Benjamin J. Heal and Erik Mortenson present an EBSN panel titled "Beat Internationalism" for the American Comparative Literature Association annual conference, April 2021. The recording of day 1, featuring Sonya Isaak and Esther Marinho Santana was unfortunately lost.Abstract:The Beat Generation as literary movement is usually regarded as quintessentially American, rooted in the great American tropes of free expression, border crossing and anti-materialism. Often overlooked in favor of other literary movements, this seminar proposes to look beyond the familiar figures of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs to investigate the relations between their works, aesthetics and techniques and those of Beat voices from across the globe. The shock waves of Howl's radical poetics, publicized via the anti-obscenity court case, and the success of On the Road, reverberated globally, and can be seen to form a foundation for experimental, politically radical works published around the world. Building on the developing and widening formulations of ‘Beat’ by scholars such as Jimmy Fazzino, this seminar will work towards a definition of ‘Beat Internationalism’ as applied to the works examined, and consider areas of convergence. More theoretical questions pertaining to the transnational turn in American literary studies, and the para-textual nature of Beat literature are also welcome. The Beat legacy continues to be felt across popular culture; with retrospectives and exhibitions featuring work by the Beats continuing to be a success. What do the Beats mean to contemporary audiences, and how are their techniques and styles employed in the works of contemporary writers and artists? How has the radicalism of the Beats manifested internationally?Li Yuan-chia’s Art and Transnationalism, a Connection with the Beat Generation. PresenterYa Chu Fu Independent Scholar Abstract InfoThe article discusses how the Chinese artist Li Yuan-chia’s life philosophy and experiences as well as his art style resonates with the Beat Generation, in terms of the historical context of the Post-World War 2 period and their similar experimentalism and transnationalism. Li was born in China, and he later moved to Taiwan, Italy, and finally settled in the UK. The reason he kept moving has a lot to do with historical context in Taiwan, for instance, the 2nd KMT-CPC civil war（1945-1950), and the ‘White Terror’ (1947-1987). At the same time the writers, and often overlooked artists, of the Beat Generation- were experiencing similar political events, the Cold War between the US and Russia, and McCarthyism, in the US. Li Yuan-chia’s art utilizes the simplicity and minimalism of East-Asian visual art and Japanese Haiku and combines with Western Avant-guard styles, such as abstract expressionism. He often paints with calligraphic symbols with ink backgrounds and abstract blocks of colors. Interestingly, one of the artists associated with the Beat Generation, Brion Gysin, also experimented with abstract ink roller poems. If we put their works together, we can see a lot of similarities between them. This paper will explore Li Yuan-chia’s Beat connections and make comparisons between his life and work and that of Beat artists and writers, for example, Brion Gysin's paintings and permutation poems, and Bernice Bing and Jay DeFeo's abstract and minimalistic artworks and Beat sensibility.Speaker Bio Fu Ya Chu, graduated in 2019 from National Chung Cheng University in Taiwan, with a first-class honors degree in Psychology and Philosophy. She has an ongoing interest in visual art, literature, and translation, having translated letters of Taiwanese Modernist novelist Qi Deng Sheng and Professor A Robert Lee's poetry. She plans to study for a master's degree in comparative literature in the UK, and continue her research on Li Yuan-chia and Hong Kong writer Eileen Chung. Hsia Yu: Translingual Cut-ups PresenterBenjamin Heal - National Chung Cheng University Abstract InfoTaiwanese poet Hsia Yu has developed an iconic presence in her native country. Her sinophone works appear with a transnational flavor, inflected with French sensibilities and Western “Beat Generation” derived stylistics, incorporating a visual aesthetic best demonstrated by her most well known work, the self-published Pink Noise (2007), printed as a trilingual text on transparent acetate. Pink Noise utilizes the semantic problems with bi- and trilingual translation with texts composed in English auto-translated into Mandarin, allowing the breakdown of meaning that results from the over-literal auto-translation to become part of the poetry. This paper explores the poet’s experimentation with translingualism, from these experiments with the liminal spaces presented by machine translation to the broader pursuit of Beat experimentation that marks her work. As J.B. Rollins states, Hsia Yu’s ‘refusal to be cowed by cultural essentialism and her sense of the ...
