"A Matter of Honour: Notes on Feminism and Multiculturalism in Britain Today": A talk with Priyamvada Gopal

Wednesday, April 18, 2007
3:30 PM - 5:30 PM
Room 710
Social Sciences Building

INVITATION AND SCHEDULE OF EVENTS:

Please join the Space and Place Collaborative for a day-long symposium
entitled 'Heritage Sites/Political Spaces: Rethinking Belonging', which
will take place next Friday, April 6, in Nolte Library. Our presenters
include:

Huhana Smith, Senior Curator Mäori, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa
Tongarewa, Aotearoa New Zealand, and visual artist

Talya Chalef, South African and Australian visual and site-specific artist

Ciraj Rassool, District Six Museum Trustee, Professor of History at
University of Western Cape Town, South Africa

Brenda Child, Associate Professor of American Studies, UMN

If you are interested in attending please RSVP to Cecilia
Aldarondo ASAP at aldar002@umn.edu.

Sponsored by the Institute for Global Studies, Department of English,
Department of Geography, Department of Anthropology, Department of American
Studies, Department of Theatre Arts and Dance

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Symposium Schedule and Abstracts:

9:30-10:00 Continental Breakfast

10-12: Session One: Presentations by Huhana Smith and Talya Chalef;
discussant Margaret Werry; chaired by Sonja Kuftinec

12-1: Catered lunch

1-3: Session Two: Presentations by Ciraj Rassool, Brenda Child, Carly
Beane, Kate Beane, and Scott Shoemaker; discussant and chair Megan Lewis

3:00-3:30: Refreshment break

3:30-5:00: Discussion roundtable (with presenters and discussants) chaired
by Karen Till

5:00-6:00: Closing reception

SESSION ONE: 10am -12 noon

Huhana Smith, Senior Curator Mäori, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa
Tongarewa, Aotearoa New Zealand, and visual artist, will talk about a
Mäori-led natural heritage initiative that uses local knowledge based on
intimate, physical, inter-generational and spiritual interfaces with lands,
water and resources to undertake ecosystem restoration.

This talk investigates the multidimensionality of an iwi and hapü-led
initiative in active kaitiakitanga or guardianship of natural resources.
The project is based on local Mäori knowledge that comes from talking about
place, observing place and developing place in a detailed way, in order to
highlight how interactions with resources and the natural environment were
prerequisites for maintaining place and its customary knowledge rights.
Aspects of revitalised local knowledge underpinned restoration planning and
projects on tribal lands, especially for wetlands and lower reaches of
river systems to sea.

Huhana Smith (Ngäti Tukorehe, Ngäti Raukawa) is Senior Curator Mäori, at
the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Aotearoa New Zealand. She is
also a visual artist, who has exhibited widely both within and outside New
Zealand, and a commentator on both contemporary and customary Mäori art and
visual culture. She is the general editor of Taiäwhio: Conversations with
Contemporary Mäori Artists 2002 (with next version due June 2007). She was
part of the editorial team for Icons Nga Taonga 2002 a cross- disciplinary
publication on Te Papa’s collection.. She recently led the curatorial team
for the cultural exchange exhibition Mauri Ora: Treasures from the Museum
of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa 2007, between Tokyo National Museum in
Japan and Te Papa, Aotearoa New Zealand. She is currently in the final
stages of doctoral study, pursuing an action research project which brings
together her interests in landscape art, ecological heritage, and Mäori
customary knowledge. She will exhibit associated paintings around her PhD
studies, ‘The Weedeaters’ in November 2007.

* * * Talya Chalef, South African and Australian visual and site-specific
artist, will discuss site, a multi sensory, one-woman performance piece
that raises ethical questions about what happens when unwanted pasts
resurface to haunt the postcolonial city. site was inspired by Prestwich
Place, a mass burial ground that was discovered on a construction site in
Cape Town 2003. Archeologists found that these bodies made up a sum total
of approximately three thousand dating back the beginnings of Dutch
colonisation. Because this site was located outside the old city’s colonial
walls, it indicated that they were not of Dutch Reformed origin, setting up
an interesting and heated debate. Using the story from Cape Town set
against the backdrop of Australia I wanted to point to issues of our shared
post colonial condition. With Tanya Heywood, I devised site, a performance
piece that sought to explore all the various perspectives on the situation
whilst not dictating or favoring any one specific point of view. The space,
sounds, projections, movements and texts all contributed equally to site.
We created and performed the work in Melbourne’s old City Watch House and
brought the audience into the space, through an installation and into the
ideas. We asked Melbourne audiences how they would deal with such an event:
what perspective would identify with and as such, how would they relate to
this history to their everyday lives? In this presentation, I will speak
about the motivations for site; the essays, which contributed to the
creative development; the artistic process with actor Tanya Heywood; the
visual, spatial, site-specific, aural and movement choices within the work;
how each element contributed to the overall concept; and lastly, how the
investigated themes spoke to larger issues of home, belonging and place.

* * *
SESSION TWO: 1-3pm

Ciraj Rassool, District Six Museum Trustee, Professor of History at
University of Western Cape Town, and Co-Director of the Heritage and Museum
Studies Program (UWC with University of Cape Town and Robben Island), in
Cape Town, South Africa, will discuss “intangible heritage� interventions
by the District Six Museum in the post-apartheid city.

* * * Brenda Child (Ojibwe), Associate Professor of American Studies, UMN,
Carly Beane, Kate Beane (Dakota) and Scott Shoemaker (Miami) (Ph.D.
candidate, UMN American Studies), will present “Reclaiming Bdote:
Considering the Fort Snelling Historic Site.�

Fort Snelling sits in close proximity to the Twin-Cities International
Airport and is at the center of the metro area of St. Paul and Minneapolis.
Today, there is a full living history program at the historic restored
stone fortress, with guides in costume during the summer months and
thousands of visitors every year. Dakota prisoners were at Fort Snelling
during the 1862 War in Minnesota, though that history is not presently part
of the interpretation at the historic site. In the aftermath, 38 Dakota men
were hanged in Minnesota, in the largest mass execution in the history of
the United States. As a further indignity, the Minnesota Historical Society
displayed the physical remains of Little Crow, the Dakota leader
assassinated a year after the conflict ended. This presentation will
explain a research project involving American Indian Studies faculty and
students at the University of Minnesota that addressed some of the complex
issues surrounding the Fort Snelling historic site for American Indians in
this region, at a time when the state of Minnesota and the Minnesota
Historical Society contemplates its renovation for the upcoming
sesquicentennial of statehood.

Abstract: Neoliberalism and neoconservatism are two distinct political rationalities in the contemporary United States. They have few overlapping formal characteristics, and even appear contradictory in many respects. Yet they converge not only in the current presidential administration but also in their de- democratizing effects. Their respective devaluation of political liberty, equality, substantive citizenship, and the rule of law in favor of governance according to market criteria on the one side, and valorization of state power for putatively moral ends on the other, undermines both the culture and institutions of constitutional democracy. Above all, the two rationalities work symbiotically to produce a subject relatively indifferent to veracity and accountability in government and to political freedom and equality among the citizenry.

Wendy Brown will be presenting a seminar on her recent piece in Political Theory (Vol. 34, No. 6 (2006)). The seminar will be an opportunity to discuss the themes developed in her paper. The paper is available online through the UMN library website. She also recommended the "prequel" to the Political Theory piece, "Neoliberalism and the End of Democracy," which can be found in Theory and Event (Vol. 7, No. 1 (2003)) or in Edgework, a collection of essays she published in 2005.

"Porous Sovereignty/Walled Democracy"
Monday, March 26th at 3:30. 101 Walter Library. Reception to follow.

Wendy Brown is a Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Wendy Brown is a Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her Ph.D. in Political Philosophy from Princeton University (1983). Her recent publications include Left Legalism/Left Critique, co-edited with Janet Halley (Duke, 2002), Edgework: Critical Essays in Knowledge and Politics (Princeton, 2005), and Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (forthcoming, Princeton, 2006). Her fields of interest include history of political theory, nineteenth and twentieth century Continental theory, critical theory and cultural theory (including postcolonial, feminist, and critical race theory). Her current research focuses on the relationship of theories of political sovereignty to global capital and other transnational forces.

We invite you to
A TRANS-BORDER DIALOGUE ON ALLIANCE WORK
on Sunday, April 15, 2007

with members of
Labor Education Service (University of Minnesota),
Minnesota Immigrant Freedom Network, and
Sangtin Kisaan Mazdoor Sangathan (Sitapur, India)

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Please join us in this unique opportunity for a discussion with members of Sangtin Kisaan Mazdoor Sangathan (Sangtin Peasants and Workers Organization). SKMS is working to build a strong movement of women and men in the villages of Sitapur District in North India. From SKMS come Surbala and Richa Singh, full time organizers in Sitapur, and Richa Nagar, a professor at the University of Minnesota. SKMS emerged from discussions of social and economic violence in the daily lives of rural women, and in the donor-funded organizations that seek to empower the poor. SKMS interweaves grassroots organizing, collective reflections, and collaborative writing to build dialogues and solidarity networks with rural communities in Sitapur, and with educators and people's movements located outside of Sitapur. For SKMS, projects of empowerment, instead of being imagined and diffused by funders and experts, must gain their meaning and form through dialogues with communities they seek to empower.

We will begin with some key questions in SKMS' journey: How does donor-driven-politics influence grassroots activism? How does unequal access to education, livelihood, and information shape the lives of workers and peasants? How can university-based research and grassroots struggles support each other? Subsequently, local organizers, students, and those directly affected by unequal access will engage with these themes and raise others. We hope to start a much needed dialogue about how our struggles overlap, what we can learn and take from each other about visions and strategies, and how we can build alliances despite significant differences in our contexts. We hope that this three-hour session will provide adequate time for meaningful conversations to happen.
2:30-5:30 PM
In the Heart of the Beast Theatre (3rd Floor of Plaza Verde)
1500 East Lake Street, Minneapolis, MN 55407

Translation and childcare will be provided

A note to paid staff at community groups and unions: This discussion seeks to expand the circle of participants that get a chance to engage with such questions. Often we find that the same people participate in events such as this, and therefore, we ask that you bring members from your organization with you if you plan to come.

Please RSVP by April 1 to hamarasafar@gmail.com indicating the language in which you would like us to provide translation and, if you need childcare, please let us know how many children will accompany you.

This event is co-sponsored by the University of Minnesota's CLA Scholarly Events Fund, Institute for Global Studies, Institute for Advanced Study, Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies, Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change, Department of Chicano Studies, Department of American Studies, and MÃ?S(S) Color, the association of students of color of the Department of American Studies.

When: Saturday April 21, 2007

The Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies at the University of Minnesota cordially invites you to join faculty and graduate students for a one-day workshop to discuss the new challenges and new directions that the pluralities of feminisms are taking today in the Americas and how are these challenges are shaping new theoretical approaches.

Participants will engage in dialogue with four distinguished guest panelists and with each other as we address recent perspectives on feminist cultural theory in/about Latin America and discuss the new directions that Latin American(ist) feminisms are taking or need to take in the re-articulation of feminist practices.

Sara Castro-Klarén, Johns Hopkins University
Jean Franco, Columbia University
Amy Kaminsky, University of Minnesota
Cynthia Tompkins, Arizona State University

Questions that will frame our discussion include
the appropriation of new theoretical frameworks by feminist criticism and theory- in particular postcolonial and transnational approaches and the new directions that these perspectives are generating in the already existing pluralities of feminist positions in Latin American feminisms.

* the new challenges for the feminist literary and cultural studies.
* the impact of new models and theoretical frameworks on the possibility of imagining new identities and communities and in their representation.
* the new debates in cultural studies and their effect in Latin American(ist) feminisms, in particular in relation to literary studies and cultural critique
* the role of interdisciplinary approaches to the consolidation of new dialogues, new languages, and new practices
* the impact of globalization in current feminist studies in/about Latin America

Location TBA. Watch for further information to be posted on www.spanport.umn.edu.
Free and open to the public, but we ask that participants RSVP to spanport@umn.edu to assist us in our planning.

Wednesday, March 7, 2007
7:30 PM - 9:30 PM
Room: Coffman Theater

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak will deliver the 44th Joseph Warren Beach Lecture in Literature. Spivak was born in Calcutta, India. Her widely influential work involves post-structuralist literary criticism, Marxism, feminism and postcolonialism, and translations of the Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi. Among her books are Death of a Discipline (2003), A Critique of Post-Colonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (1999), Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993), and In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (1987). She is currently an Avalon Foundation professor and Director of the Center for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University.

I found it useful Moya's explanation of Moraga's that "it was through her struggles - to deny chicanidad and then to reclaim it; to repress her lesbianism and then to express it; to escape sexism and heterosexism within Chicano/a cultural context and then to combat racism and sexism within Anglo-American feminist movement - that she comes to understanding and necessity for a nonessentialist feminist theory that can explain the political and theoretical salience of social location" (144). It illustrates that simply being part of certain community or claiming particular identity doesn't provide one with critical voice and knowledge. While Moraga largely demonstrates resistance and critical engagement within various communities she was part of exposing that identity based groups, oppressed by the dominant system, can be oppressive inside their group.
Similarly, although very briefly Panjabi discusses solidarity of imprisoned movement, but acknowledging class conflicts between individual women, showing that gender identity under oppression of the dehumanizing institution is a factor not large enough to bridge other differences. This theme is also persistent in Wekker's essay, showing the importance of class in Suriname society.

1. Bodies/Embodiment as essential for resistance and critical agency.
2. Agency as not experienced by an autonomous individual but by selves-in-community.
3. Agency/Subjectivity framed in opposition to postmodern theories about the self and her ability to resist.

-How do you see these different themes functioning within the texts?
-Any other common themes? What kinds of connections do you make between the experiences of these different women?
-What are the differences between these readings? How do they describe agency differently? What are their definitions of agency?
-How do these texts describe resistance and agency explicitly in terms of women?
-What are the specific oppressive institutions that each group of women (Chicana women, imprisoned women in India/Argentina, and Suriname creole working class women) is resisting? How do these institutions shape their agency/subjectivity?