Migration Studies Project
Fall 2010 Distinguished Lecture:
Professor Isabel Hofmeyr (University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa)
October 18, 2010 at 5:00 p.m.
220 Hammond
“Seeking Empire, Finding Nation: Gandhi and Indianness in South Africa”
Using Gandhi’s 21 year sojourn in South Africa, this paper examines his ideas on political community as taking shape in a world of empires, princely states, colonies, republics, chiefdoms and kingdoms. Asian migrants had to manoeuvre between these political systems as best they could, an experience that produced a range of experimental modes of belonging, many of which disappear from view as the nation state takes hold and produces its own hindsight.
The political horizons against which these intersections took shape were those of empire, an ideal to which Gandhi remained deeply wedded even as ideals of imperial citizenship evaporated before his eyes. His response to these changing circumstances was less that of anti-colonial nationalism than a set of manoeuvres around the categories of imperial authority, white settlers, ‘Africans’ and ‘Indians’ in which versions of a nation emerge as a strategy for trying to salvage ideas of empire.
This paper uses this material to contemplate on recent work from scholars See Seng Tan, Amitav Acharya, Antoinette Burton, Christopher Lee which revisits questions of Afro-Asian interaction by exploring the hitherto unrecognized diversity of forms of transnational political community that emerge within this arena. This work in turn has important consequences for rethinking older ideas of diaspora.
This event was supported by a generous Interdisciplinary Group grant from the Penn State Institute for the Arts and Humanities, Africana Research Center, Asian Studies, Comparative Literature, and Department of African and African American Studies.
Lunch Hour Seminars 2010-11:
All lunch hour seminars will be held 12:00-1:00 pm in 124 Sparks Building, unless otherwise indicated.
September 14, 2010
Dr. Xiaoye You (Penn State, English and Asian Studies)
"Multilingual Creativity and the Diaspora Life of Chinese White Collars"
October 5, 2010
Dr. Meredith Doran (Penn State, Center for Language Acquisition)
"Hip-Hop in the Hexagon: Diaspora, Youth Language, and Minority Identity in Contemporary France"
November 2, 2010
Dr. Tobias Brinkmann (Penn State, Jewish Studies and History)
"From Empire to Nation State: Jewish Migrations, 1860-1948"
December 7 (Sparks 7A), 2010
Dr. Vivian Yenika-Agbaw (Penn State, African and African American Studies)
"Literacy, Culture, and African Communities"
January 25, 2011
Dr. Shuang Shen (Penn State, Comparative Literature/Asian Studies)
"Multilingualism, Chinese Diaspora, and the Cold War: The Case of 'The Chinese Student Weekly'"
February 22, 2011
Dr. Sibusiwe Dube (Penn State, African and African American Studies)
"Visual Representations of African 'Women' of the Diaspora: Integrating Feminist Theory with Migration Studies"
March 22, 2011 (Sparks 7a)
Dr. Suresh Canagarajah (Penn State, Applied Linguistics and English)
"Skilled Migration, Global English, and Development: Perspectives from PSU Faculty Members from Africa"
April 19, 2011
Dr. Suzanne Romaine (Oxford University)
"Language, Poverty, Development and the Milennium Development Goals"
Spring Distinguished Lecture 2011
Dr. Suzanne Romaine (Oxford University)
April 20, 2011
5 p.m.
117 Osmond
“Identity, Migration and Language”
Understanding the relationships between identity, migration and language is more timely than ever in view of the fact that globalization has intensified migration and brought about increasing linguistic and cultural diversity to much of the world, along with new challenges to traditional linkages between languages and identities. My talk will examine some of the ways in which language plays a role in constructing the identities of individuals and groups in migration contexts. I will conclude with some reflections on why identities matter and identify some of the challenges ahead.
For more information visit the Migration Studies Project
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