Anglo-East Asian Exchanges in Literature, Culture, and Media

Our conference seeks to trace how Anglo-East Asian exchanges have been portrayed in literature, culture, and media from the Early Modern Era until today. Using a transcultural outlook, we wish to ponder how the English (and the British) have looked upon East Asia, and how East Asians have viewed the British. This perspective is of particular interest because postcolonial approaches in the context of Anglo-Asian literature are not applicable with regard to large parts of East Asia. We suspect that these viewpoints and projections of the “Other” reveal much more about one’s own culture and self-identification than one might initially assume, especially when considering identity formation as a process that requires us to experience alterity to be able to distinguish ourselves from others. This conference opens a space to engage in a deeper, interdisciplinary conversation about the particularities of exchanges between Britain and East Asia by looking at how intercultural encounters and cultural and personal identities have been constructed and performed in theatre and portrayed in fiction, travel writing, poetry, painting, photography, film, and TV series.