Out of Place and Time: Thinking Migration through the Humanities

120 Vassar Street, Cambridge MA

Description

A conversation with Natalie G. Diaz, Yannis Hamilakis, and Maaza Mengiste. Migration seems to be a historical category of analysis with no clear beginning, middle, and end. It has allowed humanistic inquiry to re-animate questions of displacements across time and space; intervene in multiple intersecting crises across the globe; renew inquiry into the myth and power of the nation-state, globality, and the international community; and rethink questions about global anthropogenic influence. However, migration can also construct binaries that enforce systems of dispossession and racial inequality. Moreover, much deeper histories of human migration underlie our present moment and compel scholars, writers, and curators to reckon with longer legacies of colonialism, empire, and state power that can be found in everything from material artifacts to national mythology. ABOUT THE SPEAKERS Natalie G. Diaz was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. Her first poetry collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec , was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2012. She is 2018 MacArthur Foundation Fellow, a Lannan Literary Fellow and a Native Arts Council Foundation Artist Fellow. She was awarded a Bread Loaf Fellowship, the Holmes National Poetry Prize, a Hodder Fellowship, and a PEN/Civitella Ranieri Foundation Residency, as well as being awarded a US Artists Ford Fellowship. Diaz teaches at the Arizona State University Creative Writing MFA program. Yannis Hamilakis is an archaeologist and writer who is the Joukowsky Family Professor of Archaeology and Professor of Modern Greek Studies at Brown University. He specializes in archaeology of the prehistoric Aegean as well as historical archaeology, including ethnography and anthropology. His research interests include nationalism, postcolonialism, and migration studies. He is one of the curators of Transient Matter: Assemblages of Migration in the Mediterranean . Maaza Mengiste teaches Fiction and is the Assistant Director of the Queens College MFA Program in Creative Writing & Literary Translation. She is a novelist and essayist. Her second novel, The Shadow King , is shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, and was a 2020 LA Times Book Prize Fiction finalist. It was named best book of the year by the New York Times , NPR, Elle , Time , and more. Her debut novel, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze , was selected by The Guardian as one of the 10 best contemporary African books and named one of the best books of 2010 by Christian Science Monitor , Boston Globe , and other publications. She is the recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, the Premio il ponte, and fellowships from the Fulbright Scholar Program, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Creative Capital. Her work can be found in The New Yorker , The New York Review of Books , Granta , The Guardian , The New York Times , Rolling Stone , and BBC, among other places. ABOUT THE EVENT This event is organized by this year's Mahindra Postdoctoral Fellows: Simona Capisani , Daniel Grant , Delali Kumavie , Marcos Leitão De Almeida , Daniel McDonald , and Howie Tam . Through this event, the fellows sought to bring together critical and creative approaches to migration in the humanities to question and elucidate approaches that reformulate how we study the movement of humans, other beings, and things across the globe. https://fb.me/e/5scdS2CYc