Doors open at 6pm, Free event organized by the Centre for Transnational Cultural Analysis with the support of SAW Centre, ICSLAC, School for Studies in Art and Culture, and Feminist Institute of Social Transformation.

More information: /ctca/cu-events/book-launch-talk-andrew-gayed-queer-world-making-contemporary-middle-eastern-diasporic-art/

Please join us on Wednesday, March 20th, 2024, in Patterson 303. Doors open at 4:30 pm, and the lecture begins at 5:30 pm.

This talk discusses the revolutionary genealogies of the third world (1945-1991), exploring both its earlier antecedents and subsequent legacies. While recent scholarship has focused on the mediations around the idea of world literature, from European colonization to US-led globalization, much less discussed are the concepts that were articulated from, and grounded in the realities of, the peripheries and margins of the Euro-US dominated world. Considerations of literature, and culture more broadly, played an enormous role in the mass mobilizations of 19C and 20C decolonization: there also took place significant rethinking of the issues of textuality, forms, and language, as well as the relations between theory and practice, city and country, society and nature, urban middle classes and rural subaltern groups, to mention only a few. In this radical frame, the overall emphasis was on a “new humanism” — drawing on vital but neglected intellectuals of the third world, from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, the talk addresses how their humanist work, and vision, speak to the contemporary global situation of the literary humanities.”

Dr. Auritro Majumder is Associate Professor of English at the University of Houston and author of Insurgent Imaginations: World Literature and the Periphery (Cambridge University Press, 2020). His current research comprises a book project exploring ideas of the human, “The Global South in Literature and Theory,” and a co-edited anthology, “Cultures of the Cold War in South Asia.”

Majumder has authored over a dozen essays, appearing in academic journals including Critical Asian Studies, Comparative Literature Studies, Interventions, Journal of Multicultural Discourses, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Mediations, Research in African Literatures, and South Asian Review.

This groundbreaking book explores a range of largely overlooked literary and artistic works that challenge the invisibility of Black wartime history. Emphasizing Black agency, Sarah Phillips Casteel examines both testimonial art by victims of the Nazi regime and creative works that imaginatively reconstruct the wartime period. Among these are the internment art of Caribbean painter Josef Nassy, the survivor memoir of Black German journalist Hans J. Massaquoi, the jazz fiction of African American novelist John A. Williams and Black Canadian novelist Esi Edugyan, and the photomontages of Scottish Ghanaian visual artist Maud Sulter. Bridging Black and Jewish studies, this book identifies the significance of African diaspora experiences and artistic expression for Holocaust history, memory, and representation.

SARAH PHILLIPS CASTEEL is professor of English at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University, where she is cross-appointed to the Institute of African Studies, and a member of the Holocaust Educational Foundation’s Academic Council. Her most recent books are Calypso Jews: Jewishness in the Caribbean Literary Imagination (Columbia, 2016) and the coedited volume Caribbean Jewish Crossings: Literary History and Creative Practice (2019).

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From Havana to Hollywood examines the presence or absence of Black resistance to slavery in feature films produced in either Havana or Hollywood—including Gillo Pontecorvo’s Burn!, neglected masterpieces by Cuban auteurs Tomás GutiĂ©rrez Alea and Sergio Giral, and Steve McQueen’s Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave. Philip Kaisary argues that, with rare exceptions, the representation of Black agency in Hollywood has always been, and remains, taboo. Contrastingly, Cuban cinema foregrounds Black agency, challenging the ways in which slavery has been misremembered and misunderstood in North America and Europe. With powerful, richly theorized readings, the book shows how Cuban cinema especially recreates the past to fuel visions of liberation and asks how the medium of film might contribute to a renewal of emancipatory politics today.

Philip Kaisary is the 2023–2025 Ruth and Mark Phillips Professor of Cultural Mediations and Associate Professor in the Department of Law and Legal Studies, the Department of English Language and Literature, and the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art, and Culture at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University. He is the author of The Haitian Revolution in the Literary Imagination: Radical Horizons, Conservative Constraints.

2023-12-22

With this inaugural issue, we are pleased to launch an exciting new era for the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture (ICSLAC) community! Scaffold: the Journal for the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture marks another attempt for our department here at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University, home to the Cultural Mediations Program and the Curatorial Studies program to provide a space for emerging scholars to open dialogues and research across disciplinary borders.

Featured in this issue: An in-depth conversation between Scaffold editors and Dr. Mieke Bal, Casteist Slurs and Cultural Commentary in India, The Met Gala: Where High and Popular Culture Collide, and more!

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An Interdisciplinary Exploration of Culture, Literature, and the Humanities

Virtual Conference

Date: Thursday, May 2nd, 2024

Call for Papers Submission Deadline: March 1st, 2024

This one-day Zoom conference aims to explore the challenges, rewards and necessities of working between fields, and the ways in which such an approach can reinvigorate the humanities for our times. One of the promises of interdisciplinary research is the potential to pull pre-existing but independent fields into productive conversation with one another. How might new research methodologies, such as data science and quantitative analysis tools, produce generative findings in the humanities and established disciplines such as literature and history? How might finding connections between fields help broaden the scope of research and make legible new and emerging objects of study (like social media and video games)? More broadly, for emerging scholars who find themselves in-between disciplines, temporal periods, languages, and/or blurring other boundaries, how do we navigate our academic investigation? What are the potential advantages and challenges of being “in-between”? What is the role of the humanities today in serving as an interface for our engagements with ever-evolving culture, literature, art, technology, and everyday life? In an increasingly polarized world, what is the role of the inter—whether that be of interaction, intervention, or interdisciplinarity—in (re)discovering connections and thus speaking to one another on similar grounds?

ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University’s Institute of Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture invites graduate students and academics to present at its annual conference and discuss some of the problems listed above. The conference will take place on May 2, 2024. Interdisciplinary approaches are welcome and encouraged! Examples of research include, but are not limited to:

Art & Art History / Literature & Cultural Studies / Film & Media Studies / Religious Studies & Philosophy / Digital Humanities

REQUIREMENTS

Proposals are welcomed for short presentations (15 minutes). The submissions must include the following:

Name

Institutional Affiliation

Short Biography (100 words)

Title and Abstract (250 words)

The deadline for submissions is March 1st, 2024. Please email proposals to icslacinterface2024@gmail.com

The appointment was part of an announcement made by the Honourable Terry Beech, Minister of Citizens’ Services, representing the Honourable François-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Innovation, Science, and Industry and included support for thirty-four new research chairs.

Dr. Igloliorte will concentrate her research on decolonial and resurgent Indigenous artistic practices within Canada. Her work aims to explore and advance decolonization through various channels, including institutional and community-based collaborations, both nationally and internationally. Dr. Igloliorte obtained a Ph.D. in Cultural Mediations at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University’s Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture (ICSLAC) in 2013.

“UVic awarded $8M Canada Excellence Research Chair.” UVic News. November 16, 2023.