Rites of Return: Poetics and Politics
The Graduate Center, CUNY and Columbia University
A two-day symposium about the new genealogy, cultural memory and the contemporary obsession with the recovery of roots.
Conference Schedule
Thursday, April 10, 2008, Columbia University Law School
3:30pm: Opening Remarks
4-6pm: Sites of Return and the new tourism - G 102, Law School
Should sites of trauma and atrocity be preserved? What new modes of return have they engendered?
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Performance Studies, NYU
Rising from the Rubble: Building the Museum of the History of Polish Jews on the Site of the Warsaw Ghetto
Liz Sevcenko, International Coalition of Historic Site Museums of Conscience
Sites of Conscience: Activating Historic Sites for Addressing Contemporary Issues
Diana Taylor, Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, NYU
Witness to the Ruins: Trauma and Durational Performance
Susan Meiselas , Magnum Photos
Photographic Returns: Nicaragua, Kurdistan
Moderated by Marita Sturken, Media, Culture, and Communications, NYU
6-7pm: Opening Reception - Law School Lobby
7-8:30pm: Rights of Return: The Question of Katrina - JG 106, Law School
What have the responses to Katrina revealed about the politics and the rights of return? What is the place of Katrina and the people it has displaced in US national memory?
David Troutt, Law, Rutgers University
Segregation's Diaspora: Localism After Katrina
Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick, Photographers, New Orleans
Free
Farah Jasmine Griffin, English and African-American Studies, Columbia
CHILDREN OF OMAR: New Orleans, Resistance, Resilience & Resettlement
Patricia Williams, Law, Columbia University
O Give Me a Home: Discouraging Words From Out on the Range
Moderated by George Lewis, Center for Jazz Studies, Columbia University
Friday, April 11, 2008, Elebash Recital Hall, The Graduate Center, CUNY
9:30am: Opening Remarks
9:45–11:15am: Rootless Nostalgias: New Routes, New Medias
How do the new technologies of the archive affect the reconstruction of lost communities? What effects do new media and the Internet have on individual remembrances and cultural recall? What is the future of nostalgia?
Marianne Hirsch, English & Comparative Literature, IRWAG, Columbia and Leo Spitzer, History, Columbia and Dartmouth
The Web and The Reunion: <czernowitz.ehpes.com>
Jay Prosser, American Literature, University of Leeds, UK
My Grandfather's Voice: Jewish Immigrants from Baghdad to Bombay
Svetlana Boym, Comparative Literature, Harvard
Nostalgia and Eccentric Modernities
Moderated by Geoffrey Batchen, History of Photography and Contemporary Art, Graduate Center
11:30am-1pm: The Body Politic: Roots and DNA
What are the assumptions of genealogical identity? How can we
complicate questions of origin to take into account new forms of family
and history? What is the status of origin in the age of DNA and the new
family?
Nadia Abu El-Haj, Anthropology, Barnard
History Meets a New Biology: the Embrace of DNA in the Age of Identity Politics
Jarrod Hayes, French and francophone studies, University of Michigan
Queer Roots for the Diaspora
Alondra Nelson, Sociology and African-American Studies, Yale
The Factness of Diaspora: The Sources of Genetic Genealogy
Moderated by Brent Edwards, Columbia
1-2:30pm: Lunch break
2:30-4pm: Literary Returns: A Conversation
Daniel Mendelsohn, author of The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million
Saidiya Hartman, author of Lose Your Mother
Eva Hoffman, author of After Such Knowledge
Moderated by Nancy K. Miller, English and Comparative Literature, Graduate Center, CUNY
4:30-6pm: Keynote
Amira Hass, journalist, author of Drinking the Sea at Gaza
Introduced by Aoibheann Sweeney, The Center for the Humanities, The Graduate Center, CUNY
Sponsors: CUNY Graduate, Center Humanities Center; Columbia University, Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference
Co Sponsors: The Graduate Center, CUNY: The Center for the Study of Women and Society, The Concentration in Twentieth-Century Studies; Columbia University: Seminar on Cultural Memory, Institute for Research on Women and Gender, Center for Institutional and Social Change at Columbia Law School, Institute for Research on African American Studies, Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, Barnard Center for Research on Women; The Holocaust Educators Network and the Memorial Library & Art Collection for World War II.
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