LITERANISTA Dialogue on Multicultural Books, Tech & Life

Literanista March 24, 2011

Distinguished Professor Sidney W. Mintz will be giving a guest lecture,
“Quijote and Caliban: A Different Look at Creolization,” on Monday,
April 4th at 5:00pm at New York University’s King Juan Carlos Center
Auditorium.

Date: Monday, April 4th, 2011, 5:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.

Location:
Auditorium of KJCC, 

53 Washington Square South, 

(sponsored by the Center for
Latin American and Caribbean Studies Research Colloquium Speaker Series,
New York University).

The title for the Spring 2011 Colloquium series is “Our America:
Cross Currents and Intimate Dialogues in the Making of a Hemisphere.”
The idea of America has long been dissected and reconstituted by a
number of ideologues, theorists, policymakers, artists, activists, and
ordinary people. Each has sought to craft a new existence that
distinguished itself from “Old World” tyranny and tensions,
significantly through the creation of imagined communities of identity
and belonging, based on various cultural, political-economic, and social
criteria.

In a “New World” where delineations of territory and
definitions of home have shifted as populations, resources, and
hegemonies respond to global and local forces, debated claims to “our
America” (to borrow from 19th century Cuban intellectual Jose Marti)
reveal “America” to be an extraordinarily malleable notion, one that
shapes and reflects understandings of belonging, identity, rights, and
justice–across shifting borders and diverse conceptualizations of
region and hemisphere.

Emphasizing anthropological and historical
approaches, this course will explore “our America” as simultaneously
sites of empirical practice and imagined ways of being, where the
interfaces, or cross currents among “American” ideas, dialogues, and
communities raise questions about the ways data inform categories of
analysis as well as categories of experience. 

For more information, please visit www.clacs.as.nyu.edu.