Boundaries highlight or fix limits for people, places, objects, and events. But beyond this, boundaries mark relational sites where meaning, value, and belonging are made, reworked, and contested. Should we approach boundaries as restrictive forces that constrict us within walls, borders, and lines, be they real or metaphorical, or as creative forces that overlap, move, and encourage us to rupture our own definitions of limits? Boundaries produce and attempt to manage marginal areas. They allow for a liminal space, a space “in-between” that is transitory, transient, unexpected and uncertain to erupt. This theme will allow us to interrogate the margins, those spaces in which subversive, often oppressed, knowledges and life ways take shape. If boundaries attempt to codify and construct worlds, what new worlds can emerge through the pursuit of this theme’s inquiry?
Originality, authenticity, uniqueness, and value are central to understanding how copies, fakes, and forgeries have been understood over history. Topics include: art history as a discipline, art making and the technologies involved in creating convincing reproductions (meant to deceive or not), the detection of forgeries and the technologies involved. Comparison of original/authentic works and copies/forgeries will sharpen observational skills and show that how we look (and what we see) is guided by cultural, disciplinary, and commercial preconceptions and expectations. Students are expected to participate in the creation of an online virtual exhibition and complete research and writing assignments. Boundaries and Margins humanities lab.
How did the intense personal relationship between Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville shape their fiction and lives? How does revisiting social and erotic relations between men in the past enable us to better understand our present moment? After analyzing central literary texts, letters and journal entries, students will translate their insights into works of the imagination. At the end of the semester, students will present their interpretations in a series of performances. Fulfills English C requirement. Humanities lab course.
Explores issues of race, gender, identity, diversity, cultural contact, and conflict in Indian Ocean island cultures and literatures written in French through selected writings from Mauritius, Madagascar, Reunion, the Seychelles, and the Comoros. We will examine the complex social, cultural, and historical context of the region with an interdisciplinary perspective. Topics include slavery, “marronage“, cultural hybridity, “métissage,” “coolitude,” and the development of colonial and postcolonial identities and subjectivities. Students will develop their presentation and writing skills through the production of critical essays and research projects.
Where are the boundaries between “Eastern” and “Western” thought? Where are the boundaries between nature and culture? Where are the boundaries between body and mind? What lies beyond the boundaries of what we know? Do our technologies cross such boundaries or create them? Such questions evoke issues that are treated in remarkably subtle and important ways in the American and Daoist philosophical traditions. Such questions will be explored through careful studies in both traditions.
Framing this course squarely in the long but often obscured history of slavery in early modern Spain, we will examine and interrogate cultural expressions of race in sixteenth and seventeenth century Spanish cultural production, including literature, theater, visual art, music, and archival documents. More specifically, we will consider how these images and expressions, and voices present different responses—both affirming and contesting—to early modern anxieties about race, gender, religion, social class, and national identity.
A survey of some of the histories, theories, contexts, and developing practices within performance art. We will delve into the work of artists from a range of historical, geographic and cultural contexts through text, performance materials, video, archival collections, field trips to performances and artist visits. Most importantly, we will develop our own critical voices and perspectives through embodied engagement, producing a bi-weekly performance art showcase at Colby. Through a series of guided workshops, we will try on strategies that performance artists have established in their own practices and we will create our own in order to ask: what limits, definitions, and structures can performance art intervene upon and reimagine in our contemporary moment?
Explores the global cultural diversity and social embeddedness of economic practice. Students gain analytical tools to critically examine global capitalism, consumption/consumerism, markets and their myriad social dimensions through a focus on transactions, exchange, social obligation, class distinction, and labor activities. In-depth case studies apply these insights to debates on topics such as debt, economic inequality, class, and the limits of commodification. Readings, films, and other materials highlight the rich diversity of anthropological perspectives on economic practice, from ethnographies of Wall Street to Malaysian factory work to middle-class formation in Nepal. Prerequisite: Anthropology 112.
Gender and sexuality represent fundamental categories of human social and cultural experience; in every human society, understandings about gender and sexuality constitute powerful aspects of individual identity that shape and are shaped by key aspects of social relations and cultural belief. Yet specific beliefs and social structures vary tremendously across cultures. An investigation of the varied ethnography of gender and sexuality as well as important theoretical concerns: how meanings are attached to the human body, production and reproduction of gender hierarchies, and processes by which gender and sexual meanings (and associated social forms) may be transformed or contested in societies. Prerequisite: Anthropology 112 and one other anthropology course.
Popular culture is fixated on magic, from Harry Potter to Game of Thrones, but the roots of this interest can be found in the myths and magical practices of antiquity. Love and hate, hope and fear, ambition and greed – powerful emotions drove Circe, Medea, and Hekate in myth as well as ordinary mortals in the ancient world. The focus will be on the role of magic in the contested realm of antiquity’s social and gender hierarchies. We will examine the function and fascinating allure of witchcraft by analyzing extracts from literary texts (e.g. Homer, Theocritus, Pindar, Vergil, Horace, and Lucan), protective amulets, and ancient spells designed to seduce the beloved, ward off rivals, silence legal foes, rig sports events, reveal the future, and summon demons.
Explores the shifting political discourses and visual representations of Chinese women from Mao’s socialist China (1949-1978) to post-Mao market-reform China (1978 to present). Drawing on primary sources such as propaganda posters, cover images and selected texts from Women of China, the official magazine of All-China Federation of Women (ACFW), students gain linguistic, visual, and historical knowledge on state feminism, gender equality, birth control policy, and impact of market reform and consumer culture on women in China from 1949 to the present.
Explores what we can learn about the field of medicine from works of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction that prioritize the perspectives of those most vulnerable and marginalized in mainstream medicine. Thus, patient-centered narratives by people of color, people with disabilities, poor people, women, and queer and genderqueer folks will be our focus, alongside theoretical readings from the fields of women of color feminism, critical disability studies, and biopolitics. Our explorations in this Humanities Lab course will also include visits to the Art Museum and Special Collections.
Course in constrained writing that looks at how work by the French Oulipo, Dr. Seuss, present day New Yorker writers, and others play with and grow from restrictions. We’ll read and write stories written around a single phrase or assigned image, stories written with technological or linguistic constraints, borrowed form stories, and more.
Focusing on women writers in the long nineteenth century, this seminar addresses multiple borders and margins: the porous borders between Britain and the empire, the borders created by internal colonialism within Britain, the shifting definitions and power of the provincial and the metropolitan. Case studies ranging from the ex-slave Mary Prince to the South Asian poet Toru Dutt, from the ‘provincial’ Currer Bell (Charlotte Bronte) to Michael Field (Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper). How were women writers marginalized–and how did they overcome this marginalization? How did they cross geographical borders, genres, and gendered boundaries? Fulfills English C and P. Boundaries and Margins humanities lab.
In this interdisciplinary course, we will concern ourselves with the intellectual production and development of women working in the German and Austrian contexts. Designed to explore the role of women, gender and representation, we will examine their artistic activities through historical, literary, and social movement frames. We will read women’s writing, view their art, and watch their films. Topics include the development of a public female aesthetic that encompasses Afro-German women as writers, historians, and filmmakers; Expressionist artists such as Kollwitz and Modersohn-Becker; and authors that include but are not limited to Bachmann, Ayim, and Tawada. Students will also further deepen those skills necessary for critical thinking, writing, and speaking. Conducted in German. Prerequisite: German 128 or equivalent.
Introduction to critical analysis of contested subjects in German and German-speaking cultures. While topics vary, this course will refine close reading skills of written and visual texts, including poetry, works of art, drama, short stories, prose, and film that focus on culturally contested topics. Focus on critical, written and interpretive analysis, student presentations, and exposure to relevant cultural, theoretical, and historical sources. Conducted in German. Prerequisite: A 200-level German course.
When people are forced to flee their homes because of persecution, what happens to them? What should happen? In our transnational world, cross-border conflict and displacement challenge our ideas about governance, identity, and justice. This course provides a framework to understand displacement in global perspective. We will trace the evolution of international refugee law and policy dealing with this growing population and consider the implications of displacement for individuals, communities, and states. Through case studies, we will also grapple with the social, cultural, political, and ethical challenges posed by refugee aid.
Students collaborate in activist research—which both studies and contributes to refugee struggles for human rights. Co-taught with 2020 Oak Fellow Nasim Lomani, himself a refugee, the course centers the voices, experiences, and activism of people on the move. Substantial time dedicated to documenting and analyzing Lomani’s work with refugee solidarity and mutual aid initiatives in Greece and beyond, including his central role in the remarkable self-organized squat City Plaza Hotel that hosted hundreds of refugees in Athens. Recent history studied in the context of contemporary theorizing and analysis of migrant struggles in Europe and beyond.
This course asks students to examine the construction, maintenance, and blurring of the boundaries of culture and identity within the British Empire over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The course will explore how empire not only produced new, allegedly stable ethnic and racial identities, but also how these were constantly undermined and challenged, and were subject to change over both time and space. The course will do this by reading and discussing a series of novels written over the course of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries—both during empire, in other words, and in its wake.
Japanese comic books and cartoons are known throughout the world by their Japanese names: “manga” and “anime.” This is no accident, but a reflection of their enormous global popularity. Why are they so popular? What does their popularity say about the place of Japan in today’s global culture? How did these two phenomena emerge and develop, and how do they influence each other? Our class will explore these and other related questions through readings, screenings, discussion, and original research.
This Boundaries and Margins Humanities Lab explores three Italian liberation movements of the 1970s–early 1980s: the femminismo della differenza (feminism of sexual difference), the gay liberation front (in particular, the radical thought of Mario Mieli), and the trans* movement. The goal is to investigate how these interrelated movements have questioned notions of boundaries that have been taken for granted, and traced new embodied and political geographies. Through in-class discussions, hands-on activities, and conversations with guest speakers, the class will engage in a debate about gender and sexuality that can spur dialogue across cultures while suggesting new modes of thinking, doing, and being in a place. Taught in English.
Is gender a “binary” or a “spectrum”? Are sociology and economics really “scientific”? Are Hispanics a “race” or an “ethnicity”? Are some poor people more “deserving” of assistance than others? How we answer these questions matters for the organization of social space, the distribution of resources, and the legitimacy of social inequalities. This course explores the social and political dynamics of classification across a range of substantive arenas, with special emphasis on how collective struggles to define socially important categories contributes to the creation, maintenance, or dissolution of social boundaries.
This course will consider a broad range of boundaries from national borders to social categories, from laws to metaphysics. We will explore how boundaries mark relational sites where meaning, value, and belonging are made, reworked, and contested. The theme will also allow us to interrogate the margins, those liminal spaces existing outside the mainstream, far from the center, next to the external limits–spaces of subversion, resistance, and survival. Students will attend public lectures by visiting scholars and Colby faculty as well as film screenings, performances, and community events. Together, we will engage in focused discussion and create innovative documentation of these events.
This course will examine racism and sexism in a variety of different sports contexts. The class will also explore how sport can bring attention to social inequalities and prompt feminist anti-racist activism that goes beyond the sports world. Topics include intersexed bodies and Olympic gender testing, colonialism and cricket/rugby, race and the Scripps National Spelling Bee, indigeneity and #MMIWG (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls), Black Lives Matter protests, and Asian American identities and sport. This W1 course is writing intensive with weekly writing assignments, response papers, and a final research paper on Babe Ruth Baseball. Students will learn about plagiarism, how to use the Colby College library, Chicago style citation, develop an argument/thesis statement, organize research into a research paper, and to write about research they collected through feminist methods.
Uses the theme of multiculturalism/multilingualism as a framework to read, analyze, and write about non-fiction texts by writers from various cultural/linguistic backgrounds. More specifically, it focuses on boundary and margin crossing through the discussion of “in-betweeness,” how ideas of global citizenship and multilingualism challenge established political, geographical, and linguistic boundaries. It covers topics, such as world Englishes and translingualism, which result from language users crossing artificial linguistic boundaries and creating a liminal space where multiple languages function in given interactive episodes. The humanities lab portion of the course will engage students with the idea of “internationalization at home,” which will allow them to work with Special Collections’ International Students at Colby Archive (ISACA), a broad compilation of artifacts and interviews with international students at Colby. This course fulfills the international diversity requirement.
Boundaries and Margins Lecture Series
The World is our Field of Practice
Elizabeth Jabar, Colby College and Séan Alonzo Harris
7:00 p.m., Live Zoom Webinar
Elizabeth A. Jabar is a feminist printmaker who explores a range of personal-political issues in her work including cultural identity, representation, equity and maternal ethics. She co-creates collaborative and participatory projects with students, colleagues and community members. Her hybrid works on paper and cloth display a highly personal visual language that incorporates motifs from popular culture, folk art, religious traditions and textiles. Elizabeth’s printed objects and environments embody printmaking’s democratic tradition of resistance and collective power and reflect her commitment to art as a tool for social change.
Séan Alonzo Harris is a professional editorial, commercial and fine art photographer concentrating on narrative and environmental portraiture. Over the past 25 years, Séan’s work has featured in a range of national publications, advertising campaigns, and exhibitions. In these varied contexts, Séan’s work focuses on human experience and identity and examines how individuals visualize themselves and how they are portrayed. Séan’s images bear witness to often invisible or overlooked members of our communities, and create portraits that provide a counter image and narrative of self-worth and personal agency.
Boundaries and Margins Lecture Series
What White Western Tourists Want: Border Sentimentalization in Black South Africa,
Annie Hikido, Colby College
7:00 p.m., Live Zoom Webinar
“Border crossing” is often used to describe transgressions that promise growth and possibility. In this talk, I discuss how the emotional pleasure of crossing borders can lead us to romanticize transgression in ways that sustain inequalities. I focus on white Westerners who visit Black townships in Cape Town, South Africa. These tourists decry voyeuristic forms of township tourism and instead wish to “get to know” township residents. They express fulfillment when they feel that they have transcended racial, class, and national divides through interacting with Black South Africans. But their gratification depends on the act of crossing, thereby reifying borders through sentimentalization. Building a more just world therefore must work to undo the conditions that produce their pleasure. I conclude with some thoughts about how this relates to the borders that circumscribe academia and implications for pedagogy.
Boundaries and Margins Lecture Series
History Unbound: Malaga, Performance, and the Archive
Myron Beasley, Bates College and Daniel Minter/Indigo Arts Alliance
7:00 p.m., Live Zoom Webinar
Myron Beasley is Associate Professor of American Studies, and also serves on the committee of Gender and Sexuality Studies at Bates College. His ethnographic research includes exploring the intersection of cultural politics, material culture and social change. A recipient of multiple prestigious fellowships and grants, his writing about performance ethnography, contemporary art, material culture and cultural engagement has appeared in many academic journals.
Daniel Minter is an American artist known for his work in the mediums of painting and assemblage. His overall body of work often deals with themes of displacement and diaspora, ordinary/extraordinary blackness; spirituality in the Afro-Atlantic world; and the (re)creation of meanings of home. Minter works in varied media – canvas, wood, metal, paper. twine, rocks, nails, paint. This cross-fertilization strongly informs his artistic sensibility. His carvings become assemblages. His paintings are often sculptural. Minter’s work has been featured in numerous institutions and galleries across the country.
Intersections in Environmental Literature, Environmental Justice, and Social Justice: A Reading and Conversation with Camille Dungy
7:00 p.m., Live Zoom Webinar
Camille T. Dungy is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Trophic Cascade (Wesleyan UP, 2017), winner of the Colorado Book Award, and the essay collection Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood and History (W.W. Norton, 2017), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Dungy has also edited anthologies including Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry and From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great. A 2019 Guggenheim Fellow, her honors include NEA Fellowships in poetry (2003) and prose (2018), an American Book Award, two NAACP Image Award nominations, and two Hurston/Wright Legacy Award nominations.
Boundaries and Margins Lecture Series
Winin’ Through Cyberspace:Reclaiming Community in COVID times
Adanna Jones, Bowdoin College
7:00 p.m., Live Zoom Webinar
Adanna Kai Jones is an Assistant Professor of Dance in the Department of Theater and Dance. She earned her Ph.D. in Critical Dance Studies at the University of California, Riverside, and her BFA in Dance from Mason Gross School of the Arts—Rutgers University. She has performed in professional dance companies based in NYC, including the “Julia Ritter Performance Group” and “Souloworks” with Andrea E. Woods. Her research remains focused on Caribbean dance and identity politics within the Diaspora, paying particular focus to the rolling hip dance known as winin’.
Boundaries and Margins Lecture Series
Better to speak of conquest or home and trap: a mytho-historical reflection on sonic dispossession, settler-territorialization, property, law, and displacement
Anthony Romero, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Tufts University
7:00 p.m., Live Zoom Webinar
Anthony Romero is a Boston-based artist, writer, and organizer committed to documenting and supporting artists and communities of color. His collaborative practice engages intercultural contact and historical narratives in order to generate reparative counter-images and social transformation. Recent projects and performances have been featured at esteemed institutions across North America. Publications include The Social Practice That Is Race, coauthored with Dan S. Wang, and the exhibition catalogue Organize Your Own: The Politics and Poetics of Self-Determination Movements, of which he was the editor. He is a cofounder of the Latinx Artist Visibility Award, a national scholarship for Latinx artists, and a co-founder of the Latinx Artists Retreat, a national gathering of Latinx artists and administrators.
A conversation with Naomi Klein
7:00 p.m., Live Zoom Webinar
We are delighted to announce that Naomi Klein will be the Fall 2020 keynote speaker for the humanities theme Boundaries and Margins, and will also serve as the 2020 Mellon Distinguished Fellow in Environmental Humanities. Naomi Klein is the inaugural Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University, and an award-winning journalist, syndicated columnist, and international and New York Times bestselling author of No Is Not Enough: Resisting the New Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need (2017), This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate (2014), The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007) and No Logo (2000). In 2018, she published The Battle for Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes On the Disaster Capitalists donating all royalties to Puerto Rican organization juntegente.org. Her 2019 book: On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal became an instant New York Times bestseller and a #1 Canadian bestseller.
This event is free and open to Colby students, faculty, staff, parents, alum, and the broader community.
To register for this event, please visit here.
To submit a question for Naomi, please fill out this form by Friday, October 2.
This event is sponsored by the Center for the Arts and Humanities, Environmental Humanities, the Lunder Institute for American Art, the Colby Museum of Art, the Oak Institute for Human Rights, Goldfarb Center for Public Affairs, and the Environmental Studies program.
Boundaries and Margins Lecture Series
Centering Disability Culture and Aesthetics
Alice Sheppard (Kinetic Light) in conversation with Michael Maag
7:00 p.m., Live Zoom Webinar
Alice Sheppard is the Artistic Director of Kinetic Light, a leading disability arts ensemble. Sheppard studied ballet and modern dance with Kitty Lunn and made her debut with Infinity Dance Theater. After an apprenticeship, Sheppard joined AXIS Dance Company, where she toured and taught in the company’s education and outreach programs. As an independent artist, Sheppard has danced in projects with Ballet Cymru, GDance, and Marc Brew Company in the U.K. and Full Radius Dance, Marjani Forté, MBDance, Infinity Dance Theater, and Steve Paxton in the U.S. Her choreography has been commissioned by Full Radius Dance, CRIPSiE, and MOMENTA. For more information about Alice, please visit here.
Michael Maag is the video, projection, and lighting designer for Kinetic Light. Maag designs at the intersection of lighting, video, and projection for theatre, dance, musicals, opera, and planetariums across the United States. He sculpts with light and shadow to create lighting environments that tell a story, believing that lighting in support of the performance is the key to unlocking our audience’s emotions. Maag has built custom optics for projections in theaters, museums and planetariums; he also designs and builds electronics and lighting for costumes and scenery. For more information about Michael, please visit here.
Boundaries and Margins Lecture Series
Malik Gaines, NYU Tisch School of the Arts and Alexandro Segade, Cornell
7:00 p.m., Live Zoom Webinar
Malik Gaines and Alexandro Segade are founding members of the collective My Barbarian, who work at the intersection of theater, visual arts, critical practice, and performance to play with social difficulties, theatricalize historic problems, and imagine ways of being together. Realized as drawings, texts, masks, videos, music, installations, and audience interactions, their projects employ fantasy, humor, and clashing aesthetic sensibilities to cleverly critique artistic, political, and social situations. The duo creates and performs a new work, Star Choir. The 45-minute musical performance tracks a group of humans who attempt to colonize a hostile planet after the Earth’s decline. Following some wonder and violence, a hybrid species is formed. Star Choir is performed by six singers and musicians playing synthesizer, cello, harp, horn, bass and percussion, and with animated projections. Gaines and Segade will screen sections of the performance and discuss how this connects to their broader research and artistic practice as artist-scholars.
Boundaries and Margins
About November: A recital by tenor Eric Christopher Perry and pianist Christina Spurling
7:30 p.m., Live Zoom Webinar
A recital by tenor Eric Christopher Perry and pianist Christina Spurling explores the human condition through the lens of train travel – across two continents and two nationalistic eras. Benjamin Britten’s Winter Words, Op. 52 (1956) evocatively depicts “a world unknown” with selections of final poems by English novelist Thomas Hardy, whose multitude of works are featured in Colby College’s Special Collections. Gabriel Kahane’s Book of Travelers (2017) captures conversations with fellow passengers while on a cathartic cross-country train ride immediately following the controversial 2016 United States presidential election. An emotional journey about journeys, this program illustrates stories of boundaries beyond geographical borders: racial, socioeconomic, political, and generational.
Boundaries and Margins Lecture Series
Toward the Empty Center: Journeys of Cultural Liminality and Elusive Authenticity
Ian Khara Ellasante, Bates College
7:00 p.m., Live Zoom Webinar
Ian Khara Ellasante is an Assistant Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at Bates College. They are a cultural studies theorist whose current research engages the peoplehood matrix–a core theoretical construct developed by Indigenous scholars–to examine the persistence of Indigenous and Black cultural identities within the oppressive milieu of settler colonialism, white supremacy, and anti-Blackness. In this context, Ellasante examines the history and reclamation of Indigenous extra-binary gender systems and Two-Spirit traditions, Black and Indigenous feminisms, and the resistance inherent in Black and Indigenous trans and queer cultures. In addition to their scholarship, Ellasante is a poet and winner of the 49th New Millennium Writing Award. Their poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Feminist Wire, Hinchas de Poesía, The Volta: Evening Will Come, We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, and elsewhere.
Boundaries and Margins Lecture Series
What is African Literature? Postapartheid writing and the political force of a question
Mo Shabangu in conversation with Julie Nxadi
7:00 p.m., Live Zoom Webinar
This conversation looks into the animating subject of African literature on the world literary stage to argue that it cannot circumvent questions about its very nature and being — which constantly disrupts the quest for creative autonomy. Together they will explore the premise that the political dimension of African literature is to be found in its most hushed expressions, rather than in depiction of the spectacle. Julie Nxadi is a writer and artist from Makhanda and Ngqushwa in the Eastern Cape, currently based in Cape Town. Her current research interest is ‘intimacy and oppression in post ’94 South Africa’, a subject that she is exploring using multiple mediums, writing being just one. Mo Shabangu is an Assistant Professor of English at Colby College who earned his MA at Rhodes University and his PhD at Stellenbosch University. His teaching and research interests falls at the intersection of postcolonial literatures of the 20th/21st century, global Anglophone literature, world literary theory, contemporary African-diasporic cultural production, as well asdecolonial strategies in higher education in South Africa.
Boundaries and Margins Lecture Series
‘Living Together’ Against Borders: A Disruptive Conversation with Nasim Lomani
Nadia El-Shaarawi, Nasim Lomani, and Maple Razsa, Colby College
7:00 p.m., Live Zoom Webinar
Nadia El-Shaarawi is an Assistant Professor of Global Studies at Colby College. She is a cultural and medical anthropologist who specializes in transnational forced migration, humanitarian intervention, and mental health in the Middle East and North Africa. Her current book project, Collateral Damages, analyzes how, in the aftermath of the 2003 invasion, Iraqi refugees in Cairo negotiated uncertain conditions of protracted urban exile and how interactions with global and international institutions and policies, especially refugee resettlement, had implications for mental health and well-being.
Nasim Lomani is a human rights defender and migrants’ rights activist working both in the field and at the political level in Greece and the greater EU for over a decade. Lomani arrived in Greece nearly two decades ago as a 16-year-old from Afghanistan. Upon arrival, he was arrested and charged with illegal crossing of the Greek border, ultimately serving a two-year prison sentence. During the process of appealing to the court for having his rights as a refugee abused and violated, he learned about the bureaucratic difficulties that all migrants face while on the move to Europe.
Maple Razsa is committed to using text, images, and sound to embody the lived experience, as well as the political imaginations of contemporary social movements. Trained as a filmmaker and anthropologist at Harvard University, he is an Associate Professor of Global Studies at Colby College. Maple has conducted fieldwork with alterglobalization protesters, anarchist-punk squatters, migrant-labor organizers, video activists, and, most recently, opponents and transgressors of the European border regime. His films—including The Maribor Uprisings, Occupation: A Film About the Harvard Living Wage Sit-In, and Bastards of Utopia—have shown in festivals around the world, including CPH:DOX, Hot Docs, and DOK Leipzig.
AB is a transdisciplinary performance artist, writer, and performance studies scholar. They are Assistant Professor of Contemporary Performance in the Department of Theater and Dance.
AB’s research-based practice looks at how transness, disability, and colonialism orient us to place and time and how embodied and material engagements might rearrange these modes of being and belonging. Their practice encompasses solo performance, installation, devising, and community-oriented work. Their teaching situates these practices within critical theory and social justice to collectively explore the potential for embodied knowledge to imagine, rehearse, and enact more critical ways of being in the world. They often create work under the name Sister James.
AB’s scholarly writing is based on ongoing performance work they conduct with a group of LGBTIQ asylum seekers in South Africa and argues that through performance we can begin to open up new paradigms of citizenship and belonging beyond Westernized notions of nation-states, the neoliberal individual, and the deserving, dependent migrant. AB received their PhD in Performance Studies at Northwestern University with cognates in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies as well as Postcolonial Theory. They are the recipient of a Woodrow Wilson Mellon Emerging Faculty Leaders Award. For more information, please visit: www.sister-james.com.
The Humanities Theme is an initiative led by the Center for the Arts and Humanities to celebrate the process of liberal learning by exploring a particular topic through exhibits, speakers, performances, and course work. We organize year-long, campus-wide collaboration, highlighting the perspective humanities can bring to the chosen theme while actively encouraging participation from departments outside of the Humanities Division. Our goals are to bring innovative programming to Colby’s campus and to highlight course work and programming already underway.
Energy and its limits shape our lives, connecting artistic and technological innovations, local communities and oppressive structures of power, political activism and affective fatigue, histories of environmental change and societal collapse, and the origin of life and entropic fate of the universe. This theme will bring together the arts, humanities, and social and natural sciences to investigate the space between energy and exhaustion as a metaphorical realm and lived reality. Together we will explore the endless potentiality of energy and limiting effects of exhaustion as they impact aesthetic innovation, literary imagination, political anxieties, environmental limits, and activist movements—all touching upon our shared past, current political realities, and collective futures.
Theme Sponsors:
Dale Kocevski, Physics and Astronomy
Chris Walker, English and Environmental Humanities
The Presence of the Past is everywhere: in our daily lives and activities, our natural, engineered, and social environments, our political commitments, our biasses and prejudices, our religious and spiritual convictions, our scientific and technological accomplishments and ambitions, and more. What happens when competing versions of the past come into conflict? How is knowledge about the past produced? How do structures of power and prestige operating in the present shape our current knowledge of the across the disciplines?
Theme Sponsors:
Elizabeth D. Leonard, History
Megan Cook, English
A mythical hero, a body of texts, an ancestral language, an accident, a set of principles, a tool, a technique, or a group of objects from which fields of inquiry develop and grow: how did it all begin? Origins encourages a detailed and critical reflection of the social, historical, political, and cultural contexts that inform our understanding of who we are as humans, where we come from, and the trajectory we choose to follow in an increasingly interconnected global landscape.
Theme Sponsors:
Shalini Le Gall, Museum of Art,
Gianluca Rizzo, Italian Literature and Language,
Arnout van der Meer, History
Revolutions take many forms – political, literary, artistic, cultural, social, scientific, and conceptual. They can be abrupt or gradual, peaceful or violent, top down or bottom up, guided by elites or conducted by mobs, driven by ideology, or prompted by a new reality. But what constitutes a revolution? Is a spirited challenge to the existing system enough, or must it produce a radically different, lasting change? What are the conditions leading a revolution to occur? Is violence (physical or conceptual) inherent in revolution? Are revolutions a necessary good or a dangerous disruption of established order? How are they to be judged? How do literary or artistic movements gain the status of a revolution? What roles have revolutionary ideas played in the natural and social sciences and the arts and humanities? Do injustices or inequities underlie most political revolutions? Finally, what revolutions do we still need to have?
Theme Sponsors:
Valérie Dionne, French
Jim Fleming, Science, Technology, Society
Human / Nature reflects upon nature, the built environment, and the ways in which our relationship to the natural world has shaped human existence. Across the humanities this theme will enable us to examine our relationship to nature from antiquity to the present. The social and natural sciences, will explore the connections between human actions and changes to our planet. Ultimately, Human/Nature will initiate a conversation among the humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences considering ourselves and the spaces we inhabit: those that nourish us, inspire us, and challenge us.
Theme Sponsors:
Gary Green, Art
Loren McClenachan, Environmental Studies
Steve Wurtzler, Cinema Studies
Migrations describe the movement of peoples, animals, objects, cultures, resources, identities, and ideas across time and space. Whether they involve the physical or symbolic crossing of borders, migrations contribute to our sense of belonging or exclusion and to our feeling of being “there” or “here.” The humanities theme for 2014-15 will interrogate this understanding of migrations as shaping the self and the world. How can we represent the experiences of immigration, exile, diaspora, or passing? What are the possibilities and challenges associated with mobility and immobility? What happens to the local when it interacts with the national, regional, or global? Questions like these respond to some of the most pressing issues the world is facing today, from the development of new political structures and methods of cross-cultural exchange to changes in climate and demographics.
Theme Sponsors:
Tanya Sheehan, Art
Natalie Zelensky, Music
Censorship Uncovered, is a year-long, campus-wide initiative designed to foster interdisciplinary discussion and collaboration. Through course work, performances, lectures, film screenings, exhibitions, and collegial conversation, Colby students, faculty, and staff across a broad range of disciplines and with widely varying perspectives will explore the fraught and provocative themes of censorship and free speech.
Theme Sponsors:
Valérie Dionne, French
Clem Guthro, Colby Libraries
Lauren Lessing, Museum of Art
What is comedy? Seriously. Is it more than laughter and humor? How is comedy related to other artistic genres, and how is it expressed in different languages, literatures, and art forms? Is comedy specific to culture, or are some forms of comedy universal? How does comedy undermine or reinforce our attitudes towards race, gender, religion, class, and ethnicity? Does what makes us laugh reveal our deep social norms and taboos? What can biology and the social sciences tell us about what laughter means?
In “Comedy, Seriously,” Colby students, faculty, and staff celebrated the richness of the comic tradition and the vibrant place of comedy in our contemporary world.
Theme Sponsor:
Lydia Moland, Philosophy
What is terrorism? Is it true that one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter, or can we make ethical distinctions between instances of terrorism? How does terrorism differ from other kinds of violence, for instance the violence of war or domestic violence? How do we distinguish between eco-activism and eco-terrorism or between criminal hacking and cyber-terrorism? How has terrorism shaped history, and how does it form the present?
In Reflections of Terrorism, students, faculty, and staff fostered interdisciplinary discussions of forms of terror(ism) and showcased the multiple levels on which the Colby community addresses this complex topic.
Theme Sponsors:
Lydia Moland, Philosophy
Cyrus Shahan, German
The Metamorphoses Project was a campus-wide web of events linked to the Theater and Dance Department’s November 2009 production of Mary Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses. The goal was to explore the broader theme of mythological narrative through history to contemporary life, and how myths operate in and through the various disciplines that make up a liberal arts environment. Students, faculty, and staff celebrated the process of liberal learning by exploring these questions through exhibits, performances and course work.
Theme sponsors:
Lynne Connor, Theater & Dance
Lauren Lessing, Museum of Art
Kerill O’Neill, Classics
Originality, authenticity, uniqueness, and value are central to understanding how copies, fakes, and forgeries have been understood over history. Topics include: art history as a discipline, art making and the technologies involved in creating convincing reproductions (meant to deceive or not), the detection of forgeries and the technologies involved. Comparison of original/authentic works and copies/forgeries will sharpen observational skills and show that how we look (and what we see) is guided by cultural, disciplinary, and commercial preconceptions and expectations. Students are expected to participate in the creation of an online virtual exhibition and complete research and writing assignments. Boundaries and Margins humanities lab.
How did the intense personal relationship between Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville shape their fiction and lives? How does revisiting social and erotic relations between men in the past enable us to better understand our present moment? After analyzing central literary texts, letters and journal entries, students will translate their insights into works of the imagination. At the end of the semester, students will present their interpretations in a series of performances. Fulfills English C requirement. Humanities lab course.
Explores issues of race, gender, identity, diversity, cultural contact, and conflict in Indian Ocean island cultures and literatures written in French through selected writings from Mauritius, Madagascar, Reunion, the Seychelles, and the Comoros. We will examine the complex social, cultural, and historical context of the region with an interdisciplinary perspective. Topics include slavery, “marronage“, cultural hybridity, “métissage,” “coolitude,” and the development of colonial and postcolonial identities and subjectivities. Students will develop their presentation and writing skills through the production of critical essays and research projects.
Where are the boundaries between “Eastern” and “Western” thought? Where are the boundaries between nature and culture? Where are the boundaries between body and mind? What lies beyond the boundaries of what we know? Do our technologies cross such boundaries or create them? Such questions evoke issues that are treated in remarkably subtle and important ways in the American and Daoist philosophical traditions. Such questions will be explored through careful studies in both traditions.
Framing this course squarely in the long but often obscured history of slavery in early modern Spain, we will examine and interrogate cultural expressions of race in sixteenth and seventeenth century Spanish cultural production, including literature, theater, visual art, music, and archival documents. More specifically, we will consider how these images and expressions, and voices present different responses—both affirming and contesting—to early modern anxieties about race, gender, religion, social class, and national identity.
A survey of some of the histories, theories, contexts, and developing practices within performance art. We will delve into the work of artists from a range of historical, geographic and cultural contexts through text, performance materials, video, archival collections, field trips to performances and artist visits. Most importantly, we will develop our own critical voices and perspectives through embodied engagement, producing a bi-weekly performance art showcase at Colby. Through a series of guided workshops, we will try on strategies that performance artists have established in their own practices and we will create our own in order to ask: what limits, definitions, and structures can performance art intervene upon and reimagine in our contemporary moment?
Explores the global cultural diversity and social embeddedness of economic practice. Students gain analytical tools to critically examine global capitalism, consumption/consumerism, markets and their myriad social dimensions through a focus on transactions, exchange, social obligation, class distinction, and labor activities. In-depth case studies apply these insights to debates on topics such as debt, economic inequality, class, and the limits of commodification. Readings, films, and other materials highlight the rich diversity of anthropological perspectives on economic practice, from ethnographies of Wall Street to Malaysian factory work to middle-class formation in Nepal. Prerequisite: Anthropology 112.
Gender and sexuality represent fundamental categories of human social and cultural experience; in every human society, understandings about gender and sexuality constitute powerful aspects of individual identity that shape and are shaped by key aspects of social relations and cultural belief. Yet specific beliefs and social structures vary tremendously across cultures. An investigation of the varied ethnography of gender and sexuality as well as important theoretical concerns: how meanings are attached to the human body, production and reproduction of gender hierarchies, and processes by which gender and sexual meanings (and associated social forms) may be transformed or contested in societies. Prerequisite: Anthropology 112 and one other anthropology course.
Popular culture is fixated on magic, from Harry Potter to Game of Thrones, but the roots of this interest can be found in the myths and magical practices of antiquity. Love and hate, hope and fear, ambition and greed – powerful emotions drove Circe, Medea, and Hekate in myth as well as ordinary mortals in the ancient world. The focus will be on the role of magic in the contested realm of antiquity’s social and gender hierarchies. We will examine the function and fascinating allure of witchcraft by analyzing extracts from literary texts (e.g. Homer, Theocritus, Pindar, Vergil, Horace, and Lucan), protective amulets, and ancient spells designed to seduce the beloved, ward off rivals, silence legal foes, rig sports events, reveal the future, and summon demons.
Explores the shifting political discourses and visual representations of Chinese women from Mao’s socialist China (1949-1978) to post-Mao market-reform China (1978 to present). Drawing on primary sources such as propaganda posters, cover images and selected texts from Women of China, the official magazine of All-China Federation of Women (ACFW), students gain linguistic, visual, and historical knowledge on state feminism, gender equality, birth control policy, and impact of market reform and consumer culture on women in China from 1949 to the present.
Explores what we can learn about the field of medicine from works of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction that prioritize the perspectives of those most vulnerable and marginalized in mainstream medicine. Thus, patient-centered narratives by people of color, people with disabilities, poor people, women, and queer and genderqueer folks will be our focus, alongside theoretical readings from the fields of women of color feminism, critical disability studies, and biopolitics. Our explorations in this Humanities Lab course will also include visits to the Art Museum and Special Collections.
Course in constrained writing that looks at how work by the French Oulipo, Dr. Seuss, present day New Yorker writers, and others play with and grow from restrictions. We’ll read and write stories written around a single phrase or assigned image, stories written with technological or linguistic constraints, borrowed form stories, and more.
Focusing on women writers in the long nineteenth century, this seminar addresses multiple borders and margins: the porous borders between Britain and the empire, the borders created by internal colonialism within Britain, the shifting definitions and power of the provincial and the metropolitan. Case studies ranging from the ex-slave Mary Prince to the South Asian poet Toru Dutt, from the ‘provincial’ Currer Bell (Charlotte Bronte) to Michael Field (Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper). How were women writers marginalized–and how did they overcome this marginalization? How did they cross geographical borders, genres, and gendered boundaries? Fulfills English C and P. Boundaries and Margins humanities lab.
In this interdisciplinary course, we will concern ourselves with the intellectual production and development of women working in the German and Austrian contexts. Designed to explore the role of women, gender and representation, we will examine their artistic activities through historical, literary, and social movement frames. We will read women’s writing, view their art, and watch their films. Topics include the development of a public female aesthetic that encompasses Afro-German women as writers, historians, and filmmakers; Expressionist artists such as Kollwitz and Modersohn-Becker; and authors that include but are not limited to Bachmann, Ayim, and Tawada. Students will also further deepen those skills necessary for critical thinking, writing, and speaking. Conducted in German. Prerequisite: German 128 or equivalent.
Introduction to critical analysis of contested subjects in German and German-speaking cultures. While topics vary, this course will refine close reading skills of written and visual texts, including poetry, works of art, drama, short stories, prose, and film that focus on culturally contested topics. Focus on critical, written and interpretive analysis, student presentations, and exposure to relevant cultural, theoretical, and historical sources. Conducted in German. Prerequisite: A 200-level German course.
When people are forced to flee their homes because of persecution, what happens to them? What should happen? In our transnational world, cross-border conflict and displacement challenge our ideas about governance, identity, and justice. This course provides a framework to understand displacement in global perspective. We will trace the evolution of international refugee law and policy dealing with this growing population and consider the implications of displacement for individuals, communities, and states. Through case studies, we will also grapple with the social, cultural, political, and ethical challenges posed by refugee aid.
Students collaborate in activist research—which both studies and contributes to refugee struggles for human rights. Co-taught with 2020 Oak Fellow Nasim Lomani, himself a refugee, the course centers the voices, experiences, and activism of people on the move. Substantial time dedicated to documenting and analyzing Lomani’s work with refugee solidarity and mutual aid initiatives in Greece and beyond, including his central role in the remarkable self-organized squat City Plaza Hotel that hosted hundreds of refugees in Athens. Recent history studied in the context of contemporary theorizing and analysis of migrant struggles in Europe and beyond.
This course asks students to examine the construction, maintenance, and blurring of the boundaries of culture and identity within the British Empire over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The course will explore how empire not only produced new, allegedly stable ethnic and racial identities, but also how these were constantly undermined and challenged, and were subject to change over both time and space. The course will do this by reading and discussing a series of novels written over the course of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries—both during empire, in other words, and in its wake.
Japanese comic books and cartoons are known throughout the world by their Japanese names: “manga” and “anime.” This is no accident, but a reflection of their enormous global popularity. Why are they so popular? What does their popularity say about the place of Japan in today’s global culture? How did these two phenomena emerge and develop, and how do they influence each other? Our class will explore these and other related questions through readings, screenings, discussion, and original research.
This Boundaries and Margins Humanities Lab explores three Italian liberation movements of the 1970s–early 1980s: the femminismo della differenza (feminism of sexual difference), the gay liberation front (in particular, the radical thought of Mario Mieli), and the trans* movement. The goal is to investigate how these interrelated movements have questioned notions of boundaries that have been taken for granted, and traced new embodied and political geographies. Through in-class discussions, hands-on activities, and conversations with guest speakers, the class will engage in a debate about gender and sexuality that can spur dialogue across cultures while suggesting new modes of thinking, doing, and being in a place. Taught in English.
Is gender a “binary” or a “spectrum”? Are sociology and economics really “scientific”? Are Hispanics a “race” or an “ethnicity”? Are some poor people more “deserving” of assistance than others? How we answer these questions matters for the organization of social space, the distribution of resources, and the legitimacy of social inequalities. This course explores the social and political dynamics of classification across a range of substantive arenas, with special emphasis on how collective struggles to define socially important categories contributes to the creation, maintenance, or dissolution of social boundaries.
This course will consider a broad range of boundaries from national borders to social categories, from laws to metaphysics. We will explore how boundaries mark relational sites where meaning, value, and belonging are made, reworked, and contested. The theme will also allow us to interrogate the margins, those liminal spaces existing outside the mainstream, far from the center, next to the external limits–spaces of subversion, resistance, and survival. Students will attend public lectures by visiting scholars and Colby faculty as well as film screenings, performances, and community events. Together, we will engage in focused discussion and create innovative documentation of these events.
This course will examine racism and sexism in a variety of different sports contexts. The class will also explore how sport can bring attention to social inequalities and prompt feminist anti-racist activism that goes beyond the sports world. Topics include intersexed bodies and Olympic gender testing, colonialism and cricket/rugby, race and the Scripps National Spelling Bee, indigeneity and #MMIWG (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls), Black Lives Matter protests, and Asian American identities and sport. This W1 course is writing intensive with weekly writing assignments, response papers, and a final research paper on Babe Ruth Baseball. Students will learn about plagiarism, how to use the Colby College library, Chicago style citation, develop an argument/thesis statement, organize research into a research paper, and to write about research they collected through feminist methods.
Uses the theme of multiculturalism/multilingualism as a framework to read, analyze, and write about non-fiction texts by writers from various cultural/linguistic backgrounds. More specifically, it focuses on boundary and margin crossing through the discussion of “in-betweeness,” how ideas of global citizenship and multilingualism challenge established political, geographical, and linguistic boundaries. It covers topics, such as world Englishes and translingualism, which result from language users crossing artificial linguistic boundaries and creating a liminal space where multiple languages function in given interactive episodes. The humanities lab portion of the course will engage students with the idea of “internationalization at home,” which will allow them to work with Special Collections’ International Students at Colby Archive (ISACA), a broad compilation of artifacts and interviews with international students at Colby. This course fulfills the international diversity requirement.
Boundaries and Margins Lecture Series
The World is our Field of Practice
Elizabeth Jabar, Colby College and Séan Alonzo Harris
7:00 p.m., Live Zoom Webinar
Elizabeth A. Jabar is a feminist printmaker who explores a range of personal-political issues in her work including cultural identity, representation, equity and maternal ethics. She co-creates collaborative and participatory projects with students, colleagues and community members. Her hybrid works on paper and cloth display a highly personal visual language that incorporates motifs from popular culture, folk art, religious traditions and textiles. Elizabeth’s printed objects and environments embody printmaking’s democratic tradition of resistance and collective power and reflect her commitment to art as a tool for social change.
Séan Alonzo Harris is a professional editorial, commercial and fine art photographer concentrating on narrative and environmental portraiture. Over the past 25 years, Séan’s work has featured in a range of national publications, advertising campaigns, and exhibitions. In these varied contexts, Séan’s work focuses on human experience and identity and examines how individuals visualize themselves and how they are portrayed. Séan’s images bear witness to often invisible or overlooked members of our communities, and create portraits that provide a counter image and narrative of self-worth and personal agency.
Boundaries and Margins Lecture Series
What White Western Tourists Want: Border Sentimentalization in Black South Africa,
Annie Hikido, Colby College
7:00 p.m., Live Zoom Webinar
“Border crossing” is often used to describe transgressions that promise growth and possibility. In this talk, I discuss how the emotional pleasure of crossing borders can lead us to romanticize transgression in ways that sustain inequalities. I focus on white Westerners who visit Black townships in Cape Town, South Africa. These tourists decry voyeuristic forms of township tourism and instead wish to “get to know” township residents. They express fulfillment when they feel that they have transcended racial, class, and national divides through interacting with Black South Africans. But their gratification depends on the act of crossing, thereby reifying borders through sentimentalization. Building a more just world therefore must work to undo the conditions that produce their pleasure. I conclude with some thoughts about how this relates to the borders that circumscribe academia and implications for pedagogy.
Boundaries and Margins Lecture Series
History Unbound: Malaga, Performance, and the Archive
Myron Beasley, Bates College and Daniel Minter/Indigo Arts Alliance
7:00 p.m., Live Zoom Webinar
Myron Beasley is Associate Professor of American Studies, and also serves on the committee of Gender and Sexuality Studies at Bates College. His ethnographic research includes exploring the intersection of cultural politics, material culture and social change. A recipient of multiple prestigious fellowships and grants, his writing about performance ethnography, contemporary art, material culture and cultural engagement has appeared in many academic journals.
Daniel Minter is an American artist known for his work in the mediums of painting and assemblage. His overall body of work often deals with themes of displacement and diaspora, ordinary/extraordinary blackness; spirituality in the Afro-Atlantic world; and the (re)creation of meanings of home. Minter works in varied media – canvas, wood, metal, paper. twine, rocks, nails, paint. This cross-fertilization strongly informs his artistic sensibility. His carvings become assemblages. His paintings are often sculptural. Minter’s work has been featured in numerous institutions and galleries across the country.
Intersections in Environmental Literature, Environmental Justice, and Social Justice: A Reading and Conversation with Camille Dungy
7:00 p.m., Live Zoom Webinar
Camille T. Dungy is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Trophic Cascade (Wesleyan UP, 2017), winner of the Colorado Book Award, and the essay collection Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood and History (W.W. Norton, 2017), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Dungy has also edited anthologies including Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry and From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great. A 2019 Guggenheim Fellow, her honors include NEA Fellowships in poetry (2003) and prose (2018), an American Book Award, two NAACP Image Award nominations, and two Hurston/Wright Legacy Award nominations.
Boundaries and Margins Lecture Series
Winin’ Through Cyberspace:Reclaiming Community in COVID times
Adanna Jones, Bowdoin College
7:00 p.m., Live Zoom Webinar
Adanna Kai Jones is an Assistant Professor of Dance in the Department of Theater and Dance. She earned her Ph.D. in Critical Dance Studies at the University of California, Riverside, and her BFA in Dance from Mason Gross School of the Arts—Rutgers University. She has performed in professional dance companies based in NYC, including the “Julia Ritter Performance Group” and “Souloworks” with Andrea E. Woods. Her research remains focused on Caribbean dance and identity politics within the Diaspora, paying particular focus to the rolling hip dance known as winin’.
Boundaries and Margins Lecture Series
Better to speak of conquest or home and trap: a mytho-historical reflection on sonic dispossession, settler-territorialization, property, law, and displacement
Anthony Romero, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Tufts University
7:00 p.m., Live Zoom Webinar
Anthony Romero is a Boston-based artist, writer, and organizer committed to documenting and supporting artists and communities of color. His collaborative practice engages intercultural contact and historical narratives in order to generate reparative counter-images and social transformation. Recent projects and performances have been featured at esteemed institutions across North America. Publications include The Social Practice That Is Race, coauthored with Dan S. Wang, and the exhibition catalogue Organize Your Own: The Politics and Poetics of Self-Determination Movements, of which he was the editor. He is a cofounder of the Latinx Artist Visibility Award, a national scholarship for Latinx artists, and a co-founder of the Latinx Artists Retreat, a national gathering of Latinx artists and administrators.
A conversation with Naomi Klein
7:00 p.m., Live Zoom Webinar
We are delighted to announce that Naomi Klein will be the Fall 2020 keynote speaker for the humanities theme Boundaries and Margins, and will also serve as the 2020 Mellon Distinguished Fellow in Environmental Humanities. Naomi Klein is the inaugural Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University, and an award-winning journalist, syndicated columnist, and international and New York Times bestselling author of No Is Not Enough: Resisting the New Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need (2017), This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate (2014), The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007) and No Logo (2000). In 2018, she published The Battle for Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes On the Disaster Capitalists donating all royalties to Puerto Rican organization juntegente.org. Her 2019 book: On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal became an instant New York Times bestseller and a #1 Canadian bestseller.
This event is free and open to Colby students, faculty, staff, parents, alum, and the broader community.
To register for this event, please visit here.
To submit a question for Naomi, please fill out this form by Friday, October 2.
This event is sponsored by the Center for the Arts and Humanities, Environmental Humanities, the Lunder Institute for American Art, the Colby Museum of Art, the Oak Institute for Human Rights, Goldfarb Center for Public Affairs, and the Environmental Studies program.
Boundaries and Margins Lecture Series
Centering Disability Culture and Aesthetics
Alice Sheppard (Kinetic Light) in conversation with Michael Maag
7:00 p.m., Live Zoom Webinar
Alice Sheppard is the Artistic Director of Kinetic Light, a leading disability arts ensemble. Sheppard studied ballet and modern dance with Kitty Lunn and made her debut with Infinity Dance Theater. After an apprenticeship, Sheppard joined AXIS Dance Company, where she toured and taught in the company’s education and outreach programs. As an independent artist, Sheppard has danced in projects with Ballet Cymru, GDance, and Marc Brew Company in the U.K. and Full Radius Dance, Marjani Forté, MBDance, Infinity Dance Theater, and Steve Paxton in the U.S. Her choreography has been commissioned by Full Radius Dance, CRIPSiE, and MOMENTA. For more information about Alice, please visit here.
Michael Maag is the video, projection, and lighting designer for Kinetic Light. Maag designs at the intersection of lighting, video, and projection for theatre, dance, musicals, opera, and planetariums across the United States. He sculpts with light and shadow to create lighting environments that tell a story, believing that lighting in support of the performance is the key to unlocking our audience’s emotions. Maag has built custom optics for projections in theaters, museums and planetariums; he also designs and builds electronics and lighting for costumes and scenery. For more information about Michael, please visit here.
Boundaries and Margins Lecture Series
Malik Gaines, NYU Tisch School of the Arts and Alexandro Segade, Cornell
7:00 p.m., Live Zoom Webinar
Malik Gaines and Alexandro Segade are founding members of the collective My Barbarian, who work at the intersection of theater, visual arts, critical practice, and performance to play with social difficulties, theatricalize historic problems, and imagine ways of being together. Realized as drawings, texts, masks, videos, music, installations, and audience interactions, their projects employ fantasy, humor, and clashing aesthetic sensibilities to cleverly critique artistic, political, and social situations. The duo creates and performs a new work, Star Choir. The 45-minute musical performance tracks a group of humans who attempt to colonize a hostile planet after the Earth’s decline. Following some wonder and violence, a hybrid species is formed. Star Choir is performed by six singers and musicians playing synthesizer, cello, harp, horn, bass and percussion, and with animated projections. Gaines and Segade will screen sections of the performance and discuss how this connects to their broader research and artistic practice as artist-scholars.
Boundaries and Margins
About November: A recital by tenor Eric Christopher Perry and pianist Christina Spurling
7:30 p.m., Live Zoom Webinar
A recital by tenor Eric Christopher Perry and pianist Christina Spurling explores the human condition through the lens of train travel – across two continents and two nationalistic eras. Benjamin Britten’s Winter Words, Op. 52 (1956) evocatively depicts “a world unknown” with selections of final poems by English novelist Thomas Hardy, whose multitude of works are featured in Colby College’s Special Collections. Gabriel Kahane’s Book of Travelers (2017) captures conversations with fellow passengers while on a cathartic cross-country train ride immediately following the controversial 2016 United States presidential election. An emotional journey about journeys, this program illustrates stories of boundaries beyond geographical borders: racial, socioeconomic, political, and generational.
Boundaries and Margins Lecture Series
Toward the Empty Center: Journeys of Cultural Liminality and Elusive Authenticity
Ian Khara Ellasante, Bates College
7:00 p.m., Live Zoom Webinar
Ian Khara Ellasante is an Assistant Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at Bates College. They are a cultural studies theorist whose current research engages the peoplehood matrix–a core theoretical construct developed by Indigenous scholars–to examine the persistence of Indigenous and Black cultural identities within the oppressive milieu of settler colonialism, white supremacy, and anti-Blackness. In this context, Ellasante examines the history and reclamation of Indigenous extra-binary gender systems and Two-Spirit traditions, Black and Indigenous feminisms, and the resistance inherent in Black and Indigenous trans and queer cultures. In addition to their scholarship, Ellasante is a poet and winner of the 49th New Millennium Writing Award. Their poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Feminist Wire, Hinchas de Poesía, The Volta: Evening Will Come, We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, and elsewhere.
Boundaries and Margins Lecture Series
What is African Literature? Postapartheid writing and the political force of a question
Mo Shabangu in conversation with Julie Nxadi
7:00 p.m., Live Zoom Webinar
This conversation looks into the animating subject of African literature on the world literary stage to argue that it cannot circumvent questions about its very nature and being — which constantly disrupts the quest for creative autonomy. Together they will explore the premise that the political dimension of African literature is to be found in its most hushed expressions, rather than in depiction of the spectacle. Julie Nxadi is a writer and artist from Makhanda and Ngqushwa in the Eastern Cape, currently based in Cape Town. Her current research interest is ‘intimacy and oppression in post ’94 South Africa’, a subject that she is exploring using multiple mediums, writing being just one. Mo Shabangu is an Assistant Professor of English at Colby College who earned his MA at Rhodes University and his PhD at Stellenbosch University. His teaching and research interests falls at the intersection of postcolonial literatures of the 20th/21st century, global Anglophone literature, world literary theory, contemporary African-diasporic cultural production, as well asdecolonial strategies in higher education in South Africa.
Boundaries and Margins Lecture Series
‘Living Together’ Against Borders: A Disruptive Conversation with Nasim Lomani
Nadia El-Shaarawi, Nasim Lomani, and Maple Razsa, Colby College
7:00 p.m., Live Zoom Webinar
Nadia El-Shaarawi is an Assistant Professor of Global Studies at Colby College. She is a cultural and medical anthropologist who specializes in transnational forced migration, humanitarian intervention, and mental health in the Middle East and North Africa. Her current book project, Collateral Damages, analyzes how, in the aftermath of the 2003 invasion, Iraqi refugees in Cairo negotiated uncertain conditions of protracted urban exile and how interactions with global and international institutions and policies, especially refugee resettlement, had implications for mental health and well-being.
Nasim Lomani is a human rights defender and migrants’ rights activist working both in the field and at the political level in Greece and the greater EU for over a decade. Lomani arrived in Greece nearly two decades ago as a 16-year-old from Afghanistan. Upon arrival, he was arrested and charged with illegal crossing of the Greek border, ultimately serving a two-year prison sentence. During the process of appealing to the court for having his rights as a refugee abused and violated, he learned about the bureaucratic difficulties that all migrants face while on the move to Europe.
Maple Razsa is committed to using text, images, and sound to embody the lived experience, as well as the political imaginations of contemporary social movements. Trained as a filmmaker and anthropologist at Harvard University, he is an Associate Professor of Global Studies at Colby College. Maple has conducted fieldwork with alterglobalization protesters, anarchist-punk squatters, migrant-labor organizers, video activists, and, most recently, opponents and transgressors of the European border regime. His films—including The Maribor Uprisings, Occupation: A Film About the Harvard Living Wage Sit-In, and Bastards of Utopia—have shown in festivals around the world, including CPH:DOX, Hot Docs, and DOK Leipzig.
AB is a transdisciplinary performance artist, writer, and performance studies scholar. They are Assistant Professor of Contemporary Performance in the Department of Theater and Dance.
AB’s research-based practice looks at how transness, disability, and colonialism orient us to place and time and how embodied and material engagements might rearrange these modes of being and belonging. Their practice encompasses solo performance, installation, devising, and community-oriented work. Their teaching situates these practices within critical theory and social justice to collectively explore the potential for embodied knowledge to imagine, rehearse, and enact more critical ways of being in the world. They often create work under the name Sister James.
AB’s scholarly writing is based on ongoing performance work they conduct with a group of LGBTIQ asylum seekers in South Africa and argues that through performance we can begin to open up new paradigms of citizenship and belonging beyond Westernized notions of nation-states, the neoliberal individual, and the deserving, dependent migrant. AB received their PhD in Performance Studies at Northwestern University with cognates in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies as well as Postcolonial Theory. They are the recipient of a Woodrow Wilson Mellon Emerging Faculty Leaders Award. For more information, please visit: www.sister-james.com.
The Humanities Theme is an initiative led by the Center for the Arts and Humanities to celebrate the process of liberal learning by exploring a particular topic through exhibits, speakers, performances, and course work. We organize year-long, campus-wide collaboration, highlighting the perspective humanities can bring to the chosen theme while actively encouraging participation from departments outside of the Humanities Division. Our goals are to bring innovative programming to Colby’s campus and to highlight course work and programming already underway.
Energy and its limits shape our lives, connecting artistic and technological innovations, local communities and oppressive structures of power, political activism and affective fatigue, histories of environmental change and societal collapse, and the origin of life and entropic fate of the universe. This theme will bring together the arts, humanities, and social and natural sciences to investigate the space between energy and exhaustion as a metaphorical realm and lived reality. Together we will explore the endless potentiality of energy and limiting effects of exhaustion as they impact aesthetic innovation, literary imagination, political anxieties, environmental limits, and activist movements—all touching upon our shared past, current political realities, and collective futures.
Theme Sponsors:
Dale Kocevski, Physics and Astronomy
Chris Walker, English and Environmental Humanities
The Presence of the Past is everywhere: in our daily lives and activities, our natural, engineered, and social environments, our political commitments, our biasses and prejudices, our religious and spiritual convictions, our scientific and technological accomplishments and ambitions, and more. What happens when competing versions of the past come into conflict? How is knowledge about the past produced? How do structures of power and prestige operating in the present shape our current knowledge of the across the disciplines?
Theme Sponsors:
Elizabeth D. Leonard, History
Megan Cook, English
A mythical hero, a body of texts, an ancestral language, an accident, a set of principles, a tool, a technique, or a group of objects from which fields of inquiry develop and grow: how did it all begin? Origins encourages a detailed and critical reflection of the social, historical, political, and cultural contexts that inform our understanding of who we are as humans, where we come from, and the trajectory we choose to follow in an increasingly interconnected global landscape.
Theme Sponsors:
Shalini Le Gall, Museum of Art,
Gianluca Rizzo, Italian Literature and Language,
Arnout van der Meer, History
Revolutions take many forms – political, literary, artistic, cultural, social, scientific, and conceptual. They can be abrupt or gradual, peaceful or violent, top down or bottom up, guided by elites or conducted by mobs, driven by ideology, or prompted by a new reality. But what constitutes a revolution? Is a spirited challenge to the existing system enough, or must it produce a radically different, lasting change? What are the conditions leading a revolution to occur? Is violence (physical or conceptual) inherent in revolution? Are revolutions a necessary good or a dangerous disruption of established order? How are they to be judged? How do literary or artistic movements gain the status of a revolution? What roles have revolutionary ideas played in the natural and social sciences and the arts and humanities? Do injustices or inequities underlie most political revolutions? Finally, what revolutions do we still need to have?
Theme Sponsors:
Valérie Dionne, French
Jim Fleming, Science, Technology, Society
Human / Nature reflects upon nature, the built environment, and the ways in which our relationship to the natural world has shaped human existence. Across the humanities this theme will enable us to examine our relationship to nature from antiquity to the present. The social and natural sciences, will explore the connections between human actions and changes to our planet. Ultimately, Human/Nature will initiate a conversation among the humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences considering ourselves and the spaces we inhabit: those that nourish us, inspire us, and challenge us.
Theme Sponsors:
Gary Green, Art
Loren McClenachan, Environmental Studies
Steve Wurtzler, Cinema Studies
Migrations describe the movement of peoples, animals, objects, cultures, resources, identities, and ideas across time and space. Whether they involve the physical or symbolic crossing of borders, migrations contribute to our sense of belonging or exclusion and to our feeling of being “there” or “here.” The humanities theme for 2014-15 will interrogate this understanding of migrations as shaping the self and the world. How can we represent the experiences of immigration, exile, diaspora, or passing? What are the possibilities and challenges associated with mobility and immobility? What happens to the local when it interacts with the national, regional, or global? Questions like these respond to some of the most pressing issues the world is facing today, from the development of new political structures and methods of cross-cultural exchange to changes in climate and demographics.
Theme Sponsors:
Tanya Sheehan, Art
Natalie Zelensky, Music
Censorship Uncovered, is a year-long, campus-wide initiative designed to foster interdisciplinary discussion and collaboration. Through course work, performances, lectures, film screenings, exhibitions, and collegial conversation, Colby students, faculty, and staff across a broad range of disciplines and with widely varying perspectives will explore the fraught and provocative themes of censorship and free speech.
Theme Sponsors:
Valérie Dionne, French
Clem Guthro, Colby Libraries
Lauren Lessing, Museum of Art
What is comedy? Seriously. Is it more than laughter and humor? How is comedy related to other artistic genres, and how is it expressed in different languages, literatures, and art forms? Is comedy specific to culture, or are some forms of comedy universal? How does comedy undermine or reinforce our attitudes towards race, gender, religion, class, and ethnicity? Does what makes us laugh reveal our deep social norms and taboos? What can biology and the social sciences tell us about what laughter means?
In “Comedy, Seriously,” Colby students, faculty, and staff celebrated the richness of the comic tradition and the vibrant place of comedy in our contemporary world.
Theme Sponsor:
Lydia Moland, Philosophy
What is terrorism? Is it true that one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter, or can we make ethical distinctions between instances of terrorism? How does terrorism differ from other kinds of violence, for instance the violence of war or domestic violence? How do we distinguish between eco-activism and eco-terrorism or between criminal hacking and cyber-terrorism? How has terrorism shaped history, and how does it form the present?
In Reflections of Terrorism, students, faculty, and staff fostered interdisciplinary discussions of forms of terror(ism) and showcased the multiple levels on which the Colby community addresses this complex topic.
Theme Sponsors:
Lydia Moland, Philosophy
Cyrus Shahan, German
The Metamorphoses Project was a campus-wide web of events linked to the Theater and Dance Department’s November 2009 production of Mary Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses. The goal was to explore the broader theme of mythological narrative through history to contemporary life, and how myths operate in and through the various disciplines that make up a liberal arts environment. Students, faculty, and staff celebrated the process of liberal learning by exploring these questions through exhibits, performances and course work.
Theme sponsors:
Lynne Connor, Theater & Dance
Lauren Lessing, Museum of Art
Kerill O’Neill, Classics