3rd annual UC Transnational and Transcolonial Studies Multicampus Research Groups Graduate Student Conference

Friday, May 7, 2004
8:30 AM - 6:30 PM
314 Royce Hall
UCLA
Los Angeles, CA 90095

Migrations consist of movements of individuals and groups under voluntary conditions and/or duress, and the term is used here to refer to all types of movements of peoples (immigration, forced migration, displacement, etc.) as well as movements of ideas, practices, and cultural productions.  How have various migrations been liberating and/or confining, and how have these “crossings” challenged or re-articulated the boundaries and definitions of the nation-state, culture, and identity?  This conference seeks to explore these issues and the impact migrations have on theories of space, markets, memory, and encounters.

Program Schedule

8:30 am    Coffee

9:00 am – 9:15 am   Welcome and Opening Remarks
Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, Co-Directors, UC Transnational and Transcolonial Studies Multicampus Research Group

Chris Cao, Comparative Literature, UCLA; Chair, MRG Graduate Student Conference Planning Committee

9:15 am – 10:45 am   SPACE
Moderator: Samantha Pinto, English, UCLA

Eng-Beng Lim, Theater & Critical Studies, UCLA
Uncovering Homoerotic Acts on a Colonial Landscape: “Reading” Walter Spies and the Balinese kecak 

Sara Gross, Musicology, UCLA
“On the territory of dispossession, I would that I could sing”: On the Language of Music in Assia Djebar's Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade 

Seema Sohi, History, University of Washington, Seattle  
South Asian Revolutionaries and White Exclusionists: Rethinking the Borderlands and the Transnational 

Sze Wei Ang, Comparative Literature, Cornell University
Appropriating Space (in) Under the Feet of Jesus: Migrant Workers and Nationhood

10:50 am – 12:20 pm   MARKETS
Moderator: Jeff Schroeder, Comparative Literature, UCLA

Grace Yeh, English, UCLA
Bruce Lee's Transnational “Flow”:  Representation in the Age of Global Capitalism

Rachmi Diyah Larasati, Dance, University of California, Riverside
When Cultural Production Crosses the Border: The Global Export of Kebudayaan Indonesia

Emily Cheng, Literature, University of California, San Diego
U.S. Sensational Narratives of Chinese Transnational Adoption 

Marie-Therese Ellis, French, University of California, Berkeley
Caught in Discourse: Tahar Ben Jelloun's La réclusion solitaire and La plus haute des solitudes

12:20 pm – 1:30 pm   Break

1:30 pm – 3:00 pm     MEMORY
Moderator: Nadege Veldwachter, French & Francophone Studies, UCLA

Amy Marczewski, French & Francophone Studies, UCLA
A “Revolutionary” Solution to the Language Problem in African Literature: The Use of French in Ousmane Sembène's Les Bouts de bois de Dieu

Lital Levy, Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley
Houses and Memory:  The Politics of ‘Home' in Postcolonial Writing

Chih-ming Wang, Literature, University of California, Santa Cruz
Remembering Diaspora: Diasporic Return in Mabel Cheung's City of Glass

Nadine Khalil, Fulbright Fellow, Social and Cultural Anthropology, New York University; Social and Behavioral Sciences, American University of Beirut
Border Crossings:  Choreographing Visual Memories of the Lebanese Civil War in Diaspora 

3:05 pm – 4:15 pm  ENCOUNTERS
Moderator: David Fieni, Comparative Literature, UCLA

David Schuster, History, University of California, Santa Barbara
The “American Disease” Goes to Europe:  When Neurasthenia Crossed the Atlantic in the Late Nineteenth Century 

Sylvia Martin, Anthropology, University of California, Irvine
Chains of Othering and the Links between East and West: The Case of the Baghdadi Jews in Shanghai 

Sara Fanning, History, University of Texas at Austin
How Haiti Influenced Political Activism within Northern Free Black Communities from the Time of the Haitian Revolution to the 1830s

4:30 pm        Keynote Address
Introduction by:  Thu-Huong Nguyen-Vo, East Asian Languages & Cultures, UCLA

David Palumbo-Liu, Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of the Program in Modern Thought and Literature, Stanford University
Borders and Fences, New and Old Worlds

5:45 pm        Reception

Organized by the MRG Graduate Student Conference Planning Committee at UCLA:
Chris Cao, Chair, Comparative Literature
David Fieni, Comparative Literature
Seth Jameson, Comparative Literature
Samantha Pinto, English
Jeff Schroeder, Comparative Literature
Nadege Veldwachter, French and Francophone Studies
Grace Yeh, English

Parking is available for $7.

Cost : Free and open to the public.

www.humnet.ucla.edu/transnation

Sponsor(s): UC Transational and Transcolonial Studies Multicampus Research Groups; organized by the MRG Graduate Student Conference Planning Committee