Perspectives Across Politics
(Asynchronous Session - Online)
Cultivating a Climate for Paradigm Shift: Facilitating Innovation in a Post-COVID19 World View Digital Media
Workshop Presentation Joe Perez
Renaissance philosopher and writer Machiavelli once said, “I'm not interested in preserving the status quo; I want to overthrow it.” The importance of respecting personal space and practicing impeccable hygiene aren’t the only lessons learned from COVID-19. If anything, we’ve seen the incalculable value of innovative thinking, because a global pandemic certainly provides enormous motivation to leave the status quo behind. That said, how do you overthrow the status quo without sacrificing quality and security in the process? Learn the three key words needed (Recognize, Resolve, and Respond) to strike this delicate balance in this challenge for you to shift your paradigm, facilitate innovation, and be a catalyst for change rather than an antagonist. Has COVID-19 made you see the need to adopt a more agile way of thinking? Where is your development strategy now? Where do you want it to be as the industry recovers from this worldwide crisis? Do you intend to get it there by using the same methods that haven't worked? It has been said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, but expecting different results. Is that how you want your legacy to be remembered? Do you project an image of being part of the problem or part of the solution? Find out how to be a catalyst for change (facilitating innovation) and NOT an antagonist (frustrating innovation). Discover three types of flexibility in leadership and work/life balance needed to make that happen in the aftermath of COVID-19.
Where Euphoria Lies: Ecofeminism and the Paradox of Satisfaction in Aminatta Forna’s Happiness (2018) View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Lobna Shaddad
In her fourth novel Happiness (2018), the half Scottish and half Sierra Leonean author Aminatta Forna employs unpretentious references through straightforward language to convey a deep message: humans must learn how to coexist with other creatures and to live in tune with nature. The novel sets in Britain and travels backward and forward through various places to tell the story of an American urban wildlife biologist, Jean Turane, who studies wildlife-human cohabitation. Specifically, Jean studies changing habits of urban coyotes and foxes to capture one way of ecological change: the urbanization of wildlife. Such ecological change moves in parallel with the psychological changes that happen to soldiers after war and to refugees. This psychological change is portrayed through Dr. Atilla Asare, Jean’s boyfriend, a psychiatrist from Ghana who works in the war zone. This study aims at studying Aminatta Forna’s Happiness in the light of socialist ecofeminism to trace the connection between, on one hand, the oppression of women and nature and, on the other hand, psychological problems resulting from social injustice. Moreover, applying understanding from socialist ecofeminism enables more insight into, not only, women-nature relationship, but also, the various techniques humans employ to adjust to unequal treatment.
Cultural and Literary Critical Lens in Decolonizing Global Health View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Pushpa Parekh
Decolonizing thought, theory, practice, ideology, and academic manifestations in different disciplines have convergent and/or divergent effects and implications. For example, the concept of the “decolonial” is used in Postcolonial Studies and activist movements as resistance to colonization, while cognizant of the persistence and mutational forms of colonial presence, referred to as “colonial hangover” or “internalized colonialism.” In this paper, I discuss three generative framing concept points for continued engagement: Colonial/Decolonial: persistence of and resistance to politics of domination, at various levels. Self-reflexively, I see this conceptual conundrum as shaping not only a finished past but also the unfinished present and future imaginings of identities, positionalities and subjectivities. How do we situate ourselves in what I will call the work of “decolonial delinking.” Global Health: I propose to unpack the terms “ global health” and propose we dialogue on their discursive, ideological and political contexts, legacies and implications. These inquiries are necessary steps in decolonizing current manifestations of power and knowledge. For example, think of two related questions: Is the “global” in global health understood to be “universal” or pluri-versal? What are the socio-cultural determinants of “health”? Cultural Critical Lens: what could a decolonial cultural approach to global health (as an interdisciplinary field) do to critique and disrupt power and knowledge asymmetries (along race, ethnicity, gender/sexuality, class/caste, disability, and religious lines). I also share some examples from South Asian literary works I teach, such as Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India and Mahasweta Devi’s Imaginary maps (translated by Gayatri Spivak).
Trauma, Amnesia, and Narration: Understanding Memory Politics from Migrant Narratives of the Exodus from Burma during the Japanese Attack of 1941-42 View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Priyanka Bhattacharyya
“The 20th century even more than any age before is the age of the refugee” and simultaneously works on migration seem incomplete without looking into the migrant experiences. In fact for an in depth study of migration, analyzing migrant narratives are important owing to its contribution in understanding the subjectivity of trauma and forced migrant survival. The paper attempts to engage with life stories of migrants escaping Burma from Japanese attacks (1942), including my family, whose written narrative has inspired me to carry forward this project. The author, Gayatri Gupta (born Gayatri Bose), who happened to be my father’s aunt, was only eight years old during the migration. However, it was only in around the early 2000s did she pen down her memories of the migration. The paper attempts to deal with the lived experiences of the Bose family from a critical and analytical point of view and understand the historicity of trauma, coping and memory politics from the perspective of migrants. Although the paper deals with the experience of my family in particular in the context of trauma and recollection, the larger focus of the project is an in depth analysis featuring ten culturally diverse journals (Bengali, Anglo-Indian, Australian and British) in the context of favored mobility and embodied experience of trauma.
The Poetry of M. NourbeSe Philip and the Violence of Language View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Beatriz Marques Gonçalves
M. NourbeSe Philip’s She tries her tongue, her silence softly breaks (1988) deals with the themes of identity, migration, colonialism, and memory. Mahlis (2004, 2005) and Saunders (2005) have discussed the role of language in Philip’s poetry, opening space for new understandings and interpretations of her work. Through the analysis of selected poems from She tries her tongue, her silence softly breaks (1988), this research explores the crucial role played by language in the lyrical subject’s struggle to come to terms with her identity as a black woman and immigrant, her relationship with her community, and with her own use of language. This analysis is supported by a theoretical framework provided by key concepts such as deterritorialization and minor literature (Deleuze & Guattari, 1986), in betweenness (Bhabha, 1994), the remainder and the violence of language (Lecercle, 1990). Through the violent deconstruction and re-construction of language, M. NourbeSe Philip’s poetry exemplifies a kind of language that is capable of including perspectives and stories once silenced, and of building and re-building her own identity as an immigrant and as a black woman.
