ACAH 2017 - The Asian Conference on Arts & Humanities 2017

Conference Theme: “History, Story, Narrative”
Historians are far from the only interested party in writing history. In a sense it is an interest we all share ? whether we are talking politics, region, family birthright, or even personal experience. We are both spectators to the process of history while being intimately situated within its impact and formations.
How, then, best to write it? Is it always the victor’s version? Have we not begun increasingly to write “history from below,” that lived by those who are not at the top of the power hierarchy? Are accounts of history always gender-inflected, hitherto at least men rather than women? Who gets to tell history if the issue is colonialism or class? How does geography, the power of place, intersect with history? What is the status of the personal story or narrative within the larger frame of events?
This conference addresses issues of writing history from literary and other discursive perspectives. That is to say: novels, plays, poems, autobiography, memoir, diary, travel log, and a variety of styles of essay. One thinks of Shakespeare’s history plays, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Shi Nai’an’s The Water Margin, Balzac’s La Comédie Humaine. It also addresses oral history, the spoken account or witness, Hiroshima survivor to modern Syrian migrant
Which also connects to the nexus of media and history. The great “historical” films continue to hold us, be it Eisenstein’s October: Ten Days That Shook the World (1925) or Gone with the Wind (1940). We live in an age of documentaries, whether film or TV. There is a view that we also inhabit “instant” history, the download to laptop, the app, the all-purpose mobile. How has this technology changed our perception, our lived experience, of history? What is the role of commemoration, parade, holiday, festival, or statuary, in the writing of history?
The different modes by which we see and understand history, flow and counter-flow, nevertheless come back to certain basics.
One asks whether we deceive ourselves in always asking for some grand narrative. Can there only be one narrator or is history of necessity a colloquium, contested ground? Is national history a myth? And history-writing itself: is it actually a form of fiction, an artifice which flatters to deceive? What, exactly, is a historical fact?
This conference, we hope, will address these perspectives and others which connect and arise.