logo irtg
 Version française  |  Search
 
|  Imprint  |  Contact   |

Workshop on Border Cultures

6-7 August 2015, Saarland University
 
This Ph.D. and post-graduate workshop attempts to establish the border paradigm as an aesthetic category that defines border literatures and cultures and that performatively constitutes itself at the moment of intercultural encounter. Aesthetic representations of the border give voice to what Walter Mignolo has called “border thinking,” new forms of knowledge which may counter hegemonic knowledges that have governed Western dominant thought. While the border paradigm as an important theoretical framework has emerged with the growing importance of the U.S.-Mexican border since the 1990s, it has always been a defining element of border spaces. Conspicuously, contact zones – spaces where cultures come in conflict, are contested, and reconstitute one another – are characterized by a productive borderlands poetics, that is representational forms of productions which negotiate, perform, and constitute borders at the intersection of territorial and political borders and textual configurations. As a field of cultural analysis, borderlands poetics engages the categories of gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity, and other forms of cultural and personal identities.

The workshop will be preceded by a keynote lecture on Thursday, August 6 by Prof. Mary Pat Brady (Cornell U - see http://irtg-diversity.com/index.php?page=now-and-upcoming&article=116). On Friday, August 7, in the morning, we will have a workshop session on “Border Textures” led by Prof. Brady. In the afternoon, workshop participants will be able to present and discuss their projects.

If you are interested in participating in this workshop, please contact amerikanistik@mx.uni-saarland.de and register for this event. Please send the title of your project and a short abstract by June 12, 2015.
 
 
 
 
Logo Universität Trier Logo Université Montréal Logo Universität des Saarlandes