Sifting through Lies Conference

Featuring a showing of "a/k/a Mrs. George Gilbert" by Coco Fusco
Join us for the Gallery Opening and Show: There will be a gallery opening and reception Friday, January 25th, 2008 at 5 p.m. Introduction by Dr. Eduardo Mendieta (Stony Brook University) and talk by Coco Fusco following the showing. The gallery will be open to the public from 12-2 p.m. Monday-Friday January 28th through February 14th on the 2nd floor of the Stony Brook Manhattan Campus building.

Keynote Speaker: Arlene Dávila, Professor of Anthropology, Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU
Friday, February 15th at 5 p.m.

Poetry Reading: Alexis Gómez Rosa, Dominican Poet and Scholar
Saturday, February 16th at 5 p.m.

"The Other Thing": discussion forum, Friday, Feb 15th at 2:30p.m.
From the website: Loosely speaking, this session is envisioned as a trial run of the professional forum we are hoping to launch this spring for Stony Brook graduate students (of course, this session welcomes any and all participants). We will also be testing the very real question of whether it's possible to identify a "common read" that will have at least some points of contact with--and some utility or value for--our respective projects despite significant differences in our fields of specialization, methodological and/or theoretical premises, etc. The level of expectation is modest, in other words, and it is possible that a "common read" might prove to be a lowest common denominator, equally inapplicable to the pursuits of all parties. The object of discussion for this session is Marjorie Levinson's "What Is New Formalism?"--written with grad students in mind and published in PMLA in an abridged form last March. If you can find and read that version, it is more than adequate for our purposes. More easily accessible is the longer version (with appendixes!) at:

http://sitemaker.umich.edu/pmla_article/home
(please respect the "not for publication" clause)

Conference Schedule

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 15^TH

12:00 Opening remarks, Luncheon, and Showing of “a/k/a Mrs. George Gilbert”

1:00 to 2:15 Concurrent Panels, Session One

Poetry

“The Destitution of Rhetoric: Robert Lowell’s ‘Skunk Hour’”

Daniel Parsons, North Carolina State University

“Coleridge and the Epistolary Impulse”

Lauren Neefe, Stony Brook University

“The ‘talking voice that runs on’: Wandering and Paper-Hoarding in Stevie Smith’s Novel on Yellow Paper”

Cristina J. Baptista, Fordham University

Moderator: Emily Churilla

Faculty Respondent:

Language, the Unreadable, & Race

“Reverse Occupatio and the Refusal to Tell in the Autobiography of Luiz Gama”

Laura Cade Brown, Vanderbuilt University

"Reading Philosophy and Culture: the Case of Levinas”
Cathy Hsiao, Stony Brook University

                    “Manzano’s Damaged Language: The (Un)Translatability of Transgressive Discourse?”
                            Jonathan Steimnitz, University of California, Santa Cruz

             Moderator: Ula Lukszo

            Faculty Respondent: Paul Firbas

Colonial Constructions of Identity

“’Is the World, Then, So Narrow?’: The Simultaneous Need for Home and Travel in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter”

Derek S. McGrath, Stony Brook University

“Finding Identity in Unknown Worlds: The Development of Gender, Race, and Systems of Government in Early Colonial America”

Gregory Young, SUNY Buffalo

"Genesis 32 in The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano."
Liliana M. Naydan, Stony Brook University

Moderator: Jesse Curran

Faculty Respondent: Heidi Hutner

2:30-3:30 "The Other Thing" Seminar & Discussion

3:30 to 4:45 Concurrent Panels Session Two

“Media-ting” Gender

“Miss-Representations: Italian-American Women in the Media”

Valerie A. Franco, Stony Brook University

                  “The Reality of War in American Hero and U.S. Fictions”

Lauren Rosenblum, Stony Brook University

“Where the Ladies At? Reexamining Women and Hip Hop Culture”

Hank Williams, CUNY Graduate Center

Moderator: Lauren Neefe

Faculty Respondent: E. Ann Kaplan

Truth & Fantasy

“The Fantasy of Control and the Control of Fantasy: Jean Genet’s Our Lady of Flowers, The Maids, and The Balcony”

Ula Lukszo, Stony Brook University

“The Desert of the Real: YouTube and the Simulacra of Political Discourse”

Renata Marchione, Georgetown University

“’The Architecture of Question and Answer’: Female Epistemology and Gendered Gaps of Understanding in A Passage to India”

Elizabeth Doty, Fordham University

Moderator: Eileen Chanza

Faculty Respondent: Michael Boecherer

The Gendering of Race & Colonialism

“Filling in the Gaps: Hoodoo (Voodoo) and Women in Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men”

Patrina C. Jones, Stony Brook University

“The Legacy of Lynching: A Look Back at Southern Local Color”

Blake Wilder, North Carolina State University

“A Move from Modernist to Postcolonial Literature: Heart of Darkness, Voyage in the Dark, and the Cultural Conversation”

Melissa Sande, CUNY Brooklyn

Moderator:Rachel Ellis

Faculty Respondent:

5:00 Keynote Speaker: Arlene Dávila, "Disciplining Ethnic Studies Within Corporations"

6:00 Reception

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 16^TH

9:30 Morning Reception

10:00-10:45 showing of "a/k/a Mrs. George Gilbert"

10:45 to 12:00 Concurrent Panels Session Three

The Cost of Globalization

“Presumptions of Order/Models of Exclusion: Biofuel, Bare Life, and the Banishment of the Developing World”

Michael Rio, SUNY Buffalo

“The Decline of the Socialist Economy in the 1980s: The Case of Yugoslavia”

Nina Sabolik, Arizona State University

“Neither Local nor Global: Multiscale Politics and the Struggle for the Right to Water”

Verónica Perera, The New School for General Studies

Moderator: Liliana M. Naydan

Faculty Respondent: Eduardo Mendieta

Literary Re/portrayals of Native Americans

“An Ethic of Reciprocity: Giving and Taking from Contemporary Native American Fiction”

Matthew Kremer, Humboldt State University

“’All my relations’: An Analysis of Conflicting Aesthetics in Jeannette Armstrong’s Whispering in Shadows”

Debashree Dattaray, Jadavpur University

Moderator: A.C. Burrows

Faculty Respondent: Douglas Pfeiffer

Reacting to Dystopia

“Beyond 1984: Dystopia, Literature, and the Totalitarian Threat”

Kristin Schall, CUNY Brooklyn

“Mechanical Therapy, Circa 1945”

Ben Miller, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

“Cinema After Dark: Blindness and Insight in Bernal’s Manila by Night”

Jason Jacobo, Stony Brook University

Moderator: Richard Caputo

Faculty Respondent: Helen Choi

12:00 to 1:00 Lunch

1:00 to 2:00 Roundtable Discussion on Interdisciplinarity

Helen Choi, Assistant Professor of English, Stony Brook University

Lisa Diedrich, Assistant Professor in Women's Studies, Stony Brook University

Ira Livingston, Associate Professor in the Department of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at Stony Brook University & Chairperson at the Pratt Institute's Department of English and Humanities.

Susan Scheckel, Associate Professor of English, Stony Brook University

2:15 to 3:30 Concurrent Panels Session Four
Ethnographies of Empire

“The Inheritance of Loss, the Gorkhaland Movement, and History”

Ubaraj Katawal, SUNY Binghamton

“The Ethnographic Subject: Representation, Performance, and Liberalism”

A.C. Burrows, Stony Brook University

“Narratives of Power: Gaspar Rodriquez de Francia”

Carlos Gomez Florentin, New York University

Moderator: Lauren Rosenblum

Faculty Respondent:

Gender, Sexuality, & Belonging

"Queer Relations: The Boston Marriage in Henry James's The Bostonians"

Kathryn Klein, Stony Brook University

“Ignorance is Bliss: An Examination of David L. Eng’s ‘In the Shadows of a Diva’”

Megan Clune, SUNY Binghamton

“Home in the Age of Homelessness”

Minjeong Kim, SUNY Binghamton

Moderator: Amy Falvey

Faculty Respondent: Victoria Hesford

Reading the Neighbor, Reading the Other

   “Inviting the Dead to the Table: Encountering the Other through History in The

    Atlantic Sound”

Aliza Atik, Stony Brook University

   "'Not grace, then, but at least the body':  the Ethics of the Neighbor in J.M. Coetzee's

    Age of Iron"

Rachel Walsh, Stony Brook University

Moderator: Anthony Sovak

Faculty Respondent:

3:45-5:00 Concurrent Panels Session Five

Modernism

“Distorted Distortion: Septimus Warren Smith’s Theosophical Moment”

Richard Caputo, Stony Brook University

“A Home for Robert Frost”

Anthony Sovak, Stony Brook University

“Ezra Pound’s Cantos: A Failed Modern Adaptation”

Kristie A. Schlauraff, Stony Brook University

Moderator: Aliza Atik

Faculty Respondent:

Fiction

“The Great Gatsby and the Jews”

Les Hunter, Stony Brook University

“The Aesthetics of Hysteria: An Usurpation of Language in Dracula and Dora”

Meghan Fox, Stony Brook University

                  “A Singular Problem: Clues as Things and Things as Clues in the Sherlock Holmes

                  Series”

Elizabeth Hershman, Stony Brook University

Moderator: Jason Jacobo

Faculty Respondent:

 Stealing Words, Transcribing Texts

Andrew Fitch, CUNY Graduate Center

Jon Cotner, SUNY Buffalo

Moderator: Rachel Ellis

5:15 Poetry Reading, Alexis Gómez Rosa

6:00 Closing Reception

James Baldwin, in a letter to his nephew, wrote the famous lines “It is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.” Writing at the 100th anniversary of U.S. Emancipation, Baldwin was telling a tale of a history entrapped, but it is this same notion of innocence and history that research methodologies, disciplinary factions, and a damagingly naïve Western critical framework of academia must confront in order to stop the perpetuation of lies almost intrinsic to our scholarly practices. In writing today, is there impunity to be found in acts of addressing, sifting and re-writing through lies? Is there the knowledge of possible impunity from the consequent knowledge of this entrapment in which we—academics, intellectuals, artists—are willingly initiated, caught and imputed? What are the risks and hopes of such engagements?

Sifting Through Lies: Toward an Aesthetic Impunity, the 20th Annual Stony Brook Manhattan Graduate Conference to be held February 15^th and 16th, seeks to focus on the fault lines of what can be accounted for and what new breaks must be made in order to redress the violent past archaeologies of thought and practice committed by our predecessors.

The questions that this conference sets out to address include: How can we as junior scholars critique the legacy that has been left to us while resisting the attempt to “fix” history—i.e., how—with which methodologies—to sift through the fragments of a narrative that has been ripped apart while defying the urge to build a new narrative based potentially on our own naiveté and criminal innocence? What knowledge is accessible, and just who can access it? In what languages can we communicate knowledge and what idioms, truths, and lies are privileged in this communication? What kinds of demands can we make on the work of those archaeologists of knowledge who have come before us as we confront the limitations of our own appropriations, paradoxes, and self-reflexivity? What can we really hope for or demand from interdisciplinary scholarship? For some, interdisciplinarity signals a breakdown of knowledge dissemination, for others the work is seemingly the only way to overcome or theorize the recycling of past mistakes: do the inherent conflicts and contradictions of interdisciplinarity stymie possible new movements toward academic accountability and what can an extended engagement with traditional disciplinary boundaries offer to the fight for this accountability? Is it possible that the mere rhetoric of the fragment, the fraction, and the rupture, paradoxically reinforce linguistic, bodily, disciplinary, and national boundaries?

The 20th Annual Stony Brook Manhattan Graduate Conference

Sifting Through Lies: Toward an Aesthetic Impunity