“Global Circuits, Interrupted”
May 4-5, 2012
306 & 314 Royce Hall
UCLA
(Program [PDF])
Across seas and oceans, through landscapes and cities, people, goods, and cultures traverse global circuits to follow established routes and forge new paths in the name of profit, war, hope, and ideology. We will explore various political movements, material struggles, and forms of cultural exchange in an attempt to articulate the vitality of alternative geopolitical landscapes, critical positionalities, and community affinities. How does the global circulation and local translation of knowledge, cultural artifacts, and creative human agency reinforce, interrupt, or reconfigure existing regimes of power? What is the role played by creative imagination and aesthetic agency in mediating the uneven circuits, channels, or currents of cultural contact and exchange? And finally, how can we reassess the ambivalent, asymmetric, and paradoxical nature of such global phenomena as nationalism, postnationalism, migration, and neo/colonialism?
Keynote Speech: David Lloyd (University of Southern California)
Plenary Session: Vrinda Nabar (Northwestern University)
Invited Speakers: Michaeline A. Crichlow (Duke University), David Chioni Moore (Macalester College), Hamid Naficy (Northwestern University).
FRIDAY, MAY 4, ROYCE HALL 306
1:00 pm
Welcome
David Schaberg
Interim Dean of Humanities (UCLA)
Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih
Directors, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities, “Cultures in Transnational Perspective” Program
1:30 pm
“Transnationality and Exile in International Cinema”
Hamid Naficy
Professor (Northwestern University), “Theorizing Multiplex Cinema”
Claudia Hoffmann
Mellon Visiting Assistant Professor (UCLA), “Undocumented Landscapes: Clandestine Migration in Transnational African Cinema”
JoAnne Ruvoli
Mellon Visiting Assistant Professor (UCLA), “Witness to the Sleeping Man: Spike Lee’s Miracle at St. Anna and Transnational Space”
Discussant: Thomas Harrison, Professor (UCLA)
3:30 pm
Coffee Break
4:00 pm
Keynote Introduction, Royce Hall 314
S. Ani Mukherji
Mellon Visiting Assistant Professor (UCLA)
4:05 pm
Keynote Speech, Royce Hall 314
David Lloyd
Professor (University of Southern California), “ ‘To Live Surrounded by a White Song’, or, The Sublimation of Race in Experiment: on the Margins of Susan Howe”
6:00 pm
Reception (Following Keynote Address), Royce Hall 306
SATURDAY, MAY 5, ROYCE HALL 306
10:00 am
“Rewriting Transnational Literary Circuits”
Professor (Macalester College), “Genre Trouble; or, Can the Subaltern Print?”
Annette Damayanti Lienau
Mellon Visiting Assistant Professor (UCLA), “Casteless Language and the fiction of Pramoedya”
S. Ani Mukherji
Mellon Visiting Assistant Professor (UCLA), “A Eurasian Disciple of the Harlem Renaissance: The Mixtries of Cedric Dover’s Anticolonialism”
Discussant: David Lloyd, Professor (USC)
12:00 pm
Lunch Break
1:30 pm
“Transoceanic Fictions of (Im)mobility”
Michaeline A. Crichlow
Professor (Duke University), “Making Waves: (Dis)placements, Entanglements, Movements”
Tzu-hui Celina Hung
Mellon Visiting Assistant Professor (UCLA), “Sliding Between Chinese and Filipino Postcolonial Tsinoy Mestizoness in the Mano Po Film Cycle”
Namrata Poddar
Mellon Visiting Assistant Professor (UCLA), “Oceanic Studies, Nautical Geneses, and a Mauritian Poetics of Sea Vessels”
Discussant: Keith Camacho, Professor (UCLA)
3:30 pm
Coffee Break
3:45 pm
“Plenary Session”
Vrinda Nabar
Dial Visiting Professor of Gender Studies (Northwestern University), “Heavy with History: From Memory to Memoir”
4:45 pm
Coffee Break
5:00 pm
Round Table Discussion
Keith Camacho (UCLA), Alessandra Di Maio (University of Palermo, Italy), Thomas Harrison (UCLA), Françoise Lionnet (UCLA), David Lloyd (USC), and Shu-mei Shih (UCLA). Moderated by Françoise Lionnet.
6:00 pm
Closing Reception, Royce Hall 314
Organized By
Program Co-directors:
Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih
Mellon Fellows:
Claudia Hoffmann, Tzu-hui Celina Hung, Annette Damayanti Lienau, S. Ani Mukherji, Namrata Poddar, JoAnne Ruvoli
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 $11 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
Photo credit: Still taken from the film Heremakono (2002), directed by Abderrahmane Sissako