Texts Across Time
Resistance and Reconciliation: Literary and Musical Texts by Malian Women View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Cheryl Toman
Mali has experienced war and strife since 2012 and this has sent many of Mali’s writers and musicians into exile. Nonetheless, some creative voices have managed to stay and produce in Mali. Whether speaking from the diaspora or within the country, women writers of the last decade have provided an abundance of rich texts that express resistance to war and a call for reconciliation in an inclusive way. Although most of the writings have emerged from Black Malians, there have been rare examples of texts composed by Malian women of Tuareg origin. Together, these novels, short stories, poems, and songs show a multitude of perspectives on the current conflict and how to end it. The inclusion of song lyrics in this study is notable because of the unique situation of Malian musicians who are usually from an initiated caste. The genre known as Wassoulou has freed female artists from constraints traditionally imposed upon them within more traditional genres of Malian music. Western forms of literature such as the novel as well as the musical genre known as Wassoulou provide alternative modes of expression that Malian women have embraced and made their own. Analyses and interpretations of texts will be supported by theories put forth by African scholars which give a more Afro-central focus to the problem, as seen by Malian women writers.
Shipwrecks, Islands, Magic, and Marvel: Renaissance Responses to the New World Project View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Mary Watt
Exploring the impact of contact with America on Renaissance writers, this paper explores how this newly discovered paradise, figured as a garden of earthly delights, urged early modern Europeans to start over and to create both a new life and a better world. This study presents a new framework for understanding how Europeans perceived the so-called “new world” and how such perceptions shaped transatlantic colonialism.This study is relevant to scholars of colonialism as it considers both the cultural motivations of the colonizers and the effect of the Age of Encounters on their collective consciousness. This study is framed in literary and cultural studies. It reviews critical texts by Rabelais, Shakespeare, Ariosto, Cervantes, and Tasso. Taking a Jungian approach, it identifies how Renaissance writers relied on deeply embedded archetypes to interpret this newly “revealed” other side of the world. The primary result is a deeper understanding of how early modern Europeans interpreted the ontological significance of the world “beyond the curve of the sea.” Informed by a cultural nostalgia for a prelapsarian past and an intellectual fascination with antiquity, many Renaissance works suggest that this “brave new world” is linked to an even older world. Concomitantly, this return to the past permits the “old man” to experience the cradle of humanity in its pristine state, offering a chance to heal the wounds of Eden. This study and the deeper understanding it offers represents a means of reconciling the modern descendants of both the colonizers and the colonized.
Nickels and Dimes View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Maria Urrutia
In this paper I discuss the research process for Nickels and Dimes, a choreographic work in which I embody the stories of Cuban children who arrived in the US in so-called Peter Pan flights in the early 1960s, at the height of the Cold War. Organized by the US Catholic Church, the flights transported around 14 000 unaccompanied minors to the US in clandestine fashion. The children went sent abroad by Cuban families that feared that Fidel Castro’s government would usurp parental rights over children’s education and that minors on the island would undergo communist indoctrination. In Nickels and Dimes, I revisit this controversial chapter in the history of US-Cuba relations against the background of ongoing mass migrations today—the stories of those Cuban children resonate with news reports of unaccompanied minors now crossing the US-Mexico border or sailing across the Mediterranean to reach European territory by the thousands. As an artist-scholar, my motivation for working on this topic is twofold: family history (members of my family were relocated to the US during the Peter Pan Operation) and a desire to document the stories of migrants through humanizing artistic portraits. This study analyzes the research process (oral history) of collecting testimonies from adults who recalled their migration as Peter Pan children. Also, it details my hermeneutical approach to identifying the potent moments from those narratives that found visual representation in Nickels and Dimes, while discussing the poetics of the work and the creative methods for embodying the stories choreographically.
