Feminisms Unbound: The Time of the Border
With "The time of the border” we mean to invoke, of course, the terrible urgency of our current moment: the distinct but also overlapping historical, geographical, and other contexts that bear on the displacements of our time; border-crossings that claim our attention and others that remain invisible; conceptual frameworks that have meaningful explanatory power, but also do harm. Panelists draw on their current research sites and concepts, using temporality as a way of convening these ruminations. For example, how does a sense of crisis shape our sense of time (acting before time runs out; exhaustion in the wake of a sense that time has run out)? How do notions of indigeneity shape and justify national conceptions of the past, futurity, or extinction? What are the limits and possibilities of thinking through different kinds of migrancy side by side; intimate genealogies of border-crossing; migrants’ own conceptualization/theorization of the gains, losses and temporality of their situation?
Roundtable Participants:
Dina Siddiqi is Clinical Associate Professor at New York University’s School of Liberal Studies. Trained as an anthropologist at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Professor Siddiqi’s research and publications are informed by an abiding interest in the transnational politics of gender, sexuality and Islam in Bangladesh. She serves on the editorial board of Routledge’s Women in Asia Publication Series, is Chair of the South Asia Council (SAC) of the Association of Asian Studies (AAS), and on the Advisory Committee of the Saida Waheed Gender Initiative, Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS).
Emilie Diouf, is an Assistant Professor of English at Brandeis University. She specializes in Anglophone and Francophone postcolonial African literatures and film with an emphasis on gender, feminist theory, and trauma theory. She is interested in the interdisciplinary study of the relationship between narrative, trauma, and global human rights advocacy. She is currently working on a book project that examines the politics of mediating African women refugee experiences in global rights activism. The book analyzes testimonial narratives of women refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Northern Uganda, and Mali to identify the complex intertwining of social, political, economic, and cultural systems that over determine the production and circulation of these women’s traumatic experiences of displacement.
Sony Coranez Bolton is an Assistant Professor of Latinx Literature and Culture in the Department of Spanish at Amherst College. He researches at the intersection of queer of color critique, disability studies, and Ethnic Studies. His first book, Cripping Mestizaje: US Empire, Eugenics, Indigeneity, and Postcolonial Disability in the Hispanic Philippinesexamines the ways that disability and Philippine indigeneities intersected in the Hispanic Philippines under US colonial rule during the early 20th century.
Particia Ybarra, is Chair of and Professor in the Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies at Brown. She is the author of Performing Conquest: Five Centuries of Theatre, History and Identity in Tlaxcala, Mexico (Michigan, 2009) and Latinx Theatre in the Times of Neoliberalism (Northwestern, 2017), and co-editor with Lara Nielsen of >Neoliberalism and Global Theatres: Performance Permutations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012; paperback 2014). She is also the immediate past-president of ATHE and a founding member of ATHE’s Latina/o Focus Group (now Latinx, Indigenous and Americas Focus Group).
Moderator: Faith Smith is an Associate Professor of African and Afro-American Studies and English at Brandeis University. Her research engages aesthetic strategies of writers and artists contending with the legacies of slavery and indentureship, feminist engagements with the state in the wake of globalization, and the resonance of archival histories of intimacy and loss in the present. She is completing "Strolling in the Ruins: The Caribbean’s Non-Sovereign Modern in the Early Twentieth Century," a reading of the imperial present just before the First World War. Another project, “Dread Intimacies,” examines sovereignty, intimacy and violence in twenty-first-century fiction and visual culture.
ABOUT FEMINISMS UNBOUND
This Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality (GCWS) initiative, Feminisms Unbound, is an annual event series featuring debates that focus on feminist concerns, theories, and practices in this contemporary moment. This series is intended to foster conversations and community among Boston-area feminist intellectuals and activists. The series, in its open configuration, endeavors to allow the greatest measure of engagement across multiple disciplinary trajectories, and a full array of feminist investments.
The event organizers, who are also visiting scholars with the GCWS this year, are Elora Chowdhury (Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Chair of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at University of Massachusetts Boston), Faith Smith (Associate Professor of African and Afro-American Studies and English at Brandeis University), and Kareem Khubchandani (Mellon Bridge Assistant Professor in theDepartment of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies and the Program in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Tufts University). have programmed the events in this series.