Fordham University, November 6, 2010, 1 pm

This creative and scholarly symposium which will highlight three different legacies of diaspora in the United States: Haiti, The Philippines and Puerto Rico. Each panel will feature a short scholarly talk, a reading by two writers followed by a moderated conversation. What do Filipino American writers take for granted, in terms of artistic freedom? In what political and aesthetic ways are Puerto Rican writers employing creative disobedience? Until January 2010, descendents of the Haitian diaspora could call Haiti their home-- that geography has been rent. What kind of scattering will result? And, how will it be told by writers?

The principle aim of Turning Tides is to involve prominent artists and scholars in an exchange of ideas for the purpose of proactively responding to the growing phenomena of American diaspora as it is in the making and to ground and contextualize this conversation within a critical understanding of a larger global history.

Free and Open to the Public.

Location

Fordham University, Lincoln Center
McNally Auditorium
140 W. 62nd Street, Law School Entrance (Between Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues)
Take A, B, C, D & 1 trains to Columbus Circle.
Exit at 60th Street & Broadway.
Upon entering the double glass doors and informing the security desk that you are attending the English Department event, walk up the stairs and take a quick left. After going through another pair of double doors, take the first right and enter the Atrium through its glass doors. The Auditorium will be ahead of you to your left.

Program

1:00 - 1:15 pm Opening Remarks: Yvette Christiansë

1:15 - 2:15 pm Panel on Haiti: After the Earthquake
J. Michael Dash, Denize Lauture, Yolaine M. St. Fort

2:15 - 3:15 pm Panel on Puerto Rico: Creative Disobedience in New Nuyorican Writing
Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé, Willie Perdomo, Edwin Torres

3:15 - 3:30 pm Break

3:30 - 4:30 pm Panel on the Philippines: The Artist as Activist
Nerissa S. Balce, Bino Realuyo, Melissa Roxas

4:30 - 6:00 pm Reading and Reception

Speakers

Nerissa S. Balce is Assistant Professor of Asian American literature at Stony Brook University’s Department of Asian and Asian American Studies. She was born and raised in Manila, Philippines. She worked as a journalist in Manila, writing articles on Philippine literature, politics, culture and the arts. She took doctoral studies at the University of California-Berkeley where she received a Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies. Before joining Stony Brook University, she taught at the University of Oregon’s Ethnic Studies Program as a post-doctoral fellow, and at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst as an Assistant Professor of comparative literature. She is currently completing a book manuscript on American imperialism as a visual language and the image of the Filipino savage.

Yvette Christiansë is a novelist, poet, and scholar. She was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. She was raised in that city, and Cape Town, as well as Mbabane, Swaziland. In her late teens her family moved to Australia to escape apartheid. Her first full volume of poetry, Castaway, which was nominated for the PEN International prize. In 2006, she published the novel, Unconfessed, which was a finalist for the Hemingway/PEN Prize for first fiction and recipient of the 2007 ForeWord Magazine BEA Award. She teaches African American and postcolonial literatures, as well as poetics, at Fordham University.

Daniel Contreras is the author of What Have You Done to My Heart: Unrequited Loved and Gay Latino Culture and is Assistant Professor of English at Fordham University. His new work focuses on Latino literature and the problem of mediation.

Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé is Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature and Chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Fordham University in New York. He is author of Queer Latino Testimonio, Keith Haring, and Juanito Xtravaganza: Hard Tails (Palgrave 2007), a book about the relationship between high art and Latino popular culture in the gentrifying New York of the 1980s. He is also author of a study on the prose fiction of one of Latin America’s most important twentieth-century writers, José Lezama Lima, El primitivo implorante (Rodopi 1994), and coeditor with Martin Manalansan of Queer Globalization: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism (New York UP 2002). He teaches courses on contemporary Caribbean literatures and New York in Latino literature and film at Fordham. He has been the recipient of the NEH and Ford Foundation fellowships and has been invited professor at Harvard, Emory, and the University of Pennsylvania.

J. Michael Dash is Professor of French at New York University and director of the Africana Studies Program. He is the author of Literature and Ideology in Haiti (1981), Haiti and the United States (1988), Édouard Glissant (1995), The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context (1998), and Culture and Customs of Haiti (2001); editor (with Charles Arthur) of Libete: A Haiti Anthology (1999); and translator of Gisèle Pineau's The Drifting of Spirits (1999). He is currently at work on a manuscript entitled "Surrealism in the Francophone Caribbean."

Luis H. Francia who has lived in New York since the 1970s is the author of several other books, including Eye of the Fish: A Personal Archipelago which won both the 2002 PEN Center Open Book and the 2002 Asian American Writers literary awards. His poetry collections include the recently released The Beauty of Ghosts (performed as theater at Topaz Arts in 2007); Museum of Absences; and The Arctic Archipelago and Other Poems. He is also the author of A History of the Philippines: From Indios Bravos to Filipinos, published this year. He edited Brown River, White Ocean: An Anthology of Twentieth Century Philippine Literature in English, and co-edited, with Eric Gamalinda, Fiippin’: Filipinos on America, and, with Angel Velasco Shaw, Vestiges of War: The Philippine-American War and the Aftermath of an Imperial Dream, 1899-1999. He writes an online column for Manila’s Philippine Daily Inquirer and teaches creative writing at the City University of Hong Kong, literature at Hunter College, and Tagalog Language and Culture at New York University.

Denize Lauture's poety has appeared in Callaloo, Black American Literature Forum, African Commentary, Drumvoices and Bomb. He has written four volumes of poetry. In Creole: The Blues of the Lightning Metamorphosis, The Curse of Sincerity River's Samba. In English: When the Denizen Weeps, The Black Warrior and Other Poems and children's books: Father and Son (nominated for the 1993 NAACP Image Award), Running the Road to ABC (winner of the 1996 Coretta Scott King Award) and Mother and Daughters.

Willie Perdomo is a prize-winning Nuyorican poet and children's book author. He is the author of Where a Nickel Costs a Dime (W. W. Norton & Company, 1996) Postcards of El Barrio (Isla Negra Press, 2002), and Smoking Lovely (Rattapallax Press, 2003), which received a PEN American Center Beyond Margins Award. He is a Pushcart Prize nominee, and recently was a Woolrich Fellow in Creative Writing at Columbia University. He is co-founder/publisher of Cypher Books and teaches in New York City.

Bino A. Realuyo is the author of The Umbrella Country, a novel, and The Gods We Worship Live Next Door, a poetry collection. His works have appeared in The Nation, The Kenyon Review, The Literary Review, New Letters, and several anthologies. For the past fifteen years, he has worked as an Adult Educator and Community Organizer in underserved communities in New York City. He can be found on the web at http://binoarealuyo.com. He recently founded a social enterprise for low-skilled, low-wage immigrant workers, We Speak America.

Melissa Roxas is a Filipino American poet who has won fellowships from PEN USA Rosenthal Emerging Voices and Kundiman. She is co-founder of Habi Ng Kalinangan, a Los Angeles-based Filipino cultural organization dedicated to promoting community empowerment and progressive social change. In May 2009, while on a medical mission in Tarlac, Philippines, she was abducted at gunpoint and held against her will for six days until her surfacing in Quezon City. She campaigns today for the safety of activists in the Philippines.

Yolaine M. St. Fort is a writer of Haitian descent. In 2000, she received an M.A. in Creative Writing from Long Island University. Her thesis was a novel titled My Shadows in the Mirror. She’s had her prose and poetry published in Downtown Brooklyn, Prose Ax, Calabash, Vwa: Poems for Haiti, Poetry in Performance, General Authority: Earthquake 2010, For The Crowns Of Your Heads: Poems For Haiti, and The Caribbean Writer (forthcoming) . She has also written a second novel titled Hear Their Echoes. She’s currently working on a collection of short stories and a poetry manuscript. She teaches English at Edward R. Murrow High School and sometimes adjuncts at Long Island University. She is the adviser for the school’s literary magazine called The Magnet.

Edwin Torres is a recepient of poetry fellowships from The Foundation For Contemporary Performance Art, the New York State Foundation for the Arts, and The Poetry Fund and his CD Holy Kid was part of The Whitney Museum's exhibition, The American Century Pt. II. Edwin is currently co-editing POeP! an eJournal, and Cities Of Chance: An Anthology of New Poetry from The United States and Brazil, both from Rattapallax Press.