THE RACE AND DISPLACEMENT SYMPOSIUM, OCTOBER 1-3, 2009 THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMAALL events are open to The University of Alabama community and the general public. Students, faculty, staff, and community members are encouraged to participate! THURSDAY, OCT. 1 7:30pm: Keynote lecture with Dr. Houston Baker, Distinguished University Professor, Vanderbilt University.Location: Gorgas Library room 205. A Reception and book signing will follow. This lecture is free and open to all.
Dr. Houston A. Baker, Jr is the Distinguished University Professor and Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. He has served as Editor of American Literature, the oldest and most prestigious journal in American Literary Studies. He has published or edited more than twenty books and is the author of more than eighty articles, essays, and reviews. His most recent books include Turning South Again: Re-Thinking Modernism, Re-Reading Booker T and I Don’t Hate the South: Reflections on Faulkner, Family, and the South. His critique of black public intellectuals titled Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era was released in 2008. Professor Baker is a published poet whose most recent volume is titled Passing Over. He has served in a number of administrative and institutional posts, including the 1992 Presidency of the Modern Language Association of America.
All Daytime events/speaker panels are held at the Bryant Conference Center, located at 240 Bryant Drive on the UA campus.
FRIDAY, OCT. 2 Location: Bryant Conference Center 8-8:45 am: Coffee and refreshments 8:45 am: Opening Remarks9-10:30am: PANEL 1: RACE AND BODIES Participants:
Moderator: Dr. Nikhil Bilwakesh, University of Alabama, Assistant Professor of English.
-Regina N. Barnett (Florida State), “Lady Eve’s Garden Sings the Blues: Manifestations of Ájé in Gloria Naylor’s Bailey’s Café”
-Ashon T. Crawley (Duke), “He gay…: Rumor, Gossip and the Black Gospel Sound”
-Deborah Katz (Brown), “The Practice of Embodiment: Transatlantic Crossings and Black Female Sexuality in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand”
-Matt Dischinger (Alabama), “Returning from ‘Beyond the Bridge’: Postcolonial Hybridity in Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day”
10:30-11am: Break
11am-12:30pm: PANEL 2: RACE AND PLACEParticipants:
Moderator: Dr. Yolanda Manora, University of Alabama, Associate Professor of English.
-Lauren Vedal (U of Wisc.-Madison), “Immigrant Desire: Contesting Canadian Safety & Whiteness in In Another Place, Not Here”
-Melanie Fritsch (U of Tübingen, Germany), “The Traveling Subject: Natural Rights Discourse in The Narrative of Robert Adams”
-Walter Bosse (U of Cincinnati), “Upon the Public Highways: Travel and Race in Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition”
12:30-2pm: LUNCH on your own
2:30-4pm: PANEL 3: RACE AND NATIONParticipants:
Moderator: Dr. Stacy Morgan, University of Alabama, Associate Professor of American Studies
-Cassander L. Smith (Purdue), “Washing the Ethiop Red: Sir Francis Drake’s Narrative Struggle with the Cimarrons of Panama”
-Delia Hagen (Berkeley), “Nations, Migration, and Métis Subsistence Possibilities, 1860-1940”
-Abigail Manzella (Tufts), “Disorientation: Julie Otsuka’s Imprisoned Places”
4-5pm: Break5:30-7pm: Group Dinner with Keynote Speakers and Conference Participants, Sitar Indian Restaurant7:30pm: Keynote Presentation with Queen QuetLocation: Morgan Auditorium This lecture is free and open to all.As part of the Race and Displacement Symposium, we are pleased to bring Queen Quet back to The University of Alabama campus. This event is free and open to all. Queen Quet, Chieftess of the Gullah/Geechee Nation is a native of St. Helena Island, South Carolina and is an author, computer scientist, mathematician, preservationist, and the selected and elected Head-of-State for the Gullah/Geechee Nation. Goodwine also served as a consultant for the 2000 film The Patriot, which featured scenes set in the Gullah region of South Carolina. She continues to advise on numerous historic documentaries and to lecture throughout the world. She is the founder of a historic presentation troupe, "De Gullah Cunneckshun" which has recorded several CDs.
Optional evening festivities in Tuscaloosa -- TBA.
SATURDAY, OCT. 3Location: Bryant Conference Center 8-8:30 am: Coffee and Refreshments8:30-10am: PANEL 4: RACE AND IMAGINATIONParticipants:
Moderator: Dr. Brittney Cooper, University of Alabama, Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies.
-Jonathan Glover (Florida), “Moreau avec Cuvier, Kant avec Sade: Saint Domingue, Sara Baartman, and the Technologies of Imperial Desire”
-Yumi Pak (UC San Diego), “An Oracular Swan-song?: American Literary Modernism, Modernity, and the Trope of Lynching in Jean Toomer’s Cane”
-Kathrin Kottemann (U of New Orleans), “Cultural Schizophrenia and Post-Colonial Identity in Derek Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain and Bernadine Evaristo’s Lara”
-Laura Jones (LSU), “Barack Obama’s ‘A More Perfect Union:’ Was It a Post-Racial Moment?”
10-10:30am: Break10:30am-12pm: Symposium Roundtable Discussion with Dr. Trudier Harris with all participantsDr. Trudier Harris was the J. Carlyle Sitterson Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has lectured and published widely in her specialty areas of African American literature and folklore. Dr. Harris has published articles and book reviews in such journals as Callaloo, Black American Literature Forum, Studies in American Fiction, and The Southern Humanities Review. Her authored books include From Mammies to Militants: Domestics in Black American Literature, Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals, Black Women in the Fiction of James Baldwin, Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison, The Power of the Porch: The Storyteller's Craft in Zora Neale Hurston, Saints, Sinners, Saviors: Strong Black Women in African American Literature, and South of Tradition: Essays on African American Literature.
