CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Organizers of the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities' first annual spring conference are not only expecting trouble, they're welcoming it.
That's because the topic -- "Culture, Place and the Cultures of Displacement" -- demands it, says Christine Catanzarite, adding, "We look forward to an exciting three days of troubling questions and global thinking." Catanzarite is associate director of IPRH, a new interdisciplinary and cutting-edge research unit of the University of Illinois, and with IPRH director Michael Bérubé, co-organizer of the conference. The conference, which is free and open to the public, is to be held April 15 to 17 (Thursday through Saturday) at the U. of I. Levis Faculty Center, 919 W. Illinois St., Urbana.
According to Catanzarite and Bérubé, globalization means trouble -- all kinds of trouble. They argue that in the arts, humanities and social sciences, for example, the globalization of culture has troubled the relations among: cultures and nations; the domains of so-called area studies; people's understanding of the associations between culture and place; the traditional definition of diaspora and the political meaning dependent thereon; and the human sense of belonging, of identity and home.
The conference, Bérubé said, "promises to investigate all this trouble, not to resolve it but to clarify its features and suggest new directions for inquiry. Combining scholarship on the Pacific Rim with video from the Caribbean, historical accounts of migrant workers with contemporary accounts of postcolonial exiles, this conference will bring into sharp focus some of the more nebulous images of culture and migration that haunt our historical moment."
The main speakers, together with IPRH faculty and graduate student fellows and invited speakers from across the campus, "will address a wide array of cultural phenomena," Bérubé said, "ranging from the conflicts and alliances among immigrant and indigenous populations from Australia to Arizona, to the rich music traditions of the black and Latin Caribbean, to the historical transformations and cultural continuities of Judaism."
Two screenings also are scheduled: Coco Fusco's "The Couple in the Cage," and Amitava Kumar's "Pure Chutney." Fusco is an independent artist based in New York. Kumar is at the University of Florida. Among the speakers and topics are Ien Ang, University of Western Sydney, "Indonesia On My Mind: Subjects in History and the Contradictions of Diaspora"; Grant Farred, Williams College, topic to be announced; Fusco, "At Your Service: Latina Performance in Global Cultures"; Jon Stratton, Curtin University of Technology (Perth, Australia), "More Than Average Fear: Ghetto Thinking and Everyday Life." The current IPRH fellows will present the culmination of their research on subjects relating to the program's theme this year: "Diaspora, Identity, and Expressive Culture."
More information is at the Web site http://www.iprh.uiuc.edu.