About the Symposium
“Insurgent Cross-Cultural Conversations in the Expressive Arts: Contesting Notions of Transnationalism and Citizenship” is sponsored by the Ray Smith Symposium series, under the Humanities Council in the College of Arts and Sciences. The symposium will bring together scholars, specialists, practitioners and activists in orature, rhetoric, literature, writing, music, theater, dance and film to discuss the meaning of transnational citizenship on Friday, March 24 – Saturday, March 25, 2006.
The aim of the conference is to decode, analyze and debate the concepts of “transnationalism” and “citizenship” from an artistic perspective. The point of departure is the recognition that mainstream notions of the concepts require serious interrogation because of their tendency to universalize definitions. The symposium will, thus, take into account factors such as class, race, gender, nationality, ethnicity, cultural orientation, disciplinary location and many other ways of “knowing” in defining the concepts. It will invite “insurgent cross-cultural conversations” while providing democratic space within which the various expressive art forms are able to converge in conversation with each other in order to illuminate the concepts.
Significance
Overall, the project of defining transnational citizenship from various multicultural and cross-disciplinary angles is both critical and urgent, especially given mainstream academia’s tendency to condone, through intellectual sponsorship, dominating cultures’ monopolization of public discourses. The concepts of globalization, transnational citizenship and internationalization of experience belong to the alluded to category of discourses. They have become buzzwords, constructed by the status quo, to connote collective, shared experience across geographical, national and cultural borders. The task of interrogating this assumed homogeneity is mandatory in the 21st century wherein the so-called “global village” still has its “first,” “second” and “third” worlds firmly in place. Given this triple world of unequal opportunity, an economic campus that sharply points to the north rather than to the south, an insoluble political power equation with East and West positioned at opposite ends, while countries in the global south sit on the margins of existence, the question becomes: what do these terms really mean?
Intention
The symposium will serve as a pilot project for brainstorming the meaning of transnationalism and citizenship in the expressive arts and as a sounding board for a larger project. The definitions emerging from the expressive arts will be used to compare and contrast perspectives from other disciplines in the humanities. Just as significantly, the total undertaking will demonstrate the centrality of the humanities in defining the meaning of transnational citizenship – a task often, erroneously, perceived as the primary responsibility if the social sciences. “Insurgent Cross-cultural Conversations” can assist us to gauge the extent to which assumed global oneness is either real, or elusive, or even, non-existent. The project will provide a means of exploring the possibilities of, as well as conditions under which an egalitarian, dialogical exchange between world cultures can truly take place.
The event is open to the entire campus and to members of the general community, as well as to colleges and universities within easy reach of Syracuse University. An invitation has also been extended to selected high schools in the area.
Organizing Committee:
- Coordinator, Mĩcere Gĩthae Mũgo, Meredith Professor for Teaching Excellence and Chair, Department of African American Studies, Syracuse University
- Cecil Abrahams, Professor, ETS
- Adam Banks, Assistant Professor, Writing Program
- William Cole, Professor, African American Studies
- Eileen Strempel, Assistant Professor, Fine Arts