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Second Annual CISA Student Symposium

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Borders and Bridges in the Americas Saturday, April 17, 1999 Adele Simpson Hall Hampshire College Session I: Assimilation and its Discontents Julie Minich, Smith College "Resisting Assimilation: Achy Obejas, Carmelita Tropicana, Sheila Ortiz Taylor" - This talk examines three literary texts whose authors represent the enactment of lebian subjectivity as a crucial strategy for resisting cultural assimilation, and whos e work proposes a model cultural surivival that not only resists compulsory heterosexuality and patriarchy, but is, in fact, made stronger precisely because it opposes gender/sexual repression. Margaret Bruchac, Smith College "The Indian Doctor Meets the Yankee Physician" - Inspired by recent research as a Scholar-in-Residence at the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association in Deerfield and Old Sturbridge Village, a living historical museum, this talk examins interactions between New Englad's Native American "Indian Doctors" and Anglo-American physicians in the 19th century from the point of viw of "Indian Doctors" and "Doctresses" like Louis Watso, Molly Ockett, Joe Pye, and Rhoda Rhoades. Maeve Elizabeth Caitlin Hughes, Hampshire College "In Order for One to Live, Another Must Die" - This paper explores the intimate coupling of life and death as two dueling faces of the self-same process in Meso-American and Christian religious traditions. The initial "symbol wars" that characterize the first contact of the two cultures, later become transformed into an interwoven set of rituals, symbols, and faith systems. This interweaving of traditions further resulted in new understandings between the two cultures as well as a deepening of faith within each. Session II: Challenging the State Carolina Patino, Amherst College "Drug Lords vs. the Columbian State: the New and Unforseen Successful Challengers" - This presentation examines how drug lords challenged the Colombian state in the 1980s and 1990s through successful exploitation of narco dollars, socially clientilistic clandestine networks, and integrated transational crime mafias. Their success, the paper argues, undermines traditional Weberian and Machiavellian models of the relationship between state and society. Jennifer Eisenberg, Amherst College "Student Activism in Chile: A Case Study of Three Periods" - Student activism in Chile has varied from high levels of protest under Allende (1970-1973) to low levels during the transition to democracy (1987- 1994) and then to medium levels more recently (1997-1998). This paper argues that these variations in activism reflect changing incentives for students to mobilize, triggered by the domestic and international contexts of each case. KEYNOTE ADDRESS: Josh Kuhn "CISA's Second Year" Josh Kun was the 1998-1999 CISA Visiting Faculty and taught as an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts (under the Five College Program, Crossroads in the Study of the Americas). His talk is both a reflection on CISA's second year of operation, and an exploration of what he calls the "Americas 90210" conception of the citizenship, nation and immigration. Session III: Cultural Negotiations: Sound, Story, Festival JulieBeth Napolin, Hampshire College "A Shape to Fill a Lack: Sonic Orientalism and the Search for Lost Time" - This paper examines together Debussy's 19th-century composition "Pagodes," inspired by a gamelan performance he heard during the Paris Exposition of 1889, and the work and reception of Les Baster and Martin Denny, cofounders of the "exotica craze" of the 1950s. What is at stake in comparing these two cases is the fact that the Western conception of the "global" continues to depend upon a non-Western world kept imaginatively at bay. Such a conception is based on an Orient/Occident dichotomy in which the non-Western world is exoticized, eroticized, and understood exclusively through the body. Caitriona Austin, Smith College "The Will of People: the Emergence of a Festival, Identity, Culture and a new Musical Instrument -- Against All Odds" - The festival known as Trinidad Carinval, seen today all over the world in places such as New York, Toronto, Miami, Washington, D.C., and London, was formed through political, socio-economic, racial and cultural struggle. This paper focuses on steelband, as it formed the main resistance movement of the grass-roots sector during Trinidad's social transition from the 19th to the 20th century. Deanna Tseying Fei, Amherst College "Disembodied" - It has been said that every woman always knows exactly how she looks in the eyes of others when she is walking on a beach in a bathing suit. In a sense, she has to; it is her only way of asserting some control over the inevitable assessment of her body. "Disembodied" is a short story about an Asian American girl who takes this self-detachemnt to the extreme, so that she tries to make not only her body but her self something outside of herself. Nikki Mondschein, Amherst College "Writing Visual and Theatrical Language for America's Borderlands: A Performance of Scenes from Intonation" - Intonation is a new play rooted in the idea that South Florida culture is more fluid than the immigration laws imply, and that as in the US-Mexico borderlands, migration happens more like a circuit than a wave. Characters sprial out of the landscape and are drawn back in; even after death they still circle around each other. They cross borders, then cross the other way. Intonation is, in part, a play about mobility and how characters will negotiate culture and identity and the boundaries become more blurred. Session IV: Photographs: Home, Family and Community Whitney Wilkerson, Hampshire College "Shadow and Bone: The Flores Family Album" - A selection of photographs and writing taken from a larger show, this work explores the daily life of the Flores family, living and working in Managua, Nicaragua. A reading of selected written works will accompany the exhibit. Allana Taranto, Hampshire College "Leaving Home" - An exhibition of photographs of abandoned living spaces taken to understand and discover what people left behind in the places they lived -- and why they left. The exhibition will be suported by a talk based on research into these structures.