Ramnarayan, Akhila,  University of Dayton -- After the Fall: Narratives of Race, Place, and Power(lessness) in Lost

McCredden, Lyn,  Deakin University, Melbourne,  -- Frontier Fissures and Redemptions

D)    Readings

Daly Science Room 206

Moderator:  Phyllis Brown, Santa Clara University

                        Kalyan Ray

                        Persis Karim

                        R. Radhakrishnan

                        Sukrita Paul Kumar

4:00-5:30  PLENARY SESSION III  (Center for Performing Arts auditorium)

                        Introduction:  Rajeev Patke, National University of Singapore

                        Bill Ashcroft, Chair Professor in English, University of Hong       Kong, and University of New South Wales

                                    “Critical Utopias”

                        Respondent: Rob Wilson, Professor of Literature, University of California at Santa Cruz

5:30-6:30 Reception, Center for Performing Arts Lobby

6:30-7:45  PLENARY SESSION IV  (Benson Center, Mission Room)

                        Introduction:  Aldo Billingslea, SCU chair, Dept. of Theatre and Dance

                        Tess Osonye Onwueme, Distinguished Professor of Cultural      Diversity and Professor of English, University of       Wisconsin at Eau Claire—

                                    accompanied by SCU’s World Percussion Ensemble and            members of the Chamber Singers

Sunday  Oct. 29

8:30-10:30  registration

9:00-10:30  Paper Session VI

A) The Pacific Rim

Alumni Science Room 220

Moderator: Karen Chow, De Anza Community College

Christiansen, AnnaMarie,  BYU Hawai’i -- “Dot the La’e”: Bollywood Movies in the Indigenous Pacific

Trouilloud, Lise-Helene, Cal Poly Pomona/ University of California, Davis -- Transformative Identities:  War, Religion and Sexuality in  Vietnamese American Fiction

Watson, Jini Kim, New York University -- Division, Aid and War: Koreans in Vietnam and Hwang Sok-yong’s Shadow Under Arms

B) Roundtable on Teaching Literatures of Trauma

Alumni Science Room 120

Moderator:  Robin Field, King’s College

Field, Robin E., King’s College -- Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine and Trauma

Ayuso, Monica, California State University, Bakersfield -- Trauma Theory and Contemporary Literature of Hispaniola

Gamie, Samaa,  University of Rhode Island --  Devil on the Cross and the Search for the African Self

Griffiths, Jennifer,  New York Institute of Technology -- The Classroom as a Public Space for Witnessing the Legacy of the Hottentot Venus 

Stampfl, Barry,  San Diego State University -- Todd Hasak-Lowy and the Varieties of Traumatic Experience

C)  Hispanic Postcolonial Legacies

Daly Science Room 201

Moderator:  David Gray, Santa Clara University

Brada-Williams, Noelle,  San José State University -- Looking Backward to go Forward: Parody, History and Religion in U.S. Latino Art

Mah y Bush, Juan,  Loyola Marymount University -- Caliban’s Ariel: Tracing a Chicana Postcolonial Ethics

Chan, Stephanie, Sayo Ogundiran,  San Jose State University – On Border Patrol

10:45-12:15  PLENARY SESSION V  (Center for Performing Arts auditorium)

            Moderator: C. Lok Chua, Dept. of English, California State University at Fresno

            Shu-mei Shih, Depts. Of Comparative Literature, Asian Languages                               and Cultures, and Asian American Studies University of                                               California at Los Angeles  

                        "Against Diasporic and Postcolonial Paradigms?: The                                          Sinophone as Places of Cultural Production"

            Respondent:  Colleen Lye, Dept. of English, University of California                             at Berkeley

Many thanks to the Local Committee:  Michelle Towers, Carole Wentz, Aparajita Nanda, Mitali Biswas, Revathi Krishnaswamy, Persis Karim, Lok Chua, Karen Chow,

And to the officers and representatives of USACLALS: Cynthia Leenerts, Daniel M. Scott III, K.D. Verma, Seodial Deena, Terri Hassler, Pradyumna S. Chauhan, Barbara Silliman, Karen Chow,  Revathi Krishnaswamy, Katy Howe, Alice D'Amore, Alice D'Amore,, Weihsin Gui, Ubaldimir Guerra

Special thanks to Delores Copper, Cynthia Mertens, Phyllis Brown, Patty and Gary Rauch-Neustadter, and Ram Subramaniam, for their hospitality towards our guests from India and Mauritius, and to Mariani’s, Hawthorne Suites, and  the Da Vinci RLC for housing our plenary speakers.

Conference Abstracts

Adisasmito-Smith, Steve

Forging Bonds: translating the Bhagavad-Gita in the colonial context.

Translation of scriptures has “forged bonds” between peoples, but are those uniting affiliations or ideological chains?  British Orientalists Charles Wilkins and Edwin Arnold, in India at different moments in the colonial trajectory, produced two very different translations of the Bhagavad-Gita, in 1785 and 1885, respectively.  Abetted by Governor Warren Hastings’s plan to “lessen the weight of the chain of  subjugation” and bring about “the conciliation of affect and intellect” between English and Indians, Wilkins, merchant-scholar of the British East India Company, forged the Dialogues of Kreeshna and Arjoon.  Wilkins employed neoplatonic, Anglican terminology and exalted the “sublime” poetry to create a Christianized, philosophical dialogue, while sublimating the empowering language of the original.  Posted in India after the Indian Rebellion/Mutiny, Edwin Arnold later created The Song Celestial, which restored and exaggerated the martial, virile tone

of the poem.  Arnold read the text this way because he drew upon the bridging interpretations of American Transcendentalists and other countercultural trends in Victorian England.  His version, the Gita Triumphant, became the one favored by Gandhi.  I analyze the translators’ projects and their contexts and then compare selected verses from each translation against the original Sanskrit.

Anjaria, Ulke

Making His Way Across the Black Waters: Colonialism, the realist protagonist, and World War I

World War I left an indelible mark on Europe, crushing the spirit of the long nineteenth century and paving the way for the rise of a profound disillusionment that pervaded the twentieth.  Yet behind the story of this War as it is conventionally told lies another story—of the hundreds of thousands of sepoys who fought in World War I on behalf of their imperial armies, and of the sixty thousand Indians who were left behind, in the unmarked graves so memorialized by John McCrae and others.  For these sepoys, already part of a struggle to define a national modernity of their own back home, the attraction of the World War lay in the alternative horizon offered to them in the particular ‘world’ which the army sent them to defend.  This paper will provide a reading of the first two novels of Mulk Raj Anand’s Village trilogy, The Village (1938) and Across the Black Waters (1939), which trace the protagonist Lalu Singh from the restricted chronotope embodied by his hierarchical village in the Punjab to the global expanse promised by travel across the black waters and by participation in the battles upon which hinged the fate of ‘world’ history as empire had defined it.  Indeed, despite what Lalu imagines, it is far from a liberatory journey.  Yet at the same time, the conflicts engendered between Lalu’s experiences and the formal requirements of the realist novel as it was being redefined in the pre-Independence Indian literary imagination expose more than the impact of the brutal war on the bodies of its colonized soldiers.  Rather, Lalu’s continuing life even after his companions die one by one exposes the conflict between modernity and survival faced, on a larger scale, by an India on the brink of state sovereignty.

Ayuso, Mónica G.

Trauma Theory and Contemporary Literature of Hispaniola

I propose to introduce three recent novels by women writers born in or culturally identified with the island of Hispaniola as aesthetic manifestations of collective trauma.  Like any other approach to literature, trauma theory provides a theoretical framework that elucidates crucial aspects of texts. In the context of postcolonial studies, it usefully describes the broken up ways in which the excluded and the marginalized can speak. The central concept of trauma theory I will use is Judith Lewis Herman’s assertion that the traumatic histories of societies can be as indelibly marked in the collective psyche as in those of individuals (Herman, 1992). It follows then that the collective narrative of traumatic events can be considered as much a symptom as the individual testimony of traumatic experience.  Then I will identify the national event at the heart of three novels: Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones (1998), Loida Maritza Pérez’s Geographies of Home (1999), and Nelly Rosario’s Song of the Water Saints (2002).  This event is the 1937 massacre of Haitians under the dictatorship of Rafael L. Trujillo, in which 35,000 seasonal farm workers and their families were slaughtered at the now infamous Massacre River that divides Haiti from the Dominican Republic on the island of Hispaniola. In part this event caused an exodus of Haitians and Dominicans for years to come that is also recorded in one way or another in these works. Symptoms of trauma manifest themselves recurrently in all three novels at the level of theme and form.  For example, students will identify the emphasis on mourning, the function and dysfunction of memory, the predominance of dreams, nightmares, and hallucinations; the presence of fragmented characters who are rendered in equally fragmented prose; and the dramatization of behavior so outrageous and offensive that it alienates readers.  More to the point, these symptoms will be closely read through Danticat’s character, Amabelle, who barely survives the massacre in the Dominican Republic that kills both her parents.  She herself makes a painful but relatively successful and safe reinsertion to Haitian society precisely through what Herman calls “the fundamental stages of recovery;” that is, she reconstructs her trauma story and connects with other survivors and her community(3)  In this manner I will demonstrate that an ethnic-minority American literature classroom can avail itself of trauma theory as a tool to interpret the repetitive and often bizarre recounting of atrocities that refuse to be buried and that continue to hold undiminished political relevance.  The best known of those--the Holocaust, the Spanish American War, Internment camps, and Indian Reservations to name but a few—and the lesser known—the massacre of Haitians--can be profitably explained as symptoms of a society on the way to recovery through the telling of its “unspeakable” stories.  

Baddar, Maha

Napoleon as Gaul, Pharoah, and Turk; Egypt as Hathour, Isis, and a Palm Tree: Representational Practices in the Description de L’ Egypte

This paper explores how the identities of both the French and the Egyptians are constructed in the illustrated, multi-volume work, Description de L’Egypte, produced by the French during their occupation of Egypt (1798-1801). The Description is a clear example of France’s ideologies as a colonial power and as a nation that had only recently overthrown its monarchy and adopted a republican, secular government system. The paper explores how the illustrations reflect the representational apparatus at work in the French-Egyptian encounter where representing the Egyptians as inferior was a method employed to assert the French’s superiority. Another aspect of the ideological framework of 19^th century France, namely the republican values and rising imperialism, lead to a sense of affinity and identification with the Roman Empire. In the illustrations the French metaphorically represent themselves as Roman figures while they represent conquered Egypt as either a source of material goods or a domesticated deity/royal figure. In addition to the illustrations that have been consciously produced to reflect France’s ideals as a republic and a colonial power, there is a host of illustrations that reflect a subconscious fascination (that accompanies the conscious disdain) with the royal expressing an ambivalent force at work that is competing with the newly acquired ideals.

Bady, Aaron

Mau Mau as Trauma: Imagining the Community by Mourning its Absence.

“Trauma” has often been an attractive metaphor for framing and understanding the cataclysmic social re-structurations associated with postcoloniality. Yet while the idea of trauma as a model for historical understanding necessarily narrativizes the third world’s colonial experience by reference to absence, Frederick Cooper, for example, has emphasized that it is precisely the presence of new, distinctly modern, circuits and pathways of flow and relation that best

characterizes Africa’s conscription into the global economic and political order. In fact, I argue that the metaphor of trauma is a way of articulating (and creating) an object of mourning that never truly was, to mourn for a lost cultural harmony understood and defined in terms that in are more narrowly derived from the political work the trauma narrative is embarked upon at the time of its writing. With this in mind, I read three literary re-creations of Gikuyu culture concerned

with explaining and controlling the specter of Mau Mau by articulating the trauma of lost cultural harmony: though ideological foes, Jomo Kenyatta, Louis Leakey, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o each harness the logic of the trauma narrative both to posit a lost cultural essence as part of a distinctly modern political agenda and obscure the presence of this agenda through trauma’s articulation by terms of absence.

Barua, Krishna

The  Experiments of Truth : restructuring of  Gandhian experiences in Naipaul’s Half a life and Magic Seeds.

Perhaps no life in any period has been so closely  documented as that of Mahatma Gandhi which still continue to   inspire and  move the  masses. There may be many reservations about the way Nobel Laureate V.S.Naipaul analyses  the    postcolonial dilemma arising out of  Gandhi’s  principles of  non violence and satyagraha . Probably Naipaul wants to make sure that his readers should  understand Gandhi and his obsessions,without building a halo around him. The analogy between an interpretation of historical ideas and the  break up of  the congealed meanings in a   work of fiction is always  helpful Naipaul’s  attempt to understand Gandhi in his  literary  works have  been more  on  the variations in  structuring of identity in  a dominant cultural praxis. It is of no surprise how faithfully   Naipaul could   produce fictional depictions of shifts in identity   in crisis, and how he could reflect that the contemporary experiences constantly demanded a  redefination of   identity  under Gandhian terms. The aim of the paper is to  reconsider the disenchanted paradox of the Gandhian experiments with Truth in Naipaul’s Half a Life and Magic Seeds.What drove the transformation in  Gandhi was his  capacity for self-creation or, as he termed it, his fascination with “experiments” in living. By  tracing the  central philosophical and ethical concerns that drive the desire for self-speculation,the paper shall attempt to  discuss the tensions thematized in these novels,the interplay between the  multiplicity of allusions to Gandhi that can investigate the history  of absence or presence  of memories of encounters between the west and the east,the ambiguities that question construction of the self and the challenge to cultural and idealogical polarities. Half a Life and Magic Seeds begins with high ideals, and ends with crippling realities, which tests the strength of character in times of great stress, bringing together anecdotes, drama, bawdy episodes, exploring various happenings and anarchisms.

Bayer, Jogamaya

Partition stories and the voice of insanity

The demand for two separate nations – India and Pakistan – was generally accepted as unavoidable at the wake of decolonization from British rule. However, considering the mass immigration and communal riots that followed, this view proved to be sheer madness. Many must have foreseen the misery that would follow for those who would have to live as a minority in either a Hindu or Muslim dominated country or leave their hitherto known homeland. The historical moment of partition was fought for by parties and politicians in order to secure power at the sacrifice of thousands and millions.

Amitav Ghosh and Saadat Hasan Manto belong to the few Indian or Pakistani writers who have worked through this repressed part of their history. Their characters, whose insanity makes them incapable of understanding or coping with the new situation, challenge the sanity of those who accepted this separation into two nations as a necessity. This paper will illuminate how these repressed voices, widely accepted as meaningless, yet now endowed with the voice of reason by Ghosh and Manto, urge the readers to unbury this historical moment and question its legitimacy.

Bhalla, Amrita

India Represented?

In the changing demography of post-colonial migration, diaspora, social displacement and exile, it is necessary to evolve new strategies of defining nation, culture and identity. The identity of the self, in a changing world, being part of trans- national movements and historical processes, evades specificity and acquires an indeterminate quality. Any attempt at definition becomes problematic – we tend to harmonize homogeneity and heterogeneity to find common denominators. In the process we reduce differences in cultures, which while sharing histories of colonialism/ racial discrimination may be antagonistically divided on religious lines. I would like to address myself, as a lecturer living and teaching in the nation that is being appropriated by definitions, to the critical question of lived and felt experiences that suggest a different paradigm for cultural analysis. Fifty years after decolonisation, literature and society reflect an engagement with events of cataclysmic consequences – the partition of India on a two nation theory based on the determinant of religion: and the emotional trauma of division, difference and dislocation, the scars of which have not yet been mended. Ensuing differences between communities over the past fifty years and the collective memory of the sundering has found expression in the literature of contemporary India. (2) the anti –Sikh riots in 1984, a post script to Partition, relived traumas of difference \division and the question of ‘proving’ identity—Indian? \ Sikh? (3) the phenomenon of the Diaspora, an integral aspect of the contemporary ‘global village’, so celebrated by economic pundits and yet so problematic to identity—Indian?\ American?\ Sikh? Fissures, division and barriers enforced by historical processes and paradoxically erased in the euphoria of creating new nations, new worlds, …I propose to read the literature of undivided India’s partition, and the continuing partitions attendant on the anti- Sikh riots and the Diaspora.

Bhalla, Tamara

Necessary Omissions: Authenticity and Gender in South Asian Diasporic Fiction

Kamala Markandaya became a major international literary presence upon publishing Nectar in a Sieve in 1954. The novel was a dual selection for the Book of the Month Club in 1955 and established Markandaya as a world-renown Commonwealth writer. At the time of its publication, critical scrutiny divided into two camps, both of which focused on whether the novel presented an ‘authentic’ view of Indian village life:  popular reviewers either claimed it as a ‘realistic’ example of Indian village life, or denounced it as a misinformed portrayal. In either case, these professional readers’ reactions to the text, and to its main protagonist, Rukmani, value unmediated access to an Indian peasant woman’s lived experience.  By tracing the critical history that has developed around this novel during the past 50 years, I explore shifting ‘realist’ codes that enable representations of the Indian woman abroad to be at once paradoxically exoticized and made familiar. Additionally, I use this text as a case study to examine how and why female South Asian diasporic writers push against generic assignations (such as social realism and magical realism) in order to establish a counter-canon of literature invested in political and social change.  Finally, I situate Nectar not only in relation to the history of its own reception but also as an antecedent to Arudhati Roy’s literary activism in order to interrogate the gendered mechanisms of Orientalism that continue to pervade and publicize South Asian diasporic literature.

Boutros, Fatim

“Imagined Homelands”: The Identificatory Power of African Spatiality for the Global Afro-Caribbean Diaspora

Caribbean slavery and the emergence of the black Caribbean diaspora offer an exemplary case for the study of the interrelations between cultural identity and its anchorage in cultural spaces. The Middle Passage as an initial act of violence is emblematic for the fact that slavery in the Americas was one of the most radical historical cases of cultural rupture, especially because of the spatial uprooting with all its ramifications for the displaced Africans. Out of this situation a close and enduring connection developed between the hope for an end of slavery and the idealization of an imagined spatiality juxtaposed to the New World environment. Throughout the course of colonial history Africa kept its identificatory power and increasingly formed the spatial core of the communities’ founding myths. Self-representations continue to refer to African origins as an idealized spatial subtext that forms as much the telos as the mythical origin of the historical developments of the Black communities around the globe. The imagined and idealized space of the mythical African origin is to be regarded as the identificatory core of what Benedict Anderson called an imagined community and is in accord with Arjun Appadurai’s observation of the increasing impact of imagination in the negotiation of cultural identities.

Brada-Williams, Noelle

Looking Backward to go Forward: Parody, History and Religion in U.S. Latino Art

Parody functions as a kind of in-joke, identifying and uniting peoples with a common cultural knowledge of the thing parodied (either satirically or as an homage). In recognizing the parody, we are interpellated into the community of fellow readers or audience members who are also familiar with the prior text which the parody is replicating.  This is especially useful for minority communities whose members may be so spread across geographic space that they have become non-face-to-face communities or “imagined communities” in the phrasing of Benedict Anderson.  In the book Latino Cultural Citizenship: Claiming Identity, Space and Rights, Renato Rosaldo and William Flores build on the work of Anderson, but note that their research reveals that “Latino imagined communities derive less from print and other media than from such events as public celebrations and protest rallies” (73). This talk will examine the uses of public celebrations and protest rallies in the work of Ana Castillo and Guillermo Gomez-Peña.  It will examine the veracity of Gomez-Peña’s statement that “religious and political symbols, no matter how charged they might be, can be emptied and refilled when transferred to a new context” (242), and will conclude with a brief examination of the repetition and reinscription of religious and historical icons in the recent protests of the immigration bills currently before congress.

Brouillette, Sarah

Consumer as Tourist in Graham Huggan’s The Postcolonial Exotic

My paper will discuss the figure of the cosmopolitan reader in The Postcolonial Exotic (2001), Graham Huggan’s influential materialist assessment of postcolonial literary production. I will argue that this consumer figure is the basis upon which much of Huggan’s analysis depends. Huggan’s definition of the exotic in its newly global guise rests on the notion that “difference is appreciated, but only in the terms of the beholder; diversity is translated and given a reassuringly familiar aesthetic cast” (27). The exotic is the product of a willful activity in which the “beholder” is the major participant. Yet this “beholder” has a primarily rhetorical function in Huggan’s work. Specifically, the cosmopolitan reader, ceaselessly ingesting a variety of managed products, designed with her own easy pleasure in mind, is the shadow self of the academic critic. That is, positing the consumer habits of a debased cosmopolitan class is in fact a way of distinguishing theoretical practice from the habits so described. Moreover, in analyzing recent versions of the “tourist gaze,” Huggan points out that tourists are constantly distinguishing themselves from other tourists – a process they can never perfect, and which then motivates tourism itself. I will argue that Huggan’s own distancing of critical “knowledge” from market exoticism is analogous to the way the traveler/anti-tourist claims access to the “truth” of what she beholds, while the tourist, like the global reader, is said to remain blissfully ignorant of the reality behind the exotic image. Travelers, Huggan writes, “look down on ‘superficial’ tourists, whom they see as having little or no interest in the countries they visit […] and as seeking maximum enjoyment within a minimum of effort” (179). He rightly calls this distinction a “highly profitable myth,” without seeing how perfectly it mirrors his own characterization of the equally mythic cosmopolitan consumer.

Burton, Rob

 The Spirit of Bandung and Artists of the Floating World

What has happened to the spirit of Bandung in the five decades since leaders of 29 African and Asian nations came together in April 1955 to foster a powerful non-alignment movement as an antidote to the Cold War politicking between Capitalism (embodied by the U.S.) and Communism (embodied by the U.S.S.R.)?  At first glance, the answer might appear to be bleak and sobering, especially when applied to an international political landscape that is polarized by a U.S.-led War on terrorism pitting us (“innocent victims”) versus them (evil terrorists). A concomitant chill seems to have gripped our cultural and imaginative forms of expression as civil liberties come under increasing stress and strain.  Despite this gloomy scenario, I wish in this paper to highlight contemporary multicultural writers (“artists of the floating world”) who articulate ways of transcending and deconstructing the binaries that plague contemporary international politics.  In particular, I wish to offer a reading of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day and Bessie Head’s A Question of Power that helps us to understand how personal and political “narratives” are “framed” in an empowering, rather than reductive, discourse.

Chan, Stephanie and Sayo Ogundiran

Border Patrol

We seek to re-examine the concept of the border as it has been delineated in recent theorizations of U.S. culture and identity.  Building on the notion that the border is neither a signifier of absolute Otherness nor a site of assimilation, the speakers on this roundtable draw attention to a range of alternative strategies and multiple identites emerging among the inhabitants of this “third space.” They also extend the notion of the border to include such contemporary phenomenon as gangsta rap and blogs.  Taken together, the presentations on this roundtable reveal the border as a definitive, dynamic zone of survival, assertion, even empowerment – but also a zone of struggle, strife and contradiction.  The first presentation by Stephanie Chan titled “Beyond the Sublime: Minority Poetics and Bay Area Borders,” focuses on Bay Area Asian-American poetry.  In Immigrant Acts Lisa Lowe discusses acts of “decolonization” by Asian American novelists, noting how their works destabilize “colonial modes of production” by presenting “alternative forms of memory, history, and collectivity.”  These acts, Lowe claims, disrupt an American tradition of portraying “the single unified subject and its reconciliation with the national social order” and of obcuring the specificities of minority experience. Using Lowe’s theory as a basis, Chan explores the Bay Area at mid-century as a poetic border – as the site of simultaneous inclusion and exclusion of minority poets.  As Bay Area poetry burgeoned, several minority poets emerged; but despite populist idioms advanced by artists like Allen Ginsberg, many minority poets were left out of dominant circles, ostensibly because their projects were more contradictory, and “other” than most poets’. Dionysian ideals of the sublime – which occupied many dominant circles – were less urgent to many minority poets than self-assertion in a white, masculine arena. More pressing were questions of addressing race/gender and language/meaning hierarchies; to destabilize these hierarchies, some poets created “performative”/”non-representational,” rather than “mimetic”/ “representational,” poetry.  This mode, among others, Chan contends, arose out of a specific necessity for these artists to negotiate poetic borders at home.  The presentation by Sayo Ogundiran titled “Queen Bs: Female Gangsta Rap Lyricists and the Revision of the Music Border” extends the concept of the border to rap music.  Rap, an art form created by African American male lyricists as an “alternative public space” (Singh and Schmidt) for political and social discourse, has flourished on the border of mainstream music since its inception in the early 80’s. But the Gangsta Rap community has been widely criticized for its misogynistic attitudes. Both male rappers and the music industry seem to have made the exploitation of black women an ingredient in the success and commercialization of Rap. As a result, female rappers who choose to participate in the male dominated industry of Rap are marked as “Other” and forced to survive on a border within the border of male rap.  Most female gangsta lyricists are compelled to accept the hypersexualized intraracialized images of women and forced to participate in sexist and sexually exploitative capitalistic agendas of the rap music industry in return for financial success.  However, a small number of female gangsta rap lyricists appear to be challenging the gender paradigm and present a counter-hegemonic alternative within the Gangsta Rap community by  becoming matriarchs in a patriarchal construct and subverting the marginalization of the female voice.  A few are even attempting to empower themselves by consciously engaging in ironic exaggerated performances of femininity.  Examining the work of two female gangsta lyricists-- Lil’ Kim and Trina -- Ogundiran claims that these polemical female rap artists manage to shift the gendered paradigm of Gangsta Rap even as they continue to use/rely on language and imagery framed within binary oppositions that privilege.

Chow, Balance

Operation Kite-Running: The Outsourcing of Redemption To Afghanistan Now That “The World Is Flat”

The story of an individual’s quest to expiate and to atone, and to provide redress for shameful acts of depravity and betrayal, Khaled Hosseini’s novel, The Kite Runner, has found considerable resonance among American readers.   As a narrative of redemption it apparently serves to awaken—and maybe appease—the moral conscience of quite a few individuals amidst an ongoing war against terrorism.  Yet, however, in the geopolitical contexts of the turmoil that has engulfed Afghanistan, the novel can be better understood as a discourse of (post-)colonial desire and imperial conquest, a propos a region that continues to resist integration into the hegemonic order of the “global” economy—which Thomas Friedman eulogizes as a world that has effectively become “flat” (but all for the best).  Ironically, the quest for redemption dramatized in The Kite Runner exemplifies one of the key arrangements in the hegemonic order of the global economy: an individual’s existential crisis, with its attending moral choice of action, is turned into an overseas operation akin to the “outsourcing” of a product that can be manufactured inexpensively and efficiently, and then packaged and re-imported as a commodity for the consumption of the American public, a considerable percentage of whom have acquiesced in the perpetual conflict that is otherwise known as the “Project for the American Century.”  The Kite Runner is hardly sui generis as a narrative of redemption made to order and just in time; not a few works of ethnic-American or immigrant texts conform to this pattern of operation, raising important moral and esthetic questions about the nature of supposedly heroic quests (for freedom, democracy, opportunity, etc.) that operate in an essentially flattened world.  The enthusiastic reception of a text like The Kite Runner is therefore both welcome and disturbing, if in assigning the text to book clubs and study groups we fail to probe into the basis of such a response and interrogate the moral force behind it.

Christiansen, AnnaMarie

 “Dot the La’e”: Bollywood Movies in the Indigenous Pacific

The title of this paper refers to a subject heading on an online Tongan message board in which participants, both Tongans in Tonga and Tongans in diaspora, discussed their favorite Indian films.  By the seventeenth page of the thread, most preceded their remarks with “dot the la’e”—a statement which acknowledged the Hindi custom of wearing a bindi with the application upon the Tongan forehead or la’e.  This paper will examine the fascination with Bollywood films in the indigenous Pacific.  While we can explain the Pacific consumption of Indian movies as merely one of Appadurai’s global flows of media, it is useful to acknowledge the shared experience of colonial history and contemporary migration as points of identification for an Oceanic audience.  What Pacific Islanders see in Bollywood movies are common themes of family ties, problems with modernization, discourses of difference.  When they “dot the la’e,” Tongans were creating a Tongan space for Hindi film. In a world in which the consumption of media means the consumption of dominant Western values, a globalizing process which seems to replicate imperial discourses and colonial histories, indigenous groups in the Pacific re-articulate their own difference in viewing Bollywood films. 

D’Amore, Alice

Strange Repetitions: A Query into Soweto’s Dual Promotion of National Trauma and the Tourism Industry

Apartheid ended more than ten years ago; regardless, bulletholes in the stained glass of Regina Mundi remain, long after the June 1976 Soweto school uprisings, as do the lime mines on Robben Island, the squatter camps in Soweto and Cape Town, and the to-be-furnished space for representing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the Apartheid Museum on the skirts of Johannesburg.  Likewise, the cells on Robben Island have been painted, cleaned, and prepared for tourism. A large, powerful boat leaving from a popular restaurant and shopping spot carries you to those cells, whose apartheid-era squalor, hard labor, and death are relegated to small black-and-white photographs. Outside

of the expensive bars and restaurants lining the tourist strip in Cape Town are squatter camps and worker transportation vans riddled with bulletholes spent by competing cabbies. The Gold Reef Amusement Park stands beside the Apartheid Museum, advertising a “Victorian Fun Park.” In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag writes: “But there is shame as well as shock in looking at the close-up of a real horror. Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it?say, the surgeons at a military hospital where the photograph was taken?or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be. In each instance, the gruesome invites us to be either spectators or cowards, unable to look. Those with the stomach to look are playing a role authorized by many glorious depictions of suffering. Torment, a canonical subject in art, is often represented in painting as a spectacle, something being watched (or ignored) by other people. The implication is: no, it cannot be stopped?and the mingling of inattentive with attentive onlookers underscore this?” (42). This panel seeks to address the following: --Is there a “post” for regimes such as apartheid? --How do we, and those who suffered,condone/reject/support tourism/voyeurism of suffering, ongoing and past, globally? --Where does the intersection of suffering-as-commodity and commodity-as- suffering occur? Where do the fissures and sutures emerge? --How is trauma marketed to ‘Western’ audiences? Is it ‘authenticated’ when the (previous?) sufferers are working at the museum desk or guiding visitors through a church?

Davis, Emily

Rewriting the Colonial Romance: Ahdaf Soueif and the Global Politics of Art

Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love (1999) charts the fragmentation of the Middle East during the twentieth century due to colonialism and postcolonial nation-building. In a novel full of divisions—colonizer/colonized, Muslim/Christian/Jew—the mirrored romances, one between an Egyptian nationalist hero and a white British woman in the early twentieth century, and one between a Palestinian exile and a white U.S. woman in the late twentieth century, are presented as models for political alliances across divisions. As the novel progresses, however, the cross-racial heterosexual romance is gradually overshadowed by an emerging narrative about cross-racial coalitions among women. Interestingly, these coalitions in the novel develop around representation itself. The central female characters in the novel construct their political visions through transcultural uses of artistic media such as painting, weaving, photography, and prose. At the level of the novel’s structure, these stories of female friendship and political activism are presented through a revision of both the colonial romance and the family romance of the nation. In this paper, I read Soueif’s cooptation of romance, and her insistent focus on the link between the domestic sphere, art, and international politics, as a challenge to masculinist nationalism both West and East and as a call for a more sophisticated theorizing about the politics of gender in the era of neocolonial globalization.

Edwin, Shirin

Sadly Sidelined and Morally Misunderstood: Representations of  Religion in Indian Writing in English

In the ever growing debates and conflicts between indigenous and foreign cultures and economies, no other institution, political or social, has been as thoroughly misunderstood in the last decade as religion in India. This deliberate attempt to privilege a “cosmopolitan” identity based on subscribing to “everything” and choosing or committing to “nothing” in particular has also been strengthened by literatures and theories emerging from the Indian subcontinent. This paper will examine Amitava Kumar’s Husband of a Fanatic: Journey through India, Pakistan, Love, Hate (2005) to demonstrate the ways in which religion is transformed into a  hapless scapegoat- not by political parties or agendas as Kumar shows in his remarkable account of intercaste marriages, the recent Gujarat violence or by the equally recent Kargil war with neighboring Pakistan, but via a concerted effort by writers like Kumar who uniquely privilege their personal itineraries— his own marriage to a Pakistani Muslim— to generalize the meaning of religion and its role in the lives of millions of Indians in the effort to celebrate the “cosmopolitan” and the “international as that which denies all identities and affiliations- particularly religious ones and how transgressing religious boundaries is the only way to proclaim oneself a genuine citizen of the growing “international” world. The aim of the paper is to highlight some of the one sided celebrations of the notion of “internationalism” not only by writers such as Kumar and the more famous Salman Rushdie before him, but by critics and scholars of Indian writing in English who deliberately choose to regard religious identity as myopic and parochial.

Field, Robin E.

Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine and Trauma

A discussion of how Mukherjee’s Jasmine works well with Judith Herman’s ‘Trauma and Recovery’ to demonstrate to students the physical/mental experience of trauma, as well as the textual capture of these traces of trauma.

Forman, Ross

When We Were Organs:  Bodies of Empire in  Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go

This paper addresses the question of fissures and sutures through the trope of organ donation as an emerging metaphor for the relationship between the postcolonial world and industrialized nations.  Focusing on Kazuo Ishiguro’s slightly futuristic novel New Let Me Go (2005) but referring to related fictionalizations of the theme, including Stephen Frears’ film Dirty Pretty Things (2002) and Michael Bay’s movie The Island (2005), it examines how the issue of organ donation functions as both the brutal culmination of the notion that colonial societies exist primarily to support the colonizer’s needs and as a flashpoint for the West’s anxieties about the (in this case, literal) incorporation of the other into the social body.

In Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro internalizes but does not disguise the colonial subtext by centering his narrative around a home-grown underclass of organ donors—raised for the sole purpose of extending the lives of their monoclonal “parents” or “possibles”—and protagonist Kathy H.’s increasing consciousness of her unwitting purpose in life and of the larger conspiracy that feeds her oppression and those of her peers.  With its stark portrayal of questions of nursing and subservience; its insistence on the suspect motives of colonialist forms of education; its echoes (like Ishiguro’s earlier When We Were Orphans) of the literature of the Holocaust; and its emphasis on issues of memory and collective forgetting, Never Let Me Go reveals how tensions surrounding the fusion—as well as the disposal—of bodies in the twenty-first century have come to characterize new forms of imperialism and the global inequalities they engender.

Gamei, Samaa

The Devil on the Cross and the Search for the African Self

In Fanon’s words, the Postcolonial identity struggle has plighted the nations of Africa, asserting that “it is the outcome of a double process:—primarily, economic;—subsequently, the internalization—or, better, the epidermalization—of this inferiority” (Fanon 11).  All these factors are underscored in Ngugi’s Devil on the Cross, which manifests the sources of loss and alienation of African identity, and yet it attempts to provide a manifesto for African disalienation, revival and reclaimed identity, one that is challenging to US students studying African literature. The purpose of this presentation will be to provide approaches to teaching the Kenyan novel, Devil on the Cross. In introducing students to such an intense postcolonial work, a historical background is necessary. Discussing the history of colonization in Africa and the naturalist and historicist views of race, and explaining the African post and neocolonial plight becomes crucial to provide students with the framework for understanding the text. Reading some literary criticism by Fanon, particularly, “Black Skin White Masks” will shed light on central aspects of the novel. In addition, reading an excerpt from Achebe’s Image of Africa will introduce students to a postcolonial text sensitive to the imperialistic representations of the “Other,” as well as reading a section from Chinweizu’s Decolonizing the African Mind and from Ngugi’s Creating a Space for a Hundred Flowers to Bloom are central to understanding the emancipatory messages Ngugi is presenting in his novel. I will also discuss approaches to discussing the allegorical representations of the Devil and assisting students to map put the central themes of the work and the sketching of the characters central to the themes of the work.

Ghosh, Arpa

Corpses, Bodies, Fissures and Sutures in the Novels of Nadine Gordimer, Andre Brink and J. M. Coetzee.

White South African novelists Nadine Gordimer, J. M. Coetzee and Andre Brink have all deployed postcolonial strategies to fracture the falsity of official historical records (maintained by the Nationalist party in power between 1964 and 1991 in South Africa) that made blacks and coloureds all but invisible by excluding them as much as possible from all cultural and economic resources in apartheid-ridden South Africa of the seventies and eighties decades. The paper seeks to study three novels by white South African novelists: The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer, Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee and The Devil’s Valley by Andre Brink in this critical context. The common feature in these novels is the presence of bodies that simply refuse to remain outside the purview of the colonizer’s discourse and keep surfacing inconveniently to disrupt and puncture the carefully sutured master text fabricated by the colonizer. The corpse is a motif used by these novelists to indicate the multilayered nature of history in a land torn by the brutal powers of colonization. In Gordimer, the black corpse is a symbol of the turning tide of history in the wake of Black Consciousness. Brink’s child’s skull is a witness against the lie of racial purity upheld by the pro-apartheid Nationalist Party, while Coetzee’s corpse emblematizes the colonizer’s abortive attempt to read the body-as-text and hence a failure of communication between colonizer and colonized. The three treatments can be effectively linked to the novelists’ vision of a postcolonial South African nation.  

Gill, Jaspreet K.

Difficult Daughters: The Question of Independence

Manju Kapur’s DIFFICULT DAUGHTERS is a three-generational novel about women’s realities juxtaposed with the political history of India, namely the partition.  It is the story of Kasturi who feels betrayed by her body because of the endless child-bearing; it is about Virmati who, seeking value and significance, is drawn to Harish, a married man who is her college English professor; and it is the story of Ida who writes this narrative to reconstruct her mother’s life. This reconstruction is embedded within a revisionist articulation of the partition; Virmati’s fragmented past is paralleled to the nation’s segmented partition history which is critiqued by Kapur. Kapur explores the role of women in pre-partition and post-colonial India to question the lofty idea of independence; post-1947, women have yet to be emancipated from the patriarchal constructs that imprison them. Kapur challenges mainstream nationalistic narratives of the partition and places the ‘woman question’ at the forefront of her revised history which is the focus of my paper.

Gopaul, Sooshilla

Fissures and sutures as seen in Vikram Seth’s Two Lives.

Vikram Seth’s personal experience of inter-cultural mobility enables him to look at “fissures and sutures” that exist in the present day postmodernist world where globalisation and nationalism thrive side by side. I take this transnational writer’s Two Lives to show that it is not religion and its influence that unite or divide peoples but rather ideological  forces developed in society. Seth is known for his eagerness in giving authenticity to his fictions. His realism in A Suitable Boy is often  founded on historical facts. In Two Lives he goes one step further: he brings in both autobiography and supported biography in his attempt to transmit  truth.  This paper aims firstly at exploring those fissures, that is the sufferings caused by  an establishment  nurturing  discrimination from its mildest to its highest forms. Secondly, it examines those sutures, that is those areas of love and support, that  exist simultaneously with the former. Thirdly, since “the auto/biography … is a recognisable genre and one worthy of critical attention” as pointed out by Mary Evans, I intend focussing on the confessional voices inscribed in this text to highlight those points that confirm what we “heard”.  Lastly, I probe into its form and examine its possibilities as an art form.

Goyal, Yogita

Nation Time: Redeeming History in Ama Ata Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy

Ama Ata Aidoo’s 1977 novel, Our Sister Killjoy, occurs at a crucial moment in African literature.  Writing after the euphoria of decolonization has faded, Aidoo presents a striking analysis of arrested decolonization in Africa by means of a young Ghanaian woman’s journey to the heart of Europe.  In contrast to other African writers of the era, Aidoo retains an investment in both cultural and political nationalism, particularly as a pan-African enterprise.  Steering clear of the transnational community of African expatriates in Europe as well as of global feminism, Our Sister Killjoy stakes out an alternative transnational affiliation, based on a nationalist commitment to the advancement of Africa.  Aidoo’s narrative itself takes on the form of arrested decolonization as the progressive narrative of the journey is undercut by a bitter reflection on past injustice.  While the prose of the novel follows a linear trajectory, the poetic interludes indicate that the logic of colonialism continues to unfold alongside the promised logic of nationalism, making postcolonial time an uneven, heterogeneous mixture.  For Aidoo, only bringing the nationalist project to fruition can exorcize the colonial past (which intrudes into and disrupts the time of nationalism).  Aidoo’s scrupulous historical materialism renders impossible any appeal to a singularly-conceived tradition or revolution; even as the novel closes with a return to Africa, its necessary journey through the colonial center signals the beginning of a comprehension of history as the source of political transformation. 

Graham, Shane

“Words That Look Like Acts”: Mapping Loss in Ingrid de Kok’s Transfer and Terrestrial Things

Whereas the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) often made the arguably facile assumption that “revealing is healing,” Cape Town poet Ingrid de Kok emphasizes in Transfer (1997) and Terrestrial Things (2002) the impossibility of narrating stories about traumatic loss—stories which nevertheless demand to be told. De Kok suggests that the key to unraveling this paradox lies in remapping the intimate, complex connections and ruptures between memory, landscape, and the body. Her poem “The Talking Cure” (Transfer 44-45), for example, suggests the inadequacy of words alone to achieve healing:

Sometimes the story keeps winding back to the same place.

And who would believe the gristle and lung

in our short conversations?

. . .

Here too: riddle, spiral ruse,

a ridge of words that look like acts.

On a suspension bridge,

we tightrope into talk:

silver, dancing alphabets strung with loops and hoops,

arabesques of words on a swaying net. . . .

The implication is that the “talking cure” must be concerned with more than discourse; words must do more than look like acts, they must also engage with material spaces and the bodies that occupy them before healing can occur.

Gray, David B.

Religious Fault Lines: Buddhism, Peacemaking, and Violence in Contemporary South Asia

Buddhism has typically been characterized as a peaceful religion that advocates a non-violent approach to conflict resolution. While this has often been the case, Buddhists have, on numerous occasions, ignored their religions’ ethical teachings of non-violence, and have reacted violently to the challenges presented by religious others. This has particularly been the case in Śrī Laṅka, where ethic Sinhala Buddhists, the majority group that dominates Śrī Laṅkan politics, have been engaged in a violent struggle with the Hindu ethnic Tamil minority. In this paper I will examine the factors that have led some Śrī Laṅkan Buddhists to react violently to their largest religious “other.” First and foremost, I will explore totalizing tendencies in traditional Buddhist discourse, which have been an obstacle to Buddhists accepting other religious groups on their own terms. Buddhist totalizing ideological tendencies have made it difficult for Buddhists to engage in fruitful interreligious dialogue in a sustained and non-superficial manner. Secondly, I will explore how the political legacy of the colonial era has problematized interreligious peacemaking in the postcolonial context. I will conclude with suggestions concerning possible strategies Buddhists might take in order to accept more fully members of other religious groups.

Griffiths, Jennifer

The Classroom as a Public Space for Witnessing the Legacy of the Hottentot Venus

This paper describes my experience teaching Suzan Lori Parks’ play Venus in two very distinct classrooms: an Honors literature course at a service academy and Human Rights and Literature course at a small Catholic women’s college.  I will analyze the student responses to the text in relation to institutional context, class dynamics, and class composition in terms of student subject position.  In addition, I hope to offer some possibilities for assignment and discussion strategies, including using a body/text project that allows student to examine the body and its parts as texts onto which culture inscribes meaning.

Gupta, Sukanya

Kushwant Singh, Partition, and Religion

The 1947 partition of India, and the creation of Pakistan, did tremendously affect the history of Asia.  The partition (itself a man made disaster), led to communal riots, mass death and destruction, and fostered a strong enmity between the two nations; an enmity that even now refuses to allow the people of the two countries to lead normal lives. Of course this

enmity had its roots in the history of British India. However, religion too played, and continues to play, a significant role in the fate of the two countries. Women suffered a great deal during this time, but they hardly were able to voice their sorrows. People lost their identities in one blow. Even though you had lived all your life in one place and associated

yourself with that place, it suddenly did not want you anymore. How did people deal with this identity crisis? My paper seeks to address the partition as a man made disaster and it’s impact on the societies of both Pakistan and India. The paper will be looking at the history of wars fought between India and Pakistan since Partition. I will also be referring specifically to Khushwant’s Singh’s novel Train to Pakistan, while examining the atmosphere just at the time of the

partition.

Handlarski, Denise

Women’s speaking and silencing: Gender at South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission

My paper will examine the testimony from women at the Truth and Reconciliation (TRC) proceedings in South Africa.  Engaging with the psychoanalytic implications of voicing trauma, and amnesty and forgiveness in exchange for historical recovery and truth, the commission invited testimony from both victims and perpetrators of violence during Apartheid.  Using psychoanalytic and linguistic theory, I will address the performance of women at the TRC.  Language and gender theorists, such as Eckert and McConnell-Ginet, invite an interrogation of the way language is used in order to construct and reinforce gender positioning.  I will argue that at the TRC, the testimony of women – and its treatment by media and the Commission proceedings and final report - reflects the intersections between race and gender that had a profound impact on the experience of Apartheid for women in South Africa. Drawing on the work of Nthabiseng Motsemme, who discusses the loud silences of women at the TRC, I will explore various linguistic features and

practices such as (pregnant) pauses, mitigators/hedges, indirection, and euphemism.  These practices have been identified by Robin Lakoff as being typical of women’s speech.  I wish to interrogate the assumption that these

behaviours are specific to women, or inherent to the performance of  femininity, and will argue that at the TRC the women generally did not use this type of stereotypical language.  The testimony of the women was used in

media reports, and in the final report of the TRC, in such a way as to position the testimony of women within the frame of traditional female speech patterns, thus obfuscating both the strength of style with which the women

presented, and more importantly, their experiences under Apartheid as the  women tried to convey at the hearings.

Black women during Apartheid had to negotiate the double traumas of racism and sexism, and their testimony sheds light on the psychical working through of marginalization from both feminist/ gender-related struggles due to their

exclusion as women of colour, and race-based struggles due to their  sex/gender.  This type of exclusion, and the type of gendered violence experienced by the women who testified, indicates that during Apartheid, women (of colour especially) experienced remarkable hardship.  I show that the reports from the hearings of the TRC indicate that the replication of

racialized gender inequalities were prevalent at the hearings, even as the process was meant to be undoing and addressing these inequalities.  The language used by and about women, as well as the psychical impact of

confession and telling, has led to a further silencing of women, and particularly women of colour, in post-Apartheid South Africa.

Hinga, Teresia

Colonial Fissures and Feminist Sutures

 I would examine the  the impact of Colonialism  (In Kenya, the years 1905 is decisive) and the multiple fault lines that colonialism presented and examine the corresponding multiple/multiplicative impact of these fissures on women. With specific reference (though not exclusively) reference to the Kenyan context, I would explore the  feminist responses to these upheaval and the quest for the healing fro such upheavals.

Hoover, Sara

Paying Tribute to the Past?  Yasukuni Jinja and the Politics of Social Memory

In recent months, Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has provoked intensifying criticism from Chinese and South Korean authorities for his public visits to Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine.  A Meiji Era Shinto Shrine that commemorates the wartime dead, Yasukuni Jinja has been a controversial site since 1978 when fourteen Class A war criminals were enshrined there as “Martyrs of Showa.”  While Japanese officials suggest that Koizumi’s recent visits simply honor a cultural custom of paying tribute to those who died in combat, Chinese and South Korean authorities argue that these visits invoke a militaristic past to revise a highly imperialistic national history.  In my paper I explore how debates surrounding Yasukuni Jinja are embedded in the construction of postcolonial national narratives as a conflicting site of social memory.  Using architectural theory to examine how competing national narratives are spatially negotiated, my essay attempts to theorize how monuments act as spaces where tensions surrounding narratives of colonization play out.  Monuments such as Yasukuni Jinja ultimate write what Richard Handler and Eric Gable have described as defensible “front line” histories and thus these sites are of crucial importance to the reconstruction of colonial histories in post-colonial studies.  By looking at how monuments to resurrect narratives of racial and geopolitical conflict, I hope to articulate how the conditions of colonialism reproduce themselves via narrative.  

Jha, Priya

The Bluest Indian:  Race and the Ambivalence of Postcoloniality

This paper examines how some ethnic, multicultural and, postcolonial fiction by women has utilized women’s bodies as a means through which to understand the specificity of trauma and violence which often irreducibly marks women-of-color and magnifies their identity as the completely alien and unknowable “Other.” I examine four women’s texts, Meena Alexander’s Manhattan Music, Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, as well as my own autobiography, and the ways in which tropes of violence that visit, racinate, and colonize these bodies, are used by the authors to remember and recode how colored women’s identities are marked as “national” or “transnational” in light of the histories of voluntary or involuntary migrancy.[1]  In the “texts” I discuss, black women’s bodies become discursive sites where the modern and the pre-modern, the public and the private, the local and the global collide and where the notion of “home” and family are destabilized.  Historicizing the specificity of the “transnational” bodies in motion (or in stillness) has salience in light of recent critiques of multiculturalism in the United States. In the three novels I discuss, the authors’ present their own critiques of modernity by giving us third-world women[2] protagonists who choose to escape fixed subject positions anchored in the histories of immigration and/or slavery and who seek liberatory subjectivities by exoticizing, romanticizing, and performing hybrid[3] identities other than their own, with varying results.

Kain, Geoffrey

Global Mindshare: US-driven Globalization in an Age of Rising Anti-Americanism

In No Logo, author Naomi Klein points out that corporate sponsorships (putting the corporate name on everything from sports stadiums to museums to various events to… just about anything) increased by more than 700% from 1985 to 1998.  Similarly, while there has been a 1200% increase in average number of people employed in U.S. temp agencies from 1970 to 2000 (despite an astounding increase in total assets among the top 100 transnational corporations), there has been a radical shift in emphasis/expenditure away from employees/production and toward advertising.   One of the dominant methods of economic globalization, along with deregulation, has been the “prepping” of new or emerging markets via communication of the brand (whether it be Nike, Apple, Microsoft, McDonalds, or whatever).  Similar to nineteenth century competition between nations for colonies, corporations compete for “mindshare” in the global field of “emerging markets.”  In this presentation, I will investigate complications to rapid globalization that have been introduced by rising anti-Americanism—primarily (but not exclusively) as a response to U.S. action in Iraq.  What has been the effect of anti-Americanism on U.S. brands?  How are the mega-corporations (Wal-Mart, McDonalds,…) countering animosity directed toward US-based corporate branding….particularly when the brand is the standard bearer and tool of globalization?

Kapstein, Helen

Tourist Attractions

Tourism, first paid attention to by critics like Dean MacCannell, is becoming a more and more visited topic across disciplinary fields, and has proved critical to theorists of colonial and postcolonial encounters already, as we can see in such works as Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes, but no one has yet argued that the idea of the postcolonial nation is shaped through the experience of tourism, or, in other words, that tourism shows (and shows off) the new nation to

 itself. Most discussions of tourism assume that the tourist is the outsider, visiting a new place in order to experience the new, the exotic, or the erotic. This paper addresses global, outsider tourism, but also suggests the idea of insider tourism--that is, when the tourist is local, and longs for or gains the ability to tour his or her own nation.  In post-apartheid South Africa, for instance, a significant number of heritage sites, like Robben Island prison or

 have been identified as places to which South Africans themselves might travel to pay homage to apartheid-era injustices. Interestingly, these places are also visited by apartheid supporters who see in them an ode to a lost past, indicating the possibility of multiple readings of a tourist site. We also see locals who want to be tourists in the form of political prisoners on Robben Island writing the prison director to request a tour of the island, and we then see them return, after apartheid officially ends, in the form of tourists, buying souvenirs and visiting the jail. This is a very different kind of tourism from that performed by Adela Quested in EM Forster’s colonial novel A Passage to India, who complains that “sight-seeing bores me.” Some of the issues that arise along the way include violence and the tourist gaze, labor, the souvenir, the overlaps of pleasure and punishment, and the economics of tourism. Adela’s complaint about being bored echoes Donna Haraway’s commentary on Carl Akeley, of the African Hall in the American Museum of Natural History in New York, for whom “the gorillas had become boring” (33) on film and so he shot one. This trajectory from seeing to violence, the correspondence between gun and camera, does not seem to evaporate with the emergence of postcolonial tourism. In fact, the current trend in global tourism is towards what’s variously called adventure tourism, risk tourism,

 risk recreation, or tragic tourism with tourists drawn to destinations such as Korea’s DMZ and Sri Lanka’s civil war zone. The increasing demands by tourists for ever-more exclusive and exotic experiences belie our natural assumptions that peace is profitable and that war and tourism are mutually exclusive. War and nature meet then not only in the structuring violences they share and the technologies they employ but also in the escalating explicitness of war as tourism and tourism as violent. This new kind of safari has its origins in big game hunting and the photographic expedition, but adventure tourism offers something different. Risk replaces the boredom of tourist leisure, and even looks like work. War-watching explodes our current definition of tourism. Susan Sontag has argued that “Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ceased to be what it has always been—what people need protection from. Now nature—tamed, endangered, mortal—needs to be protected from people. When we are afraid,  we shoot. But when we are nostalgic, we take pictures” (in Haraway). While that previously made sense, today I think we have to amend Sontag’s analysis and say that now when we are nostalgic, we shoot cameras and guns.

Karim, Persis 

On a Mission from God or the Emerging Imperial Power? : Presbyterian Missionaries in Iran During the Constitutional Revolution of 1906-1911

This paper takes as its starting point the historical relationship between the United States and Iran at the turn of the century, not through formal governmental ties, but rather through a system of American Christian missions established in the late nineteenth century that were ultimately protected by the British capitulatory system in Iran. These missions, established through the Presbyterian Church, initially began in northern Iran where there were Assyrian Christian churches. Operating under British protection, these missionaries worked within the elite and educated class of Iran to

promulgate Chritianity, American values, and ultimately American interests. Their influence in Iran, is not commonly understood in the context of an imperial project, but if one examines some of the motives, associations and tactics of these missionaries, one can see some evidence of this. This paper will interrogate the role of Christian missionaries in Iran and the ways that they allied themselves with various political movements and how ultimately, the missions brought with them a mixed assortment of ideas, values and agendas that would prove part of Iran’s later struggle for democratic

ideas. While Presbyterian missionaries saw their mission as an evangelizing one, they ultimately worked in the service of

“modernizing” Iran. With this came a much more ambivalent and problematic relationship with the west and with the United States. By looking at textual materials and papers of some of these missionaries, I will examine some of the attitudes and ideas of how these missionaries looked at the Mohammedan Iranians they were attempting to convert.

Kasibhatla, Bharati

Erasures in the Production of the Nation State: A Reading of Mahasweta Devi’s “Douloti the Bountiful”

The consequences of capitalism on the restructuring of space are often expressed in terms of fissures – the “globalized metropolital subject” versus the “indigenous,” progress of capital versus environmentally sustainable living practices, and often for the poor, eviction from their ancestral land and erasure from the national consciousness, which is ultimately dependent on these populations for its construction of middle class subjectivity. The past half a century has witnessed the displacement of millions from their spaces of origin, evicted because of the requirements of industry, “progress,” and “development.” Representations of this eviction are absent in mainstream national discourse. In this paper, I will examine the importance of bringing that erasure into focus, specifically in Mahasweta Devi’s story, “Douloti the Bountiful.” The 

story questions the collusion of capitalist interests with the government and feudal practices in a labyrinth of power, which in effect incarcerates tribals in a cycle of dependence.  Mahasweta carefully considers the different effects of this power 

structure on tribal men and women, and pays special attention to the function of the knowledge industry on the construction of the space of the nation. The nation state is conceived at various levels of 

knowledge production and Mahasweta’s work provides the much-needed rupture in this process. By reworking the Mother India symbolism to articulate the condition of the nation from below, she forces the well-meaning liberal intellectual to examine her/his complacence in creating the ideal of the stable and prosperous nation-state. Her 

attention to fissures within the nation state enables the ideological construction of a just and equitable national space.

Kumar, Sukrita

Translating India Across Borders

In 1947 when the Indian Subcontinent was partitioned and Pakistan came into being, millions of people were suddenly uprooted and accompanied by a series of violent upheavals, both physical and psychological. While massive migrations took place, peoples’ minds ‘carried across’ their homes and histories, their memories and cultures. This paper will examine two important fictional narratives written in Urdu, and offer a study of the denial of negotiation with the new reality in the case of one and total bewilderment of the protagonist in the case of the other, in dealing with the new history of his nation. Memory takes them to the older history to which they belonged before the Partition. The novels to be examined are Sleepwalkers and Basti, both translated into English. Borders are mere shadowlines for the protagonists, dismissed by their psyches through sheer non-acceptability of politically drawn borders. Their unconscious is mapped in the novels effectively to trace their cultural baggage that cannot be shed just because they are no longer in their original land. Translation literally means carrying across; the novels examined in this paper will demonstrate this kind of translation. 

Lang, Anouk

Critical sutures: conversations across indigenous/settler literary divides

At various points within postcolonial studies, fissures can be seen between two kinds of texts: those by indigenous authors and those by non-indigenous (settler) writers. In this paper, I ask what bridging these gaps might look like, at both the level of representation and the level of criticism. How compatible is this approach with the attempt to retain the specificities of Native and Aboriginal writing? Is it, moreover, a desirable course of action to take in the face of homogenising forces which threaten to mask real dissent and difference with illusory harmony and unity? I use these questions as a starting-point to think about how and why hegemonic critical categories with institutional currency, such as literary modernism, can be made to take account of indigenous texts and authors. In exploring aspects of the value of Native writing in this light, I ask how its subversions, experiments and irreverencies may feed back into and enrich the canonical categories of settler literatures that frequently evince an impoverished monologic, rather than a dialogic, relation to indigenous authors and indigenous forms of cultural expression.

Lee, Mihra

(Re)Thinking of Cosmopolitanism and “Home”

What does “home” mean in a time of Diaspora?  Are those culturally hybrid peoples more flexible world citizens? True cosmopolitan spirits?  Does cosmopolitanism even exist? In my paper I will explore the several meanings of “home” in the concept of “cosmopolitanism.” I will also attempt to examine how the contemporary multicultural novels, for example, Chang-rae Lee’s A Guesture Life and Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost render the immigrant identity and deal with the cosmopolitan phenomenon (or “symptom”).  I would also like to focus upon those who seemingly have mobility to become the world citizen, keeping in mind that not everyone is capable of freely floating and enjoying the global networks (i.e., the stateless minority tribes, or the contemporary refugee).  Kant originally proposed the concept of “universal hospitality” that the host and the guest-stranger should practice in every state and even ownerless lands such as the sea or desert; whereby, human beings could truly accomplish the citizenship of the world. Can they claim the stranger’s universal hospitality?  If it is possible, from what host and what space can they make this claim as a universal right?

Mah y Busch, Juan D.

Caliban’s Ariel: Tracing a Chicana Postcolonial Ethics

U.S. Latina/o narrative is too often “read” alongside U.S. postmodernisms, a theoretical turn that, in a cult of complexity, has lost hope and, in its recognition of contingency, has left unrepresented the value of freedom. Despite this crisis in the representation of value, everywhere in Chicana/o literature there is evidence of hope and freedom, what I consider to be traces of a Latina American intellectual history that animates Chicana/o narrative ethics.  Through reading two contemporary plays and two postcolonial essays, I describe hope as an ethical orientation that animates Chicana narrative. Tracing how hope reaches toward unrepresented freedoms provides a mechanism for reconsidering, reconfiguring and, ultimately, for representing these values. Specifically, I situate Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s Temple of Confessions (1996) and Cherríe Moraga’s The Hungry Woman (2001) within the Latina American postcolonial debate between José Rodó’s Ariel (1900) and Roberto Fernández Retamar’s “Caliban” (1971). Through Shakespeare’s figures, we have come to associate Ariel with ephemerality, time and idealism and Caliban with the body, space, and materialist struggle. Even though contemporary Latina/o cultural production privileges the standpoint of Caliban, the forcefulness of hope suggests that these writers of Caliban have not divorced him from Ariel as much as we critics have ignored the influences that the two slaves have had on one another.  By comparing divergent notions of hope in Gómez-Peña and Moraga, and by demonstrating a parallel logic in the earlier postcolonial debate, I represent two different freedoms, “mobility” and “spaciousness,” that orient Latina/o literary imaginations. That is, I ask what Rodó’s Ariel might look like now through Calibanic eyes, and I wonder how the two tempestuous figures might be brought together in a postcolonial ethics of liberation.

Mandal, Somdatta

Constructing the Post-Partition Indian Cultural Identity through Bengali Films

Partition is either the outcome of a full war or it could also be caused by the warlike disposition of two groups and their animal-brutality proceeding hand in hand with pernicious politics - for example, the Partition of Bengal and Punjab in India. Partition, again, could foment exodus of two kinds -- massive, multitudinous transfers of population associated with trauma and terror as recorded by Ritwik Ghatak, S.M. Sathyu, Govind Nihalani, and Nemai Ghosh in their films. Taken together, the partition of India prompted massive migrations, which dehumanized millions. It is interesting to note that though the Partition in 1947 was not a lived experience and meant almost nothing to Indians other than the Bengalis and Punjabis, it finds ample reflection in literature, but it really did not take off so well with the visual media, namely films.  There was no significant Punjabi film industry in the 1950s and Punjabi directors and writers working in the Hindi film world gave conflict a wide berth. Barring exceptions like Nemai Ghosh’s Chinnamool and the films of Ritwick Ghatak, ( which were often imprisoned in nostalgia), the Bengali film industry also avoided conflict as a theme to be explored. Ghatak was outspoken concerning India’s Independence and Partition. In response to an interviewer’s question regarding what personal truth had inspired his films, stories and plays, Ghatak replied:  “Being a Bengali from East Bengal, I have seen the untold miseries inflicted on my people in the name of independence—which is a fake and a sham. I have reacted violently towards this and I have tried to portray different aspects of this [in my films].” My presentation will deal with six films on the partition of Bengal, five of which are from India and one from Bangladesh --  Ritwik Ghatak’s Meghe Dhaka Tara, Komal Gandhar and Subarnarekha,  Nemai Ghosh’s Chinnamul; Rajen Tarafdar’s Palanka; Buddhadeb Dasgupta’s Tahader Katha; and Chitra Nadir Pare directed by Tanvir Mokammal of Bangladesh. Portrayed mostly in the neo-realistic style, all these films are silent about the direct representation of political issues but talk about the trauma, and resettlement angst that torment the lives of ordinary people. Video-clips of some of the films mentioned will also be shown.

Martinsen, Eric L.

Haunted Histories and Global Futures in Morales and Ghosh

As Jacques Derrida writes, “One never inherits without coming to terms with some specter” (21).  The inheritance of a global future from a colonial past haunts two science fiction novels of the 1990s: Alejandro Morales’ The Rag Doll Plagues (1992) and Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome: A Novel of Fevers, Delirium & Discovery (1995).  Centered on global pandemics and featuring ghostly characters, these novels—one Chicano, the other South Asian—conjure and collapse various time periods: a colonial past, the postcolonial “present” and a globalized future.  In Morales, three generations of doctors from a single family battle a trans-historical plague called La Mona in colonial Mexico City, AIDS in contemporary Orange County and chemical pollution in the future megalopolis of Lamex.  Ghost-like figures from the past and future appear to Morales’ narrators, disrupting the Enlightenment view of history as a “natural, homogeneous, secular, calendrical time” (Chakrabarty 74). Ghosh’s novel also creates an alternative history of Roland Ross’s discovery of the cure for malaria in late 19th century Calcutta; the story of his “scientific” discover  is interwoven with a present-day quest to uncover the substantial contributions of folk knowledge and with a near-future search with the help of a supercomputer for the investigator who has gone missing.  While these novels summon up various historical moments of crisis, Morales and Ghosh also invoke global futures that, while they are haunted with racial division and environmental devastation, are at the same time filled with the promise for mutual aid through cross-cultural coalitions and heterogeneous epistemologies.

Martinez, Ouimette

The Political and Poetical Imagination: Brazilian Candomblé in Intercontinental and Historical Context

In this paper I initially focus upon a brief historical introduction of Brazil, as it is internationally circumscribed within the Americas since colonization, an intercontinental process.  In this light, I come to an understanding of Candomblé insofar as it is a modern syncretic practice of cultural distinction in a problematic—racialized—process of religious syncretism that involves European and African influences.  Resistance appears, here, not only in terms of assumed racial differences, but where and how Candomblé worship occurs geographically, if not only economically.  I consider religious syncretism in two theoretical ways that are woven into the historicity of Candomblé: First, I outline Peter Fryer’s position in Rhythms of Resistance: African Musical Heritage in Brazil, noting that modern Candomblé places of worship, and its followers, were driven to the periphery of urban centers.  Second, I synthesize Fryer’s text into an unfinished product in terms of the general method I use, as this expository version of method is incomplete in reference to how I conceive of this ongoing inquiry into Brazilian Candomblé, its politics and poetics. 

Masmoudi, Ikram

Exile and Memory in Hadiyya Hussein’s After Love

Inaam Kacahachi who is an Iraqi  journalist and a writer living in Paris, said in a recent book  called : Words Of Iraqi Women: the Iraqi drama told by women (Paroles d’ Irakiennes, le drame iraquien ecrit par des femmes, which is actually a translation from the Arabic): “ The legend says that in the Baghdad of the  1001 Nights, Sheherazade deceived death with the narrative, in the evening she would start a tale and she would stop just before dawn the consent words, and that today her granddaughters use almost the same trickery: they deceive fate with their narratives and writings which speak more truth than all the bulletins of the world”  Whether inside the homeland or on exile, the characters of Hadiyya Hussein’s After Love suffer much distress, isolation and loss. In After Love, life under repression drives the female protagonist to flee her native Baghdad to Jordan to escape imprisonment. Fear, anxiety, isolation and uncertainty are the common lot of Iraqis in exile, lining up at the Commissariat for Refugees’ Affairs in hope of obtaining asylum and relocation somewhere in the world. To counteract erosion and the vicissitudes of her exilic conditions the narrator recourses to the recollections of her memories and make them alternate with her loss and the fissures of her being. This paper will try to shed light on this negociated movement in the novel between exile and memory, as an antidote to loss and perdition and the contributions of the recollection of the past as a suture device to the fissures of the protagonist’s soul.

McCredden, Lyn

Frontier Fissures and Redemptions

This paper will read the two “subversive Westerns” Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch, 1995, U.S.A) and The Proposition (Dir. John Hillcoat, 2005, Australia) for their versions of the frontier. It will examine the multiple “fissures” in “frontier thinking” probed in each film, but also ask whether there are any redemptive possibilities imagined. Finally, the paper will inquire into the possible differences between the films as indicative of contemporary post-colonial American and Australian imaginings of frontier history.

Moukhlis, Salah

The Postcolonial Muslim Subject and the (Con)text of Globalism

Today as the global community is deeply enmeshed in ideological battles over socio-cultural value systems and historical trajectories, elaborations of cultural identity narratives have become discursive strategies of survival in what appears to be an amorphous global cultural landscape. As the juggernaut of globalization is in the process of rearranging the world into conform cultural and economic entities, the perennial task of formulating the self both at the micro as well as the macro levels becomes all the more urgent. Such endeavor necessitates a revisionist approach to autochthonous foundational discourses and historical continua sometimes reviving and reformulating them as the underpinnings for a contemporary native epistemology capable of challenging the universal claims of Western humanitarian and democratic rhetoric and sometimes these foundational narratives are imbricated into the very fabric of Western master discourses so that eventually neither Western nor native subjectivities can have access to an unadulterated identity or a coherent historical linearity without the recognizable intervention of the other.   This paper will address the role of Islam and the past in constructing the modern Arab-Islamic identity. It will specifically interrogate the claim that an elaboration of a localized counter-hegemonic value system centered on Islam and Islamic historical narratives is a mandatory step toward negotiating Muslims’ entrance into the global community. With specific reference to the Maghreb as an example, the paper will further engage the centuries-old questions of whether a happy marriage between local cognitive traditions and Western modernity is possible at our historical juncture; whether an identity defined primarily by an Islamic epistemology can enter into a meaningful dialogue with the demands of global capitalism. The paper will conclude with the argument that the emphasis on religious and localized identities and the nourishment of the fantasy of their purity and ascendancy paradoxically only serves the global capitalist machine by locking the postcolonial Muslim subject into archaic articulations of identity while all along making their very existence dependent on Western material modernity.

Naji, Ammar

The politics of the Postcolonial canon in academia

My work, which theoretically calls into question the displacement of Postcolonial Studies by globalization theory or what has been called “Anglobalization”, presents a new way of re-reading the postcolonial. If  Bill Aschroft contends that one needs to “re-write history” to project the transformative nature of the colonized, I believe, it is also the time for Post-colonial scholarship to trans-format that Post-colonial. In other words, with the effects of a globalized theory, the Post-colonial- as the site of representing ”the local” ( as for example Modern Arabic literature and other Postcolonial writings), should neither be exoticised nor simply globalized in discussions. Rather, the Post-colonial, I believe, should maintain a space of ”trans-globality” that speaks of its agency to change that “globality” to fit its own “locality”. And it is through the re-readings of Third World  literature ( like  the modern Arabic novel for example) that one can understand and perceive the geo-political structurality that undermines the social as well as the literary evolution of the colonized. With such a socio-politicised re-reading, the Postcolonial will no longer be perceived as the site of agonistic positionality deployed in notions like hybridity, liminality and emigrancy, nor it will represent an antagonistic gaze manifested in the empire’s ability to write back, rather it will initiate a site of a local inventiveness that is both trans-formative and responsive to its own localized globality in relation to a globalized order. 

Najita, Susan

Sexual Politics and Decolonization in Keri Hulme’s The Bone People

This paper examines a central problematic in bringing to bear feminist critique of gender relations on indigenous Pacific Island texts.  How do questions of decolonization and sexual politics come into tension with questions of indigenous genealogy and more traditional gender roles?  Keri Hulme’s prize-winning novel the bone people provides a productive entré into this question.  Decolonization in Hulme’s novel is imagined via a transformative relation between people and the land which is often figured cosmogonically and genealogically as the feminine and maternal goddess Papatuanuku.  The bone people provides a  radical critique of the ways in which two colonial and native patriarchal structures, British colonialism and Maori chiefly structures in New Zealand/Aotearoa, worked to commodify Maori women’s bodies in early trade and contract marriages.  This history of exchange between Maori and British men which occurred in the nineteenth-century resurfaces in the contemporary moment of the novel in the protagonist Kerewin Holmes’ neuter sexuality; her refusal of intimacy and sexual relations is an attempt to remove herself from this traumatic history of colonization.  The decolonizing relations Hulme envisions transforms this traumatic past through a particularly indigenous mode of relating to the past and future: Maori genealogy or whakapapa.  Through renegotiating the lived relations between Kerewin, the foundling Simon, and his foster-father Joe, they are able to articulate a new whanau (extended family) structure which emerges out of but transforms notions of genealogy.  The new community formed at the end of the novel is one that is not determined solely by biological, reproductive, blood, or marital relations.

Nanda, Aparajita

Of power, politics and the “undoing” of gender in Octavia Butler’s Adulthood Rites

My paper focuses on the re-definition of tactics inherent in discourses of power and control in the “undoing [of] gender” in Octavia Butler’s Adulthood Rites.  Through the critical lens provided by Judith Butler’s recent publication of the same name my paper seeks to look at the role assigned to the third gender in Octavia Butler’s narrative. It delves into the controlling discourse of power that seeks to bring in a novel triangulation of the presence of the third gender in any heterosexual mating. What then is the relationship of the child born of this mating to the third “neuter” gender? What genes are passed down to this progeny?  What politics does it learn from this third parent?  As re-definitions of kinship emerge, in which incestuous bonding is not a taboo but an imperative, they challenge the traditional concept of family.  This third gender exists as a divisive trope, an intrusion into the accepted essentials of gendered mating and birthing and yet at the same time promises essential aid without which human birth would be impossible. An “undoing” of gender that in itself is a fissure and a suture, a schism and a bridge, plays out the inherent ambiguity of its construction through a unique manipulation of the politics of power and control.

Ndigirigi, Gichingiri

The Exile Writes Back: Ngugi wa Thiong’os Murogi wa Kagogo

    This paper examines the refigurations of home in Ngugi’s new monumental novel, Murogi wa Kagogo. In the novel or through the novel, Ngugi apparently comes to terms with the reality of his long exile and to an acceptance that exile at best makes his view of Kenyan realities partial. The employment of an apparently untrustworthy narrator, symptomatic of the displacement of the writer as witness, stylistically captures that partiality. Thus, his narration is distanced with such qualifiers as “according to those who were there” “it is said” and “for I was not there”. The narrative itself is constantly undergoing rewriting as new details become available, and it is conscious of its “storyness” rather than aspiring to the false coherence of a Kenyan reality that was being objectively depicted. But the temporal and spatial separation from the homeland has also given the writer space to reflect almost dispassionately on home. For  a writer who was previously criticized for his trenchant partisanship, oversentimentality and melodramatic portrayal of character and situation, the critical distance from the subject in this novel is refreshing.  But lacking access to the homeland, writing becomes a means of reconnection to it. Even more than this, the writer adopts a larger canvas, a generalized African locale and the maladies of postcoloniality more generally.

Nguyen, Marguerite

Recovering History through Race in Le Minh Khue and Michael Herr’s Vietnams

This paper examines how depictions of race in a Vietnamese short story and an American memoir function to organize understanding of the Vietnam War.  I examine Dispatches (1978), Michael Herr’s acclaimed Vietnam War narrative, and “Anh Linh Tony D.” (1991), a short story set in contemporary Vietnam written by North Vietnamese woman writer Le Minh Khue.  In Michael Herr’s Dispatches, widely perceived to be an exemplary Vietnam War and postmodern text, the racial structuring of relations within American combat units and in relation to North and South Vietnamese become muted beneath Herr’s postmodern, idiolectically diverse language of war-time camaraderie which Herr mobilizes against official American war-time rhetoric.  I will explore how Herr’s narrative language, which Fredric Jameson describes in Postmodernism as helping to “open up the place of a whole new reflexivity” in a postmodern era, depends upon Herr’s powerful but implicit and unexamined delineation of North and South Vietnamese racial form.[4]  In Le’s satire “Anh Linh Tony D.,” a father-son burglary team discovers the bones of an American soldier, Tony D., and exchanges them for a large sum of cash.  However, the relatively easy economic exchange is thrown off course by the haunting presence of Tony D., who appears to the father and son as a skeleton with no epidermal traits, but whose face is black.  Tony D.’s return reminds the father, Thien, of a black French soldier whom Thien had befriended in the days following French defeat, and it is this ironically fond memory of a black French soldier found in the face of Tony D. that compels Thien to rethink the moral implications of his life of greed and thievery.  Tony D.’s racialized presence offers possibilities not only for relinking postcolonial Vietnamese society with the legacy of the two Indochina wars, but also for engendering within Vietnamese subjects a moral impulse in a contemporary Vietnam which Le depicts as spiritually and economically impoverished.  At the same time, however, the focus on Tony D. as an enabling presence raises the issue of what political implications are attached to a notion of blackness that is reified in the service of historical and ethical recovery.

Papayanis, Marilyn

Black Houseboys and White Homelessness: Shame and Succor in the African Bush

In my paper, I propose to examine the pivotal role of the “houseboy” in Doris Lessing’s first novel, The Grass is Singing, and Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People. In both texts, domestic space, as both as structural regulator of bourgeois family life and an embodiment of “home,” is rendered problematic through revolution (July’s People) or the fact of settler culture itself by virtue of which the colonizer is always already displaced from “Home” (The Grass is Singing.) The structural absence of “home” and the condition of white homelessness pose a number of interesting questions concerning gender, ownership, the status of children, and, of course, the relationship between colonized and colonizer. The native houseboy steps into the void in ways that are both nurturing and lethal, introducing a fatal ambivalence that impacts upon, among other things, bourgeois models of self-definition and the relations of power and powerlessness by which social space in the colony (or under conditions of apartheid) is negotiated. The effect is not so much to reverse power relations between the colonizer and the colonized as to bear witness to the internal dissolution of the white settler family. The houseboy in The Grass is Singing murders the wife of his white “master,” and through that act (itself clothed in ambiguity) becomes, not so much a marker of colonial rage as an agent of redemption insofar as the death is, in some sense, pre-ordained, even willed, thus transforming the colonized subject’s agency into an act of service. July, on the other hand, shelters his colonial masters in his own village after black revolutionaries have swept through Johannesburg. In the process their status changes from that of property owners to objects with their own kind of use value. He remains, nominally, in their “service,” mediating between “back there” and what is ultimately represented to be an unlivable and increasingly unspeakable present and exposes the fault lines between the rhetoric of liberalism and the realities of social life under apartheid.

Patke, Rajeev

Partition and its aftermaths: Poetry & history in Modern Ireland

The paper will address the effects on poetic culture of the partition of Ireland into Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland in 1921-22. The aim of the paper will be twofold: first, it will examine the grounds for an analogy between the cultural consequences of the Irish partition and the consequences for literary culture of other political partitions that were a direct or indirect consequence of British colonialism (such as those in the Middle East, South Asia, and Southeast Asia), focusing primarily on the genre of poetry for its instantiation of literary cultures. Secondly, the paper will address the ways in which poetic language and form are utilized to explore the repercussions of politics on society in terms of the diagnostic, the agonistic and the ameliorative function of art in relation to society.

Perez, Graciela

The history of Spain in the French literature: a fascination expressed in the fantastic literary world of Nodier: a Study of ‘Inès de Las Sierras’ by Charles Nodier

Nodier links history to the literary fantastic story in such a way, that the historical event and the literary event transcend themselves.  Both ‘stories’ retain shared facts and images originating a dialogue in the form of a ‘romanced history’. The mystery of history merges the mystery of the fantastic story composing a cosmogony of shadows in a playful esthetic mirage.  The writer that adopts this writing process incorporates the reflection of the history of ‘the other’ into ‘his’ history; in this case, the History of Spain into the History of France.  This is why the echo of the ‘romanced history’ fascinates both the writer and the reader. Nodier uncovers in this esthetic expression, a prolific venue where to express his own stories and history through the history of ‘the other’.  He transgresses the limits of time and in this way, inserts his work into the human history. This intriguing process is marked by fascination that emerges from an artistic literary source where extraordinary images reflect two histories bringing them closer in spite of the distances.  In this analysis of themes, images and roles I aim to value not only the translation of two Histories into a literary story, but also appreciate the intent of the literary world to incorporate other worlds.

Popescu, Monica

Exiles in Paradise?: South Africa Seen from the Eastern Bloc

If post-colonial literature and theory has been influenced by intellectuals traveling “into the West,” to use Amitav Ghosh’s phrase, a smaller yet equally fascinating number of African intellectuals chose Eastern Bloc countries as their destination. During the apartheid regime, many intellectuals affiliated with the African National Congress or the South African Communist Party traveled to Eastern Europe to find political refuge, to study, or to receive military training. A good number spent the remainder of their lives there, as revealed by ANC statistics. Up to this point, their writings have received very little attention, being usually dismissed as political propaganda without much literary value. Yet these writings pose questions about the role of Eastern Europe in the South African imaginary.  This form of exile has taken place within the constitutive political binaries imposed by the Cold War. As a result, intellectuals affiliated with the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party regarded the Eastern Bloc as a source of inspiration for writing about the social and political struggle in their own country. The travel narratives of Walter Sisulu, Archibald Sibeko, Ruth First are a far cry from the disappointment experienced by Western “fellow travelers” (like Andre Gide). What reasons, aside from political expediency, determined these open-eyed critics of South African oppression to overlook similar censorship structures, imperial configurations that subordinated the component republics, gender inequality, material shortages and even racism, which they must have witnessed in the USSR during the dying days of the Stalinist regime? To answer these questions I will focus on Alex La Guma’s A Soviet Journey as it reflects and deflects the ideological and cultural background in communist countries while outlining the writer’s hopes and strategies for overturning the apartheid regime. Ultimately my paper will discuss the Cold War as the context that generated one of the most lasting political and ideological global fissures, while reflecting on the complicated triangulations that existed below the surface of its dichotomies.

Purkayastha, T.D.   

Themes of Orality and Silence in Karnad’s Nagamandala: Play with a Cobra

A famous play by Vijay Tendulkar, one of the leading playwrights of India, is titled Silence! The Court is in session. The admonitory word is intended to suggest the peremptoriness with which patriarchy seeks to perpetuate its hegemony by systematically silencing all the voices of protest While silence is a curse under which the repressed and the marginalized have labored all the world over, women become easily, especially in Indian drama, a gendered site of that repression, thanks to the lingering power of a cultural stereotype. The present paper is focused on a play by Girish Karnad, which is marked by a meaningful engagement with the topos of a silent woman, whose speechlessness Karnad regards with interest for its subversive potential. The play, to my mind, is a landmark if only because of the way it challenges the role of drama, basically a verbal artifact, as a medium intended to capture the silence of the speechless with all its nuances. Karnad’s Nagamandala, based on two oral tales, which the author once heard from Prof. A.K. Ramanujan, introduces in its Prologue the figure of a playwright who   encounters a Story that has sneaked out of the mouth of its teller to take shelter in a village-temple. The play, which is but an enactment of the tale being told before the playwright, explores the tension between sexual exploitation of a woman by her husband and her private fantasies. Placed within the framework of an oral tale, the narrative lends itself to manipulation by its narrator/s. The play’s alternative endings, depending on the narrator’s decision to either kill the cobra or let it survive in its lover’s tresses, underline the importance of silence in a male-dominated society, where man-woman relationship remains suspended in a state of precarious balance. A woman-centered oral tale becomes a metaphor for lives subjected to confinement and oppression.

Ramnarayan, Akhila

After the Fall: Narratives of Race, Place, and Power(lessness) in Lost

This paper examines constructions of race in television network ABC’s successful, award-winning drama/adventure series, Lost.   Set in a remote island in the south Pacific, Lost interweaves the stories—past and present, allegorical and immediate—of the survivors of a plane crash (en route to LA from Sydney), including in its plot twists a mysterious hatch, a sinister “Dharma collective”, and an enemy faction of feared, unnamed “Others”.   The paper traces how Lost’s diverse cast—Naveen Andrews as Sayid Jarrah, an Iraqi military veteran; Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje as Mr. Eko, a Nigerian warlord; Michelle Rodriguez as LA police officer Ana-Lucia Cortez; Daniel Dae Kim as Jin Soo-Kwon, a Korean fisherman’s son turned mafia flunkey; Josh Holloway as James “Sawyer” Ford, an American con artist from the deep south; and Dominic Monaghan as heroin addicted UK rock star Charlie Pace—negotiate interracial communication, connection, and strife in a steamy jungle setting that is decidedly the product of Orientalist fantasy.    I argue that Lost reifies ethnic and gender stereotypes in its apocalyptic depiction of power struggles in a post-enlightenment world even as it breaks new ground in its representation of multilingual and multiracial community in a popular televisual genre.  

Rastogi, Pallavi

Where do Muslims Fit In? : Religious Unbelonging and the Failure of South African Democracy in Ahmed Essop’s The Third Prophecy

South African Indian novelist Ahmed Essop’s most recent novel The Third Prophecy (2004) problematizes the accommodation of the Indo-Islamic community within the contours of a secular nation. The Third Prophecy evaluates the South African political psyche through the tropological consciousness of Indian Muslims and meditates on the nature of Islamic identity in contemporary South Africa as well as on the utopian possibilities of multicultural democracy. This last, Essop argues, will never achieve fruition unless the nation can incorporate the Indo-Islamic constituency within its parameters. The Third Prophecy claims that Indian Muslims seem more occluded from the national norm in the post-apartheid period than they were in the apartheid era. The novel laments the two strikes—of race and religion—against Indian Muslims and critiques democratic South Africa for failing to live up to its own image of egalitarianism and inclusivity. Essop uses Muslim alienation to expose the hegemonic impulses of the “rainbow nation”: the dominant cultural identity in South Africa is a black/Christian one therefore national identity is also black/Christian. The Third Prophecy laments South Africa’s inability to accommodate the Indian Muslim population, a constituency whose racial difference is further exacerbated by religious difference.  Indian-Muslim unbelonging underlines the fact that the new South Africa is not so new after all. The rainbow nation continues to preserve an absolutist sense of racial, ethnic and national identity as it moves from Eurocentrism in the apartheid period to Afrocentrism in the post-apartheid period. Essop’s later fiction thus reveals a disturbing trend in post-colonial societies where Independence does not always herald a better world especially for those still on the fringes of power. Indian-Muslim alienation from the national norm casts doubts on democratic South Africa’s success in the projects of community building, inter-cultural reconciliation and racial healing thus compelling us to question its very legitimacy as a truly post-colonial nation.

Robbins, Wendy and Jessie Sagawa

“Books / To Set It Right”:  Slave Narratives by and/or about Women Connected to Canada

About slavery, there has been a great silence in Canadian history and literature. Yet some 4,000 slaves--Blacks and Natives--were held in New France alone. In 1734 one young Portuguese-born Black slave woman, bought in New England, was put through a two-month trial, tortured, mutilated, and publicly hanged for starting a fire that destroyed her mistress’s house and a large part of Montreal. Her “confessions,” taken down by the chief investigator, constitute the first slave narrative in North America and inform Afua Cooper’s The Hanging of Angélique (2006). A hundred years after Marie-Joseph Angélique, Mary Prince fled from slavery in the West Indies to London, England, where she told her story to Susanna Strickland, an abolitionist (and later, a pioneer Canadian author). The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave (1831) is the first narrative of a Black woman published in Britain and provides the first detailed depiction of a Black slave woman’s life in one of the British colonies. Its success contributed to the 1838 abolition of slavery in the Caribbean.  Dionne Brand’s novel At the Full and Change of the Moon (1999) opens in Trinidad in 1824, where Marie Ursule plots a mass suicide of militant slaves, while sparing her young daughter. The interconnected stories of six generations of Marie Ursule’s descendants map a matrilineage of the Black Diaspora, confirming its motherlode of strength and endurance. These slave narratives recover lost voices and buried motifs in the Canadian cultural “mosaic,” enrich transnational traditions of womanist literature, and bear potentially healing witness, from Black women’s perspectives, not only to the excruciating realities of slavery, but also to women’s courage and agency in resistance and survival. Their authors suture what Brand calls “the fissure between the past and the present.”

Sarafa, Farrah

Re-writing Algerian Nationalism through the Discourse of the Woman in Assia Djebar’s Fantasia

Djebar’s text, which is an “interweaving” of autobiography, prose poems, and histories of the French conquest of Algeria, culled from the reports, memoirs, and correspondence of military officers, aristocrats and publicists. The dialogue generated by this textual interplay is, subsequently, locatable in the notion of “voice” to which Nadia repeatedly returns in the novel. The means through which the self is preserved, voice seeks to not “borrow” from the foreign source. Voice strives to individualize, to make the woman and the nation independent and therefore free. Nadia’s voice, as the fictionalized version of a colonial, political reality, therefore, is an extension of national identity. Voice is the literary strategy enabling me to formulate connections between Algerian history and the novel. Like the memory and identity it constructs it itself is the site of multiplicity and dimensions of time. Exposing these contradictions will in turn enrich the reading experience of the novel and locate Djebar’s successful representation of the Algerian nation and woman. I intend therefore to culturally rewrite Algerian nationalism and the Algerian woman along the narrative interstices or short italicized excerpts of Djebar’s novel. They are physically unique plot digressions in which the voice of the author emanates more strongly than anywhere else in the novel. These sections divide the novel into six parts: “Le Sistre,” “Le Clameur,” “Murmures,” “Chuchotements,” “Concialabules,” and “Soliloque.”

Satpathy, Sumanyu

Beyond Hybridity: The Case of the Oriya Diaspora in the Americas

This paper explores the problematic of the cultural domain called the Indian Diaspora. The so-called Indian Diaspora consisting of disparate Indian linguistic groups, seem to be constantly reconfiguring their identities in multiethnic “Americas” (comprising the US and Canada). Whereas most of discussions of the Indian Diaspora focus on the category “Indian” unproblematically by totalizing Indianness, these linguistically divided Indians carry their divisions with them, and often regroup themselves into miniature nationalities and sub-nationalities (both provisional descriptions and theoretically contentious) in their adopted locations. They become organized communities, making contributions to enable themselves to identifiable groups and hold cultural conventions and observe traditional cultural festivals, even “educate” their offspring in their respective cultures (not necessarily “Indian”). Consequent upon the unproblematic categorization of the Indian Diaspora, the now hugely popular theoretical category “hybridity” remains similarly unscrutinized beyond colonizer-colonized binaries. The “America Odiya Samaj” (or Orissa Society of the Americas) is a case in point.  My paper, with special reference to the Oriya Diaspora, is a modest attempt to see what happens when the category of Indian Diaspora is

unpacked for further scrutiny. It is an exploration in the construction of the identity through a process of othering, in which discourses on sameness and difference are evoked involved. For primary material the paper will focus on souvenirs, documents used for registration of such societies in the Americas, and juvenile, and amateur literary works, as well as more accomplished Oriya works such as those of KC Das and Santanu Acharya seeking to represent these identities.

Schleiner, Winfried

Early Modern Recovery: Harvey’s Gendered Response to an Earthquake in Essex, England, on 7 April 1580

The paper analyses the gendered eye-witness report given by the famous humanist Gabriel Harvey to the poet Edmund Spenser. According to his report, men reacted to the quake differently from women.  Asked how he, the Cabridge scholar, would explain an earthquake, he gives two explanations: one for women and one for men.

Schultheis, Alexandra

International Human Rights, Modernity, and Anti-Colonial Discourse: A Look at Contemporary Tibet

Contemporary debate on the status of Tibet often emerges through the conflict of international human rights language (everyone has the right to a nationality; everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country; everyone has the right to freedom of religion; the will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of the government) with that of expansive, capitalistic modernity.  Yet both these discourses stem from what Dipesh Chakrabarty terms the Enlightenment’s “hyper-rationalism” and silence discourses as well as subjects constructed through religion and other manifestations of the “non-rational.”  “The problem,” Chakrabarty continues, “is…that we do not have analytical categories in academic discourse that do justice to the real, everyday and multiple ‘connections’ we have to what we, in becoming modern, have come to see as ‘non-rational.’”  In this paper, I argue for postcolonial studies to attend to the problems of current colonialisms, such as that in Tibet, and to do so in language that both admits its subjects into the modern era and re-presents (in the dual form both Marx and Spivak suggest) them without polarizing modernity and religion.  Through a reading of Ani Pachen and Adelaide Donnelley’s Sorrow Mountain: The Journey of a Tibetan Warrior Nun, I invoke Buddhist feminist frameworks (particularly as developed by Anne Carolyn Klein) to move discussion from questions of authenticity, of who is “Tibetan” (a debate that parallels one over who/what constitutes “the human” in human rights discourse), to how the text invokes anti-colonial discourse in Buddhist terms.  I conclude that the subject emerging through such a reading of Sorrow Mountain directs its energies toward anti-militaristic and anti-colonial ends, although it expresses those ends in the language of compassion, emptiness, and interdependence largely unrecognizable in postcolonial studies or international human rights.

Shemak, April

Rights of Passage: The Refugee Narratives of Kamau Brathwaite and Edwidge Danticat

The Caribbean has been described as a fluvial and marine space which evokes the centrality of the sea to island existence.  In his book, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective, Cuban-born scholar Antonio Benitez-Rojo writes, “the culture of the Caribbean, at least in its most distinctive aspect, is not terrestrial but aquatic, . . . The Caribbean is the natural and indispensable realm of marine currents, of waves, of folds and double-folds, of fluidity and sinuosity” (11).  One of the features of this fluidity is the role of migration—the movement of peoples across the sea that has shaped the population of the region.  In this paper I focus specifically refugee narratives of migration that occur by boat or raft.  This type of migration poses specific issues for geographic and cultural “trespassing” as such refugees attempt to cross illegally into the U.S. by water. In addition to the environmental challenges they face, these migrants encounter such bureaucratic obstacles as the Coast Guard, INS officials and detention centers that hinder their access to U.S. society.  While previous Caribbean migration narratives represent the journey from the native space to the metropolis and the various negotiations of race, ethnicity and language that it entails, boat refugee narratives are most often distinguished by the lack of arrival in a new place. I will examine Kamau Brathwaite’s prose-poem, “Dream Haiti” and Edwidge Danticat’s short-story, “Children of the Sea” and analyze how the abyssal space of the open seas shapes and shifts postcolonial Caribbean identities once they have become unmoored from the boundaries of the nation.  As such, these refugee narratives present a kind of textual trespassing because they represent the unsanctioned (and illegal) physical movement across geographic and national borders and boundaries.

Simms, Lindsey

The Mercedes and the Baobab: Commodity Envy in the Postcolony

In The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Thomas Friedman describes the post-cold war, globalized world as divided in two: The Fast World, symbolized by the newness, innovation, and technology of the Lexus, and the Slow World, still stuck squabbling over who owns which olive tree.  Although Friedman argues that there is always a struggle between the Lexus and the olive tree, he believes that those who can’t or won’t take the Lexus out for a spin are the turtles in a world of 100-meter sprinters.  Using examples from a number of recent Senegalese films, this paper argues that Friedman’s account of the new world order fails to consider the ways in which the Slow World is also innovative and creative, but without giving itself over entirely to the cult of the Lexus (or the Mercedes as is the case in West Africa.)  Furthermore, I look at the way that commodity envy operates in these films.  If Friedman is correct, then the underdeveloped world secretly lusts after Western products, publicly criticizing the West but hoping, nonetheless, to achieve its level of consumerism.  While it is true that a certain level of envy exists, the films I examine show how Senegalese youth navigate consumerism, opting for a form of economic autonomy that is different from both Western capitalism and Senghorian socialism.

Sohn, Stephen Hong

After The Plague in the City of Angels:  Queer Artistic Diasporas in Russell Leong’s Phoenix Eyes and Other Stories

In this presentation, I develop a critical analysis of bodies and sexualities at play and at rebellion in Russell Leong’s critically acclaimed short story collection, Phoenix Eyes and Other Stories.  In literary critic David L. Eng’s conclusion to Racial Castration, he theorizes linkages between Asian American Studies to queer sexuality through diaspora, a way to reformulate queer Asian American subjectivity through the celebration of “homelessness” that yet still speaks to the nature of individual experiences.  However potentially liberating this queer subjectivity is, Phoenix Eyes and Other Stories envisions the complexities of queer diaspora in its evocation of Asian American men, who attempt to situate their own romantic and communal relationships in post-1980’s AIDS era Los Angeles.  I concentrate particularly on three stories, “Hemispheres,” “Camouflage,” and “Samsara,” tales which explore radically different conceptions of the queer Asian American in transpacific postcolonial perspectives.  By offering such divergent characterizations, ranging from a Filipino American bathhouse entertainer, to a Chinese American film industry administrator, and a reluctantly recruited performance artist, Leong constructs a pan-Asian diasporic queer community united by their sexual and symbolic desires.  As reviewer Robert Murray Davis notes, “Most of the characters, whatever their gender orientation, carry with them ‘the loneliness of displacement’” (341). It is precisely these feelings of displacement that these characters attempt to combat, but such a terrain of battle necessarily induces not only complicated pasts in faraway landscapes, but problematically configured domestic topographies as well.  For instance, Alec, the Asian American protagonist of “Samsara” feebly searches for a way to sensitively reach out to an ex-lover, Nayo, an immigrant from Saipan, a choreographer, and now dying of AIDS.  His reluctant work as a performance artist helps him engage the bitter feelings of loss that connect him to Nayo as well as his queer Asian performance artist troupe.  In navigating this world, these queer characters, who all hold ties to the realm of performance, engage with what critic Jose Esteban Munoz calls “disentification,” a way in which marginalized groups might transform their subjectivities through and by their own cultural productions.  Thus, Leong collides the personal with the political to show how queer Asian Americans embody flagrantly symbolic and artistic outlaws.  To support this contention, I draw upon the work of queer and sexuality theorists, Lee Edelman, Celine Parrenas Shimizu, Michael Warner, Leo Bersani, Roderick A. Ferguson, Douglas Crimp, Gayatri Gopinath, Martin F. Manalansan IV, and Pat Califia. 

Stampfl, Barry

Todd Hasak-Lowy and the Varieties of Traumatic Experience

In her recent book Trauma Fiction (2004), Anne Whitehead does not merely view stories through the lens afforded by trauma theory, but rather seeks “to remark on a resonance between theory and literature in which each speaks to and addresses the other.  The literary readings in each of [my] chapters add something, or speak something, that the theory cannot say” (4).  Something of this dynamic interplay may be brought to the classroom with reference to two new short stories by Todd Hasak-Lowy (The Task of This Translator, 2005), if they are taught in conjunction with three short readings from Judith Herman, Cathy Caruth, and Michael Rothberg.   Hasak-Lowy puts his finger on a weakness in contemporary trauma theory that flows from what is arguably its greatest strength.  Its strength is its power to delineate the structural common ground inhabited by all trauma survivors.  But its weakness is a resultant inability to to distinguish among the varieties of traumatic experience, especially in point of severity, a failure that has repeatedly led to charges of trivialization.  The first two chapters from Herman’s Trauma and Recovery are sufficient to introduce the idea of trauma as a field theory that links war veterans, 19^th century “hysterics,” and survivors of rape and domestic abuse.  Caruth sharpens and extends the theoretical implications with her influential assertion that a trauma is defined not by an event nor by a subjective “distortion” of the event, but solely in terms of the structure of its experience, one characterized by temporal belatedness (Introduction to Trauma 1995: 4-5).  Rothberg comments on the advantages and limitations of Caruth’s theorem in his essay from literary trauma theory’s recent come-as-you-are party, Trauma at Home, a collection of essays responding to 9/11 (Ed. Greenberg 2003: 147-57).   Reading these essays will prepare students to understand the implications of Hasak-Lowy’s witty intervention.  By juxtaposing huge overwhelming disasters with much smaller personal setbacks that nonetheless maintain their piquancy, he makes visible the incoherence lurking within contemporary trauma theory.  Thus, in “The End of Larry’s Wallet,” the misplacing of a personal item of practical and symbolic importance is juxtaposed with a chilling scenario, evoked by Hasak-Lowy with convincing realistic detail, of a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan that results in the deaths of over 24 million people.   In “On the Grounds of the Complex Commemorating the Nazis’ Treatment of the Jews,” Hasak-Lowy makes the Holocaust the backdrop of a quarrel between two Jewish men who are embittered by personal disappointments romantic and professional—a quarrel touched off by the staleness of a pastry served in the Holocaust museum’s coffee shop.    These funny and edgy stories, taught in conjunction with a few selected readings from literary trauma theory, should provide a basis for an animated class discussion, one in which the personal experiences of all the participants, students and teacher, cannot help but be invested with the significance of theoretical implication.

Stampfl, Tanja

Colonial Encounters in Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner

This paper will examine Khaled Hosseini’s novel The Kite Runner (2003) through a post-colonial lens in order to highlight the complex identity politics and class conflicts that together offer a variety of national allegories for Afghanistan. One the one hand, my paper will analyze the structural elements of the novel that draw from a variety of genres, like the immigrant novel, the Bildungsroman, the post-colonial novel, and the allegory, in order to investigate how these various levels of narration influence the overall story. On the other hand, this paper will specifically make use of various forms of empire and colonialisms to draw attention to the complex layers of power and guilt the post-colonial nation is confronted with. Whose responsibility is it to help a war-ravaged country and its people and what are the complications of identity politics in that enterprise?  Especially in the current political situation, the relationship between the US and Afghanistan becomes a focal point in the reading of The Kite Runner, because it includes post-colonial as well as neo-colonial elements, which the novel partly mimics, partly indicts, but always plays out. This is a work that mirrors a political situation perfectly, and raises major issues in the field of post-colonial studies.

Trouilloud,  Lise-Hélène

Transformative Identities:  War, Religion and Sexuality in Vietnamese American Fiction

This paper focuses on two of Vietnamese American poet Truong Tran’s collections of experimental poetry Placing the Accents (1999) and Dust and Conscience (2002).  Truong Tran’s narrator relays the experience of growing up bicultural in the United States in the aftermath of the Vietnam war.   He specifically privileges the subsistence of ancestral traditions while demonstrating a need to break free from his parents’ painful past, anchored in the desecrated Vietnamese homeland.  Truong Tran stages this generational conflict as one opposing the fervent Catholicism of pious parents to the blasphemous homosexuality of their dissident son.  His poetry suggests that, in the narrator’s Vietnamese household, memories of war and histories of displacement are ultimately expressed and negotiated through the body.   While the narrator emphasizes his exilic parents’ transformative cultural acts, through cooking or hammering, he expresses the urgency to translate these acts into linguistic terms to convey the legacy of reconstructed refugee lives post-migration, and the difficult reinvention of culture.  Truong Tran’s narrator sets out to investigate the communicative power of broken speeches, enigmatic smiles, and cryptic silences to produce an alternative language capable of evoking shifting cultural affiliations dictated by migration and refracted through religion and sexuality.

Watson, Jini Kim

Division, Aid and War: Koreans in Vietnam and Hwang Sok-yong’s Shadow Under Arms

The Vietnam War is usually seen as a struggle resulting from decolonization played out between North and South Vietnam and the United States. Yet, large numbers of other allied troops were involved, including 300,000 South Korean troops sent by US-backed military dictator Park Chung-hee. Hwang Sok-yong’s remarkable novel Shadow Under Arms [Mugi e kunul] (1985, 1988) is a panoramic view onto the Korean involvement in the Vietnam War. A scathing critique of wartime mercantilism, the black market system and US racial violence, the novel addresses the possibilities and limits of Korean and Vietnamese solidarity, while also revealing how South Korea benefited economically from military participation.  This paper examines the supposed act of military “aid” to US forces in Vietnam from a nation itself divided following decolonization. How might we understand South Korea’s postwar development in terms of both its neocolonial subordination to the US, and its anti-revolutionary role in Vietnam? What can we gain from a “transcolonial” (Lionnet and Shih) perspective (looking at Korea through Vietnam or vice versa) rather than one focussed on the vertical colonized/colonizer relation? And, writing in the politically constrained 1980s, what approach to historiography does Hwang’s novel give us? In raising these and other questions, I aim to extend the realm of postcolonial studies to the Asia Pacific and interrogate the complicated fissures, sutures and politics of “aid” in the region.

Weaver-Hightower, Rebecca

Tricked, Robbed, and Beaten: Life Lessons, Representation and Ideology in Three South African English Textbooks

This paper examines South African textbooks as sites of colonial enculturation and anti-colonial resistance.  Though most scholarship on literature in South African schools focuses on issues of language, this presentation will analyze how the educational system, through narrative, interacted with the rapidly changing South African colonial landscape. Specifically, this paper analyzes a set of three South African, primary school English readers from the early 1980’s, the New Day-By-Day English Course readers, which (according to their listing in the University of Witwatersrand historical special collections) were used in township schools.  The three texts contain poetry, African folk tales, Euro-American fairy and folk tales, and Bible stories, all broken down into reading units with vocabulary levels appropriate for primary school classes, as well as science lessons appropriate for a rural readership.  Most interesting for my purposes of better understanding how these texts might have intervened in a particularly violent and unstable period of South African history, however, are stories that I call “life lessons.”  One of these, entitled “Themba Comes to Town,” tells of a black South African boy from the country who comes to the city only to be robbed, cheated and frightened by a variety of strangers.  Another tale, “Jason Sithole Goes to Work,” tells of a black South African boy’s first job, where he also is robbed, mistreated, and beaten (the story ends with his hospitalization).  Such sad and violent tales, surprisingly alarmist for contemporary children’s books, seem aimed at imparting unpleasant life lessons and teaching necessary coping mechanisms to children who might find themselves encountering hostility.  Yet those same stories, by showing violence as overwhelmingly perpetrated by black Africans against black Africans, might conversely work to cement the very racial inequalities they attempt to guard against.  Analysis of the New Day-By-Day English Course readers as complicated socio-historical texts reminds of the delicate and sometimes ambivalent work undertaken by the South African school system as part of the nation’s struggle towards postcoloniality. 

Yun, Paul

Locating Tourism: Zakes Mda’s ‘Heart of Redness’ and the Business of Trauma

 Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness is unique in that it was written during post- apartheid South Africa and yet does not explicitly wrestle issues of the apartheid. The basis for Mda’s novel, however, is colonialism-the pioneer of apartheid and the epicenter for the fight over land. This research paper will explore the negotiation tourism in the New South Africa via ecology and land development (for the purposes of tourism).  The proposed paper will begin with an examination of how Mda’s novel  represents this tension between past and present, tradition and modernity. The central conflict in the novel revolves around the “Unbelievers” and the “Believers”, dating back to the time of the prophetess Nongqawuse and the

 Xhosa cattle killing. The characters who live in the present carry the names of their ancestors and carry, as well, the conflicts of the past into the present. The conflicts over land are similarly brought into the present but they are relegated to the black community, although heavily influenced by the colonial past (which brings a kind of white, European presence to the novel, even in the absence of white characters).  Although I have not yet fully formulated the theoretical framework I will use to account for the problematic treatment of tourism and the trauma it enacts, the textual elements that I am planning to discuss will be the development of amaxhosa land used to build a casino and tourist resort for the purposes of  spreading British “civilization”. This paper will focus on tourism in rural  areas of South Africa and possibly even game reserves. Finally, this paper  will explore what tourism tells us about the reality of South Africa today.

Zahiri, Abdollah

Diasporic Consciousness in The House of Sand and Fog

This paper is an attempt to bring about a closer understanding of diasporas and the ideation of time. A diasporic consciousness is a peculiar one. It  occupies a unique bicultural space divided between ‘here’ and ‘there’. This split ontological status creates a postmodern sensibility conditioned by its instability and constant shift.  Temporally, this bicultural entity does not operate in a coherent, unified, and linear progression of time. Instead, it is subject to a constant pendulum movement of time. One day the individual is here, the next day a memory, a phone call, a certain fragrance or object  catapults the diasporic subject to the place of origin. Hence, a unified, linear progression of time becomes an impossibility. This writer would examine this state of ‘diasporic consciousness’ in Andre Dubus III’s novel: The House of Sand and Fog. The novel/Hollywood revolves around the tragic fate of an ex-army Iranian officer who ended up in California with his family. Furthermore, this diasporic subjectivity sheds light on the dynamics of imperialism and oppression in the pre-Revolutionary Iran.