In response to French universalist politics and ideals, French writers of Asian descent (Doan Bui, Grace Ly, Linh-Lan Dao, etc.) have more recently brought to light and challenged diasporic Asians’ complicity in the erasure of racial difference in France, especially in comparison to Asian American formations. Bui, in Le silence de mon père, notably likens Asians’ self-erasure in assimilating to French identity (“faire semblant d’être Français”) while rebuking “le communautarisme à l’américaine et [leurs] cousins californiens tout simplement fiers d’être Asian-American” to chasing after a shadow (Bui 176). Yet, even as these erasures and silences may be attributed to racial politics that set France up as a colorblind countermodel to the US, Viet Thanh Nguyen has argued that Asian American memory is similarly shaped through active acts of remembering and forgetting through “willful recollection” (Nguyen, “Memory,” Keywords for Asian American Studies 153). Given these resonances, what insights might we uncover about the dynamics of diasporic memory if we consider French Asian and Asian American racial formations as contrapuntal, dialogic, or intertwined rather than antithetical? This is particularly poignant given this year’s PAMLA Conference theme, “Palimpsests: Memory and Oblivion,” and location in San Francisco—a city where histories of Asian labor migration have given way to assimilationist narratives in Asian American literature and scholarship in its reification as a central lieu de mémoire (Achille et al., Postcolonial Realms of Memory; Jung, Coolies and Canes).

This panel invites us to decenter US-focused perspectives on Asian diasporas and diasporic memory, with special attention to Francophone narratives. How do histories and narratives across or beyond national/imperial formations speak to, with, and/or against each other? How do literature, art, film, music, and other forms of diasporic Asian expression address these entanglements or contribute to their obfuscations?

Papers (in French or English) may potentially explore the following topics…

· Comparative, transnational, and/or transimperial racial formations
· Contestations of the “model minority” myth, such as “bad Asians” (Oishi, Jung, Man) or “bad subjects” (Nguyen)
· Anti-Asian hate; #AsiatiquesDeFrance and anti-racist movements, especially via new media
· Mass displacement due to war and genocide; refugitude
· Concurrent and intersecting labor migrations; coolitude
· Decolonial movements and solidarities
· Literature, language, and non-belonging (Linda Lê, Shumona Sinha, Anna Moï, etc.)
· Queer (Asian) diasporas (Eng, Gopinath, Hoang, Bao)
· Asian settler colonialism, Transpacific Studies, the French-occupied Pacific, oceanitude
· Diasporic Asian authors outside of France or the US (Kim Thúy, Ook Chung, André Dao, Nam Le, etc.)