Tania Libertad Balderas is an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow within the Department of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. She holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of New Mexico. Her fields of study are 20^th Century Comparative Literature, centering on Chicanx, Latin American, and Native American Literature. She specializes in Marxism, feminism, theater studies, and decolonial theories. Her current book project, Resistance Narratives: Storytelling of Transnational Insurgencies in 1960-70s US and Mexico, traces the interrelationship between the novels, autobiographies, theater plays, and oral histories that center the participation of women in the American Indian Movement (AIM), the Chicano/a Movement, and the “Dirty War” in Mexico. Her project emphasizes how these narratives articulate notions of decolonization, self-determination, women’s liberation, and the existence and significance of transnational solidarity networks established in their struggle for liberation.

Esen Kara received her Ph.D in the American Studies department of Dokuz Eylul University, Turkey, in 2018, with a thesis titled “Claiming the Right to the City: Representation of Los Angeles in the Transnational American Literature.” She is an assistant professor at Yasar University, Department of English Language and Literature, where she teaches courses on postcolonial literature, contemporary American literature, and Turkish literature as world literature. For the 2023-2024 academic year, Esen Kara is appointed as a visiting scholar at Dartmouth College COLT, Spanish/Portugese with a TUBITAK international post-doctoral fellowship. Her current research focuses on ecological imagination as medium of counter-memory in Turkish and US-Latinx literatures, specifically the production of affective archives in testimonial narratives of wars and genocide.

Preeti Singh is an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Leslie Center for the Humanities at Dartmouth College where she is affiliated with the department of Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages.  She researches and teaches postcolonial studies and world literature with a focus on 20^th and 21^st century South Asian and South Asian diasporic literatures and cinema. Broadly, she is interested in literary expressions of political and social crises at the intersection of decolonization and the global cold war,  discourses of human rights, and the contemporary rhetoric and theories of populism. 

Preeti received her PhD in English from Ohio State University-Columbus in August 2022. Her book project is based on her dissertation titled, Postcolonial Exceptions: Cultural Lives of the Indian National Emergency (1975-1977)  which examined literary and cinematic representations of the widely memorialized national emergency declared by Indian prime-minister Indira Gandhi on June 25, 1975. Reading across a range of genres—  novels, theatre, cinema, and political cartoons, Postcolonial Exceptions, scripts a literary and cultural history of postindependence India through the prism of the ‘Emergency.’  Her second project tentatively titled The Comparative Poetics of Decolonization theorizes decolonization as a planetary phenomenon with specific attention to the aesthetics of alignment, solidarity and indigeneity. The project traces the relationship between indigeneity and refuge as it has shaped the intellectual history of Postcolonial and Subaltern Studies.  

Preeti completed her M.A. and M. Phil degrees at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, India where she wrote an M.Phil. dissertation on urban form and postcolonial subjectivity in the emerging genre of the Indian graphic novel. At Dartmouth, Preeti is the co-convenor of the South Asian Studies Collective. She is also one of the principal investigators on the project Infrastructures of Race, Knowledge, and Aesthetics funded by the Leslie Center’s Venn Vision Grant. 

WORKSHOP SCHEDULE

The roundtables are discussion based so participants need to have read the pre-circulated papers beforehand

To receive a copy of the papers please contact eman.s.morsi@dartmouth.edu

All roundtable sessions will take place in Haldeman 246

Monday August 12

6:00 pm-8:30pm: Opening reception and dinner at the Hanover Inn for participants and sponsors

Tuesday August 13

7:30 am-9:00 am: Breakfast

Day 1. Theorizing the Home/land

Roundtable I: 9:30 am-12:00pm

• Ofure Aito, Senior Lecturer, Department of English and Literary Studies, Faculty of Arts, Federal University, Lokoja, Nigeria
  • Home and Exile: Belonging/’Unbelonging’ Identities in Nwosu’ A Gecko’s Farewell
• Oluwole Coker, Senior Lecturer, Department of English, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria
  • Tensions of (Be) longing:  Envisioning Home and the Homeland in the Twenty-first Century African Novel
• Subhasree Ghosh, Assistant Professor, Department of History, University of Calcutta, India
  • In Search of Home: Nostalgia and Trauma of Lost Homeland of the East Bengali Migrants

12:00 pm- 1:30pm Lunch

Roundtable II: 2:00 pm-4:30 pm

• Alina De Luna, PhD Candidate, Center for Conflict Studies, Phillips University of Marburg, Germany
  • This Body We Call Home: Exploring the relation between body and home
• Eman Morsi, Assistant Professor, Dartmouth College, USA
  • Exile in the Sprachraum: Home and Language in the Works of Cristina Peri Rossi and Ghada al-Samman.
• Shareah Taleghani, Assistant Professor, Queens College, the City University of New York, USA
  • Home, Exile, and Emotional Border Zones in Two Syrian Documentaries

5:00pm-7:00pm: Screening of Syrian film, Haunted. Followed by Q&A. Open to Public. (trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yl4KRwCqVlY) 

 *******

Wednesday August 14 

7:30am-9:00 am Breakfast

 Day 2. In-Between Spaces and Border Ecologies

Roundtable III: 9:30 am – 12:00pm

• Silvia Soto, Visiting Assistant Professor, American Indian Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
  • Localizing Mayanness: vivencias and the challenges of belongingness
• Rituparna Mitra, Assistant Professor of Literature and Writing, Marlboro College, USA
  • Partitioned Border Ecologies in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide and Akhtaruzzaman Elias’ Khoabnama
• Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, Professor and Chair of Migration and Refugee Studies, Department of Geography, University College London (UCL), UK
  • A rhizoanalysis of ‘more-than-camps’ in the Middle East: exploring the constitutive nature of overlapping processes of displacement and destruction

12:00-1:30pm Lunch

Roundtable IV: 2:00 pm-4:30pm

• Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, DPhil Candidate in English Literature, St Anne’s College, University of Oxford, UK.
  • Writing the Camp: Death, Dying and Dialects
• Svati Shah, Associate Professor, Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (additional appointment, Department of Anthropology), University of Massachusetts, Amherst. USA
  • Sexuality as Homeland: Queering Genealogies of Anti-Sodomy Law Activism in India
• Sireesha Telugu, Assistant Professor, Department of English, University of Hyderabad, India
  • Between Citizenships: Questions of “Home” among the Burmese-Indian Repatriates”

5:00pm -7:00 pm: Opening for artist Nobukho Nqaba,(http://artmeets.agency/nobukho-nqaba/). Installation at the Hood Museum with reception. Open to public.

7:30 Dinner for Workshop Participants

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ThursdayAugust15 

7:30am-9:00 am Breakfast

Day 3. Globalization and Transnational Identities

Roundtable V: 9:30 am-12:30pm

• Lin Chen, PhD Student, Department of Political Science, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, and Department of Sociology, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium.
  • Identity Reshaping and Maintaining of The African Student Migrants Through Social Networks Across the Digital Space Border Of The Great Fire Wall In China
• Elmo Gonzaga, Assistant Professor, Department of Cultural and Religious Studies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)
  • Emergent Imaginaries of South-South Circulation and Community in the Inter-Asian Migrant Labor Melodrama
• Vivian Lu, Postdoctoral Associate, Council on African Studies, Affiliation with Ethnicity, Race, and Migration Program. Yale University, USA.
  • Decolonial Capital: Economic Sovereignty and Diasporic Citizenship in Nigerian South-South Commerce
• Khangelani Moyo, Associate Researcher, Global Change Institute, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa
  • “Beyond the allure of gold”: Zimbabwean migrants belonging, attachment and identity in Johannesburg

12:30-2:30 Lunch

Roundtable VI: 2:30pm – 4:00 pm  

• Concluding session

6:00- 8:00: Nobukho Nqaba artist talk followed by Community Dinner

Join us for a series of monthly works-in-progress workshops and talks this winter and spring quarter organized by Preeti Singh (ASCL) that center around some of the main questions in postcolonial and de colonial studies. To receive the work-in-progress and participate, please email Preeti Singh (preeti.singh@dartmouth.edu)

February 26, 2024 

Tania Libertad Balderas (English), “Resistance Narratives: Storytelling of Transnational Emergencies in 1960s-70s US and Mexico (Work-in-Progress)

April 8, 2024

Preeti Singh (ASCL),  “Emergency/Emergence: Narratives of Postcolonial Authoritarianism (Work-In-Progress)

April 15, 2024 

Esen Kara (CompLit), “Writing the Catastrophe: Affective Archives and Non-representational Memory in Contemporary Turkish and US Latinx Literatures” (Public Talk)

May 10, 2024:

Eman Morsi (CompLit), “Another Hispanosphere: Western Saharans and linguistic belonging” (Work-in-Progress)

June 7: Translating Indigeneity: Aesthetics, Activism, Solidarities 

A One-Day Online Workshop. Speakers TBD

September Workshop

October Workshop

Displacement

PLEASE NOTE THAT DUE TO LOGISTICAL ISSUES, THIS WORKSHOP HAS BEEN POSTPONED TO JANUARY 2025

This is a funded, weeklong workshop hosted by the Department of English, University of Hyderabad and Co-Sponsored by the South-South Forum at Dartmouth College.

Description:

Diasporas are formed by either gradual accretion of immigrants, or sudden expulsion of huge masses. While the former is often viewed as a voluntary movement, the latter results from forced dispersal. One of the defining characteristics of migration – voluntary or forced – is that of displacement.

The trauma of displacement is a recurring theme in diasporic studies. Displacement for some is political, rooted in violent processes of state formation, including partition, and militarization, while for others, it is ecological, the outcome of droughts, hurricanes, and environmental degradation. What are the characteristics of political and social displacements? How do we understand displacement and resettlement in the era of climate change? How does displacement inform identity formation in young adults and children? These are some of the questions that this international workshop will consider when thinking across regions and disciplines. Our focus on the theme of “Displacement” could include these and other channels of inquiry:

Format and Timeline:

The workshop sessions will be dedicated to discussions of participants’ pre-circulated works-in-progress with the aim of publishing the final drafts as a special issue in an academic journal.

We welcome submissions from academics and independent scholars of all disciplines. Given the cross-regional emphasis of the organizing bodies, applicants who work on more than one area within the same continent or across multiple continents will be given priority.

The workshop will be held at the University of Hyderabad from Nov 26 to Dec 2nd.

To apply, please send a paper abstract (max. 300 words) of an original unpublished work and a recent curriculum vitae by August 15th to dartmouthssf@gmail.com.

Decisions will be made by September 30th. Once notified, participants will be asked to submit a complete draft by October 30th for pre-circulation among other members of the workshop

Funding:

The University of Hyderabad will cover all expenses inside India (transportation to and from the airport, meals during the conference and housing). The SSF at Dartmouth will provide an honorarium to all participants and will cover all or part of international air travel for applicants who do not have sufficient research funds.