Interface 2019 – (UN)Bound: Interdisciplinary Dialogues

Keynote

“Metaphors of Migration” by Dr. Lisa Lowe (Yale University)

Friday May 3, 2019 @ 6:00 p.m. – Azrieli Theatre 101, Carleton University

Keynote lecture is FREE and open to the public

Abstract:

This talk considers the dilemmas of representing contemporary migration in discourses of national security, humanitarianism, migrant activism, and the arts. Whether as foreign threat or suffering victim, the state produces “the migrant” as the limit of national sovereignty, social order, and liberal personhood, even as it seeks to translate the “migrant” into the “immigrant” through regimes of visibility, legality, and temporality in the political sphere, laying claim to migrant labor in the economic sphere, and subjecting what remains to humanist concepts of free will and autonomy. Activist projects and aesthetic works offer other vocabularies with which to represent migration and other means to frame the political beyond normative ideas of citizenship in the nation-state.

Bio:

Lisa Lowe is Samuel Knight Professor of American Studies, and Ethnicity, Race, and Migration at Yale University. She taught for several decades at the University of California, San Diego, and most recently, Tufts University, where she was a founding faculty in the Consortium of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora, and Director of the Center for the Humanities. She is the author of books on race, immigration, comparative colonialisms, and globalization, including Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Duke UP, 1996), The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital (Duke UP, 1997), and The Intimacies of Four Continents (Duke UP, 2015).

This conference was made possible by the generosity of:

The Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art, and Culture

Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs 

Migration and Disapora Studies (MDS)

Centre for Transnational Cultural Analysis (CTCA)

School for Studies in Arts and Culture (SSAC)

Department of English Language and Literature