

Seng Tong Chong (PhD) is a faculty member at Universiti Tenaga Nasional (UNITEN), Malaysia. He has a continuing interest in the representation and construction of Malaysian Chineseness and environmental identity in Malaysian literature in English. His critical and historical research explores the symbiotic relationship between nature and human beings. He is developing a comparative project looking at the inter-

relations between cultural identity, environmental identity and metaphorical representation.

Yu Jin Ng (PhD) is a faculty member at Universiti Tenaga Nasional (UNITEN), Malaysia. He is a corpus linguist by training. His recent projects include environmental discourse, disaster management, sustainable development and energy compendium. He has published a number of papers on corpus linguistics.

Boon Kar Yap (PhD) is an associate professor at University Tenaga Nasional (UNITEN), Malaysia. She works on sustainable environmental engineering. She is an engineer by training. She earned her PhD from Imperial College London. Her current research includes transdisciplinary research building on health communication, urban processes, environmental engineering and sustainable development.

Le Thi Luu Oanh, Faculty of Language and Literature, Hanoi University of EducationTran Thi Anh Nguyet, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Duy Tan University

Empathizing with Animals of Contemporary Vietnamese LiteratureNew sense of ecological ethnics in XXI century has formed new personality patterns, those who know to sympathize with damaged natural fates, share feelings of pain with alnimals, listen to the voices of them and respect natural world. Those personality patterns are not formed by centered rational person patterns but through the voices of lonely and idiotic characters, sideline body parts and vulnerable, such as women, elderly, children, those with the loss of wisdom, goofy, deformity, defect in The Giat Market (Phiên chợ Giát, 1989) by Nguyễn Minh Châu; Salt Of The Jungle (Muối của rừng, 1992) by Nguyen Huy Thiep; The Dog and the Divorce (Con chó và vụ li hôn, 1995) by Da Ngan; The Endless Field (Cánh đồng bất tận, 2006), Single Wind (Gió lẻ, 2008), River (Sông, novel, 2012)… by Nguyen Ngoc Tu, The Smell of the Tiger (Mùi cọp, 2009) by Quy The, Person Speaking in Pigeons (Người nói tiếng bồ câu, 2010) by Mac Can; Slaughter (Đồ tể, 2013) by Nguyen Tri…Comparing with animals, authors has “upset” the default perspectives of what still considered as exclusive of humans to "stand higher than the nature": emotion, language, culture. Animals have their own language. Humans do not hear that voice, but it is not existent. Actually, animals is more sincere, calm, tolerant and liberal than that of humans. Humans bring reason into all types of emotion, taking lies to hidden the clarity of the language… Some characters can hear the voices of nature. Motif as humans hear animal voices have appeared in folklore, legendary stories, but they heard the animals to understanding. That is the reward for the good. They took human conception to give animals (in legendary stories, to communicate with people, animals have "human form"). Nowaday, facing with animals, humans find themselves become defective, incomplete and lonely.Listening to the voice of nature, people realize alnimals have soul, feeling, affection. Characters who share feelings of pain with alnimals, sympathize with damaged natural fates, are gentle, rustic and filled with love. From human rights to the nature rights is a big step forward on the path of humanism of human beings. Ethnics of Ecological Humanism does not recommend praising humans as lord conquering nature, as the “style of all life” but a living attitude where humans know to miniature self, respect nature and adjust the attitude and behavior of humans towards a sustainable, peaceful and happy life.

BIONOTELe Thi Luu Oanh, PhD., Assoc. Prof. of Literature, Mrs.Faculty of Language and Literature, Hanoi University of EducationNationality: Vietnamese1977 up to now: Lecturer and Assoc. Prof. of Literature

1997 – 2014: Vice – Head and Head of Department of Theory and History of LiteratureResearch fields: Vietnamese Literature, Theory of Literature, Ecocritism.Publications: about 15 books (Author, Co –author, Editor) and 30 articlesMain Publications:1. Theory of literature (2005, 2006, 2007) Co-author, Textbook, T1, 2, 3, Education University Press, Hanoi.2. Lyrical poetry of Vietnam 1975-1990 (1998), Monograph, VNU Press, Hanoi.3. Analyses of Vietnam literature works in school (2012, 2013, 2015), Vietnam Education Press, Hanoi.4. “The trend of ecocriticism in literary studies” (2016), Co-author, Journal of Literary Theory and Criticism, Hanoi.

Tran Thị Anh Nguyet is a lecturer and researcher at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Duy Tan University. She is studying the relationship between Modern Asian Literature and the physical environment of Asia. She has taken part in national and international seminars and conferences, including: Vietnamese Literature of The Renovation Period – Situations and Prospects (Hanoi, 2014), Vietnam Study: Theory and Practice (Ho Chi Minh City, 2016) and Thirty Years Innovation Achievement (Hue, 2016). Her articles and essays have been published in literary journals such as: Journal of Theory and Criticism, Science and Technology Development Journal (Vietnam National University), Journal of Science (Ho Chi Minh City University of Education), Journal of Science and Technology (Duy Tan University). Her doctoral thesis for her degree in Arts in Linguistics and Literature was Human and Nature in Vietnamese Prose after 1975 from the Ecocriticism Viewpoint (Hanoi, 2016).

Tran Thi Phuong Phuong, Faculty of Literature and Linguistics, University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Ho Chi Minh CityConversation of Human Body with Nature (On Nguyen Ngoc Thuan’s Open the Window, Eyes Closed and Other Stories)

ABSTRACTNguyen Ngoc Thuan (b. 1972) is Vietnamese author, who began his writing in the early of 2000s. He did not write much, and wrote mostly on the subject of children. He won the Swedish Peter Pan Award 2008 for best children’s literature for his story Vua nham mat vua mo cua so (Open the window, eyes closed).A painter working as illustrator for Tuoi Tre Newspaper in Ho Chi Minh City, Nguyen Ngoc Thuan is well-accustomed to the human body, due to a course he took in anatomy at the School of Fine Art. This same body is part of nature as well as of society. The modern society of Vietnam, which went through wars, the economic crisis and then economic growth, also constantly affects this human body. In Nguyen Ngoc Thuan’s Open the window, eyes closed and other stories, the voice of the body may either be heard as whole, or of its parts (the tooth, the finger, the feet, the eyes and so on) speaking with the gardens and forests, the flowers and fruits, as well as animals familiar as well as unfamiliar for the reader. Notably, this natural world becomes fresher and brighter when it gets into conversation with children, when it is touched by children’s body and soul which are embodiments of human purity and human good.

BIONOTETran Thi Phuong Phuong is Associate Professor of Literature at University of Social Sciences & Humanities of Ho Chi Minh City (USSH-HCMC), Vietnam. She teaches Russian literature and Comparative literature. She is the author of several books on Russian literature, such as Russian Realist Novel of the 19th Century, Russian Poetry from Its Beginning to the Present Time. She is also the translator of Leo Tolstoy’s novel The Kreutzer Sonata, of Vsevolod Garshin’s short stories and of other Russian works. She got B.A. of Russian Language and Literature (1990) at Odessa State University (Former USSR), M.A. of Vietnamese Literature (1996) and Ph.D. of Literary History and Theory (2001) at USSH-HCMC (Vietnam). She was Visiting Fellow (1997-98) at Harvard-Yenching Institute (Harvard University, USA), ASIANetwork Exchange Faculty (2006) at Hobart and William Smith Colleges (USA).