MIGRATORY POETICS: LITERATURE, THEORY AND VISUAL CULTURES IN TRANSLATION
December 6-7, 2018, UC Irvine, 2018
Keynote Speaker: Sayak Valencia (El Colegio de la Frontera Norte)
Today, processes of transnational migration are inextricably bound up with spatial and geographical norms – a proper place for women, for groups defined through ethnicity, language usage, or histories of land use – and normative forms and fantasies of movement – the good traveler who ventures south to return home in the north, the displaced migrant who travels north and west. National governments make recourse to ideas of inhabitation and national identity in order to legitimize transnational inequalities, while neglecting or exacerbating forms of internal migration, gendered and racial inequality, and their violent effects. Attending to the circulation of these ideas can help us to articulate how histories of continued violence against identifiable groups of people – black, indigenous, female, gender non-conforming – might be understood not as exceptional, but as differently integral to a supposedly ethical orientation to otherness that secures progressivist ideas of state-mediated education and democracy. In this light, it becomes clear how weaponized borders, such as the… read more