FIFTH ANNUAL MELLON CONFERENCE

“Itinerant Affiliations”

April 15-16, 2011
306&314 Royce Hall
UCLA

How can a transnational approach highlight the cultural specificities of local contexts? What are the possibilities and instances of non-oppositional relationships between the transnational and the national? How can historicizing transnational practices starting from multiple moments complicate our definitions of diaspora? We hope to address such questions using transnationalism as a critical lens in order to illuminate dynamic affiliations that are, as-of-yet, under acknowledged. Itinerant affiliations, as we conceive of them here, traverse concepts of periodization, regionalism, and forms of belonging, moving across geographies, temporalities, and conceptual spaces. In underscoring the itinerant affiliations extant in an array of cultural productions and critical discourses, we also expand and reconfigure the trajectories to which transnational studies is attuned.

Keynote Speech: Ato Quayson, University of Toronto
Invited Speakers: Vilashini Cooppan (UC Santa Cruz), Tyler Stovall (UC Berkeley) and Laura Winkiel (University of Colorado, Boulder)

FRIDAY, APRIL 15, ROYCE HALL 306

1:15 pm

Welcome

Tim Stowell
UCLA Dean of Humanities
Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih
Directors, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities, “Cultures in Transnational Perspective” Program

1:30 pm

“Archipelagic Aesthetics and the Circulation of Place”

Vilashini Cooppan
Professor (UC Santa Cruz), “Diasporic Memory and Regional History: Amitav Ghosh’s Geonarrative Modality”
Namrata Poddar
Mellon Visiting Assistant Professor (UCLA), “Paradise, Parody or Paradox? : The Beach, Ecology and Place in Postcolonial Island Literature”
Jeannine Murray-Román
Mellon Visiting Assistant Professor (UCLA), “Repetition as Praxis: Caribbean Chaos in Benítez-Rojo, Glissant, and Harris”
Discussant: Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Professor (UCLA)

3:30 pm 

Coffee Break

4:00 pm

Keynote Introduction, Royce Hall 314

Keynote Speech
Ato Quayson
Professor (University of Toronto), “On Postcolonial Literary History: Scapes, Scales and Scope ”

6:00 pm

Reception (Following Keynote Address), Royce Hall 306

SATURDAY, APRIL 16, ROYCE HALL 306

10:00 am

“Resistance and Exile: Rethinking the Black Diaspora”

Tyler Stovall
Professor (UC Berkeley), “Work It: Labor, Culture, and the African Diaspora”
Claudia Hoffmann
Mellon Visiting Assistant Professor (UCLA), “Staging a Subaltern African Diaspora: Undocumented Laborers in the Cinematic City”
Ani Mukherji
Mellon Visiting Assistant Professor (UCLA), “Anticolonial Culture in Exile: Black Cultural Work in 1930s Moscow”
Discussant: Robert A. Hill, Professor (UCLA)

12:00 pm 

Lunch Break

1:30 pm

“Transnational Mediations”

Laura Winkiel
Professor (University of Colorado, Boulder), “Chronotopic Doubleness: Reading 1920s South African Literature”
Firat Oruc
Mellon Visiting Assistant Professor (UCLA), “Entangled Nations: Montage and Metonymy in Postcolonial Fiction”
Joseph Bauerkemper
Mellon Visiting Assistant Professor (UCLA), “Cosmopolitan Nationhood and Sovereign Interdependence”
Discussant: Mishuana Goeman, Professor (UCLA)

3:30 pm 

Coffee Break

4:00 pm

Round Table Discussion, followed by Reception

Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Mishuana Goeman, Robert A. Hill, Françoise Lionnet, and Ato Quayson, moderated by Shu-mei Shih

Organized By

Program Co-directors:
Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih

Mellon Fellows:
Joseph Bauerkemper, Claudia Hoffmann, Ani Mukherji, Jeannine Murray-Román, Firat Oruc, Namrata Poddar
This event is sponsored by the Dean, College of Letters and Sciences and the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowships in the Humanities at UCLA.
This program is free and open to the public, however, seating is limited. Parking will be available for $10 on the UCLA campus. Please go to the kiosk on Sunset and Westwood Plaza to purchase a pass for the nearest available lot.

For further information, please contact Dacia Imakura at dacia@humnet.ucla.edu