How to turn your dissertation into a book?
What does a book proposal look like versus a dissertation prospectus?
Come to hear our discussion and give feedback to assistant professor Cheryl Naruse, Department of English, University of Dayton and 2014 PhD graduate, who is sharing her book proposal draft for this workshop.
Even if your research areas are not about Singapore, Asian American Studies or postcolonial literature, come to discuss and hear some general suggestions about the purpose, readership, components, and the submission process of book proposals. Book editors are usually not specialists in your field (or even your discipline), so your feedback is valuable regardless of your research expertise.
Please email Professor Lynn Itagaki at itagaki.5@osu.edu for a copy of the book proposal which will be available after Nov 14.
Abstract and title of her book proposal:
Incorporating Singapore: the Culture and Politics of Mobility in an Age of Neoliberalism challenges the long-held assumption that increased migration is the mere effect of labor demands that accompany processes of economic globalization. I ask a different question: how do social constructions, representations, and cultural attitudes towards human mobility influence, perpetuate, or sustain economic globalization? Moreover, how do representations of mobility and economic globalization affect each other? Through these questions, my book project explicates the cultural, ideological, and aesthetic dynamics of the process I call “incorporating Singapore.” “Incorporating” signifies the state’s efforts to consolidate a national body, integrate Singapore into the global economy, and manage Singapore as a corporation. I argue that, following the 1997 Asian financial crisis, practices of incorporating Singapore rely on increased human mobility and its framing as both an economic asset and an ethical value. I address this phenomenon by examining literary and cultural productions from four groups that have different experiences of mobility: the Singaporean state, diasporic Singaporeans (including Singaporean-Americans), domestic workers, and former political prisoners.Incorporating Singapore complicates the tendency in postcolonial studies to focus on geo-political sites where independence has been predicated on anti- or de-colonial struggle. Only achieving independence after its expulsion from the Federation of Malaya, Singapore has embraced a postcolonial nationalism that is consciously complicit in neocolonial practices—despite its experience of both Japanese and British colonizations. By attending to different figures of mobility that emerge from this unusual postcolonial past, my project recasts theorizations of neoliberal culture in a non-western context.
Cheryl Narumi Naruse is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Dayton, where she teaches postcolonial literature, literary theory, Asian American literature, and writing. She received her PhD in English from the University of Hawai'i at Manoa in 2014. Articles developed from her dissertation, "Imagined Diasporas: Neoliberal Nationalism in Contemporary Singaporean Fiction and State Culture," appear in Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture (forthcoming), biography: an interdisciplinary quarterly (in press), andCLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture. Besides working on her book manuscript, Cheryl is also co-editing a special issue of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies on the intersections of neoliberal globalization and postcolonialism in Singapore.
Sponsored by the Program in Asian American Studies
Co-sponsored by the Department of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies and the Department of English
