Provost Lecture Series 1997: Border Crossings: Conversations Across Disciplines and Cultures
"A creative event... requires that one leaves the realm of the known, and takes oneself there where one does not expect, is not expected to be... Dare to cross the borders."
-Trinh T. Minh-Ha
The Spring 1997 PROVOST'S LECTURE SERIES: presented by the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society (ICS), offers a series of events which explore cultural interactions at the crossroads between social realities and cultural worlds. The series includes talks and event by interdisciplinary scholar and performance artist Coco Fusco; Third World scholar Barbara Harlow; and African-American critic Michael Awkward.
Bringing these nationally known scholars and artists to our learning community at Bowling Green State University marks an attempt to "dare to cross borders" between the "known" and "unknown"; to gather a group of scholars, artists, and individuals who are dedicated to our cultural equity and international rights; and to "take ourselves there where we do not expect to be." Borders thus cease to be dividing lines and instead, as Elsbeth Probyn has noted, become those places "at the limits of who we think we are" where "we can articulate, repect, and use our differences" to produce new knowledge.
Coco Fusco
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Performance and the Power of the Popular: Cultural Fusion In the Americas
Thursday, February 27, 1997 at 2:00pm, Grand Ballroom, Union. Reception to follow.
International performance artist and interdisciplinary scholar Coco Fusco will present a documentary history of her past, present and forthcoming performance work. Performances by Fusco include "The Couple in the Cage: Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit..." (created with border artist Guillermo Gomez-Pena), a satirical commentary on the ethnographic display of non-westerners for white audiences; "Pochonovela," a parody of Latin American soap operas; and "Stuff," an exploration of how fear and a desire for food, nurturing, and erotic pleasure are connected to perceptions of Latin American women and culture. Professor Fusco is the author of English is Broken Here (1995), a collection of essays on art, media, and cultural politics, along with the prize winning article "The Other History of Intercultural Performance," and most recently "Performance and the Power of the Popular" in Let's Get It On: The Politics of Black Performance (1995). |
Barbara Harlow
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Cultural Struggles in Narrative: Human Rights Reporting Truth and Commissions
Friday, April 4, 1997 at 1:00pm, Assembly Room and Gallery, McFall Center. Reception to follow.
Barbara Harlow, University of Texas at Austin, will address the topic of new ways of telling stories at the end of the 20th century in relation to human rights reporting and what she calls "committing truth." Professor Harlow is author of Resistance Literature (1987), Barred: Women, Writing, and Political Detention (1992), The View From Within: Writers and Critics On Contemporary Arabic Literature (1994), and After Lives: Legacies of Revolutionary Writing (1996). Her published essays, which are international in scope, examine African-American, Arab, Chicano, Irish, and Latin literatures. |
Michael Awkward
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Identity and Cultural Criticism: The Role of the Black Public Intellectual
Friday, April 18, 1997 at 7:30pm, Alumni Room, Union. Reception to follow.
Part of the American Culture Studies Third Annual Graduate Student Conference, "Culture is Ordinary."
Cultural critic and scholar Michael Awkward, University of Michigan, has served as its director of Afro-American and African Studies and is currently visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania. His talk will speak to the ways in which our differences and similarities can connect us across communities as well as the risks and necessities of crossing borders (across disciplines, between the academy and the community, and between and among genders and ethnicities). He is author of Inspiring Influences: Tradition, Revision, and Afro-American Women's Novels (1989), New Essays on Their Eyes Were Watching God (1990), and Negotiating Difference: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Positionality (1995). |
Special thanks go to
All Events are free and open to the public. For more information, please contact the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society.
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