CONTACT AND POWER:
Transgressions in the Borderlands of
Intercultural and Interdisciplinary Encounter
20th Burdick-Vary Symposium
sponsored by
The Institute for Research in the Humanities
University of Wisconsin-Madison
March 7-9, 1997
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Featured outside speakers:
Simon Gikandi, Lisa Lowe, Richard Price, Sally Price, and Kamala Visweswaran
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All sessions will be held in the
Wisconsin Center, 702 Langdon Street.
The 20th Burdick-Vary Symposium sponsored by the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has a double agenda. First, we want to examine the sites of nomadism, migration, creolization, and hybridity: the broad borderlands where cultures blend and clash, where peoples resist and embrace the "other." We hope to shift the focus from the theorization of difference pervasive in identity studies across the disciplines to a theorization of the contact zones of intercultural encounters and the interactive circulation of power that conditions such exchange. Second, we plan to transgress the boundaries between institutionally distinct disciplines of knowledge that address questions of difference and identity--bringing
Together people across the methodological divide of the humanities and social sciences to establish a middle ground of dialogue and exchange that looks forward to the twenty-first century.
How do intercultural encounters produce identity as difference? Identity as sameness? What happens in the spaces between "difference" as people, goods, ideas, beliefs, artifacts, and cultures move reciprocally through them over time? In what way do historically constituted power relations compel and structure these encounters? Under what conditions and in what ways is agency evident, differences negotiated, reciprocity manifested? When and how are boundaries based on difference erected or dissolved? How do self-concepts of pure difference interact with the always already syncretist nature of culture? When and how do peoples and cultures resist the other, reject the other, imitate the other, engage dialogically with the other, adapt the other? Under what
Conditions does the monolithic Other become a multiplicity of heterogenous others? How do the differences within a society play out in the borderlands of Intercultural exchange? In what way do the differences of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, race, nationality, religion, class, caste, age (and so forth) generate intercultural encounters of their own within a society? Or complicate encounters with other societies? What is the impact of transnational forces and global migration on the ethnoscapes of the local? the regional? the national? the global?
How might an encounter among the disciplines of knowledge constitute just such a "middle ground" and at the same time contribute to a greater understanding of it? To what extent are the different disciplines today distinct? or (always) already interdisciplinary? How have such fields as literary studies, anthropology, geography, history, women's studies, ethnic studies, post-colonial studies, and cultural studies theorized identity and the borderlands of intercultural encounters? Is there a common discourse? Distinct differences? Mutual influences? Shared epistemologies? Shared projects of cultural and political transformation? How do the textualizations of our various researches mimic, resonate, depart from each other? What role does the post-modern turn of an increasingly transnational, migratory, and cyberspatial globalism play in these encounters?
FRIDAY, MARCH 7
9:00 a.m.-12:00 SESSION I
Paul Boyer, Director, Humanities Research Institute, UW-Madison : Welcome
CONTACT AND POSSESSION IN COLONIAL AMERICA
Susan Stanford Friedman, UW-Madison
Opening Remarks
Simon Gikandi, University of Michigan
Aesthetic Reflection and the Colonial Event: Lessons from the Atlantic Complex
10:15 a.m. Refreshment Break
10:30 a.m.-12:00 Workshop 1
Neil Whitehead, UW-Madison
White Tupis, Black Caribs and Civilized Indians: The Rhetorics of Ethnic Transgression in the Colonial Possession of
South America
Margarita Zamora, UW-Madison
First Contact in the Discourse of Discovery
Luís Madureira, UW-Madison
Lapses in Taste: The Brazilian "Anthropophagy" Movement and the Aesthetics of Primitivism
12:00-2:00 p.m. Lunch Break
2:00-5:00 p.m. SESSION II
PERFORMING IDENTITIES: "RACE"/"GENDER"/"NATION"
Kamala Visweswaran, U. of Texas, Austin
Performing Betrayal: Notes on the Story That Comes After
3:15-3:30 Refreshment Break
3:30 Workshop 2
Susan Bernstein, UW-Madison
Hybrid Sensations: Darwin and the Boundaries of Identity in Victorian Fiction
Amy Ling, UW-Madison
Representation of Asian Women: On Butterfly's Origin
Ronald Radano, UW-Madison
Black Music and Racial Encounter
5:00-6:30 p.m. Reception
Alumni Lounge, Wisconsin Center
SATURDAY, MARCH 8
9:00 a.m.-12:00 SESSION III
GEOGRAPHIES OF THE MODERN/DISPLAYS OF IDENTITY
Sally Price, College of William and Mary
Artistry and Art History Or Again: ArtIsStory
10:15 a.m. Refreshment Break
10:30 a.m.-12:00 Workshop 3
Thongchai Winichakul, UW-Madison
Locating "Siam" in World's Civilization: Travels and Exhibitions in the Contact Zone
Richard Flores, UW-Madison
Memory, History, and the Alamo as Tex(Mex) Master Symbol of Modernity
Edward Friedman, UW-Madison
Can Democracy Travel to Asia?
12:00 a.m.-2:00 Lunch Break
2:00-5:00 p.m. SESSION IV
BORDERS OF IDENTITY AND NATION
Lisa Lowe, University of California, San Diego
The International within the National: The Cultural Politics of Asian Immigration
3:15 p.m. Refreshment Break
3:30-5:00 p.m. Workshop 4
Mary Layoun, UW-Madison
Cartoon Passage across Fearful Borders: Visualizing Travels, Encounters, and Understanding in Joe Sacco's Palestine
Rachel Brenner, UW-Madison
On the Crossroads of Politics, Nationality, and Culture in Emile Habiby's Fiction
Jacques Lezra, UW-Madison
The Colonial Sublime
6:30 p.m. Conference Potluck
Anyone with a dish or bottle to share is welcome!
At the home of Susan & Ed Friedman.
SUNDAY, MARCH 9
9:00 a.m.-12:00 SESSION V
CROSSING FORMS: THE RHETORICS OF ACADEMIC FICTIONS
Richard Price, College of William & Mary
The Convict and the Colonel
10:15 a.m. Refreshment Break
10:30 a.m. Workshop 5
Kirin Narayan, UW-Madison
Mapping a Border: Ethnography and Fiction
Roberta Hill, UW-Madison
Gaps and Contradictions: Writing a "Multi-Vocal" Biography
Susan Stanford Friedman, UW-Madison
"Beyond Difference:" Migratory Feminism in the Borderlands
12:00-12:30 p.m.
Concluding Remarks and Discussion
Conference Summations and Discussion: Where do we go from here?
Open discussion on conference themes and the future of interdisciplinary transgressions in Border Studies at the University
of Wisconsin-Madison and elsewhere.
All sessions are open to the public without charge. Advance registration is not required.
Plenary Speakers
Simon Gikandi teaches at the University of Michigan in the English Department, in association with the Center for African and Afro-American Studies, the Program in Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and the Comparative Literature Department. A noted post-colonial critic of African, Caribbean, and British literatures, he is the author of Reading the African Novel , Reading Chinua Achebe , Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature , and Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism .
Lisa Lowe teaches at the University of California-San Diego in the Comparative Literature Department. Well-known for Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms on western representations of East and South Asia, she also writes on Asian American heterogeneities. Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics and a co-edited volume, Worlds Algined: The Politics of CUlture in the Shadow of Capital , are her most recent works.
Sally Price is at the College of William and Mary in Anthropology and History. Working on Surinamese and other Caribbean Maroon societies, she is known especially for her publication on art and on women's issues, including Co-wives and Calabashes and Primitive Art in Civilized Places . With Richard Price, she has co-authored Afro-American Arts of the Suriname Rain Forest , Two Evenings in Saramaka , Equatoria , On the Mall , and Enigma Variations . She and Sidney Mintz have also published Caribeean Countours and Focus--Caribbean .
Richard Price is at the College of William and Mary in Anthropology and History. A leading expert on Maroon societies in the Americas, he is the author of the best-sellers First-Time: The Historical Vision of an Afro-American People and Alabi's World . Other books include Saramaka Social Structure , The Guiana Maroons , To Slay the Hydra , Ethnographic History, Caribbean Pasts , The Birth of African-American Culture (with Sidney Mintz), and the edited volume, Maroon Societies . Most recently, his interests have turned tomore experimental forms of writing about culture, history, and identity.
Kamal Visweswaran is in the Anthropology Department at the University of Texas, Austin. Known for her feminist anthropological work on India and her ethnographic experimentalism and theory, she is the author of Fictions of Feminist Ethnography and is completing a book entitled Family Subjects: An Ethnography of the Woman Question in Indian Nationalism at the Chicago Humanities Institute this year.
This symposium is funded by the Burdick/ Vary Trust.
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