Junot Díaz’s short fiction, novel, essays, and interviews are changing the landscape of Américan imaginaries





















Junot Díaz: a symposium  may 18 & 19 , 2012

About Junot Díaz

Junot Díaz was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, and is the author of Drown (1996) and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize, the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Ainsfield-Wolf Book Award, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. His fiction has appeared in: The New Yorker, African Voices, Best American Short Stories (1996, 1997, 1999, 2000), Pushcart Prize XXII and The O. Henry Prize Stories 2009. A new book by Díaz entitled This is How You Lose Her (Riverhead), will be published in fall 2012. He has received a Eugene McDermott Award, a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, a Lila Acheson Wallace Readers Digest Award, the 2002 Pen/Malamud Award, the 2003 US-Japan Creative Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is the fiction editor at the Boston Review. Junot Díaz is currently the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing at MIT.


Goals of the Symposium

The goal of "Junot Díaz: A Symposium" is to assess the literary and cultural significance of Pulitzer Prize-winning Dominican American writer Junot Díaz. Junot Díaz’s short fiction, novel, essays, and interviews are changing the landscape of Américan imaginaries. In hosting this event, we are bringing scholars working within the paradigms of Latina/o literary and cultural studies into conversation with those working on immigrant and diasporic cultures to appraise what we consider an emergent dialogue in the fields of Latina/o, Latin American, and U.S. critical studies. Participants are both established and emergent scholars who come from a variety of universities, departments, and field-imaginaries.
Our schedule consists of four roundtables and a CCSRE Kieve Distinguished Address given by Junot Díaz. The roundtables will address the separate but interrelated themes of the symposium: the place of Junot Díaz’s trans-American fiction and essays in 21st-century Américan literatures and cultures; the planetary forces animating his texts; the continued and perhaps resurgent significance of race, latinidad, gender, sexuality, ability, and poverty as analytic and experiential categories in his fiction and essays. In opting for a roundtable format, our aim is for the symposium to proceed less as a series of monologues and more as a series of dialogues and debates that develop over the course of our two days together.


Schedule

Friday, May 18

Breakfast (8:45-9:15 am)
Opening Remarks (9:15-9:30 am)
Roundtable 1 (9:30-11:30 am)
Arlene Dávila
Lyn Di Iorio
Claudia Milian
José David Saldívar
Lunch (11:30 am -1:00 pm)
Roundtable 2 (1:00-3:00 pm)
Silvio Torres-Saillant
Jennifer Harford Vargas
Enmanuel Martínez
Edrik López
Kieve Lecture Address (4:00-5:30 pm)
Junot Díaz presenting the Kieve Distinguished Lecture Speaker Series Address


Saturday, May 19

Breakfast (9:30-10:00 am)
Roundtable 3 (10:00-12:00 am)
Ernesto Martínez
Julie Avril Minich
Paula Moya
John “Rio” Riofrio
Lunch (Noon-2:00 pm)
Roundtable 4 (2:00-4:00 pm)
Guadalupe Carrillo
Monica Hanna
Elena Machado Sáez
Ramón Saldívar
Closing Remarks (4:00-4:30 pm)


Participants

Guadalupe Carrillo
Guadalupe Carrillo is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at Stanford University. She specializes in 20th and 21st century American Literature, Latino cultural production and affect theory. Her dissertation, entitled "Geographies of Feeling: Ethnic Affect and Sentimental Acculturation," examines how contemporary US ethnic writers use formal experimentation to help create a new sense of ethnicity in a post-civil rights, multicultural United States.
Arlene Dávila
Arlene Dávila is Professor of Anthropology and Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. She is a cultural anthropologist interested in urban and ethnic studies, the political economy of culture, and media and consumption studies. Her latest book is Culture Works: Space, Value and Mobility Across the Neoliberal Americas, andher previous books include Latino Spin: Public Image and the Whitewashing of Race, Barrio Dreams: Puerto Ricans, Latinos, and the Neoliberal City and Latinos Inc: Marketing and the Making of a People.
http://anthropology.as.nyu.edu/object/arlenedavila.html

Lyn Di Iorio
Lyn Di Iorio is the author of Killing Spanish: Literary Essays on Ambivalent U.S. Latino/a Identity and the co-editor of Contemporary U.S. Latino/a Literary Criticism. In 2011, she also published her first novel, Outside the Bones, which is currently a finalist for the Book of the Year prize, awarded to books published by independent presses. Lyn is also number two on the 2012 Top Ten Latino Authors to Watch (and Read) List. She teaches Caribbean and Latino literatures, creative writing, and special topics at the City College of New York and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York..
http://www1.ccny.cuny.edu/prospective/humanities/english/faculty/ldiIorio.cfm

Monica Hanna
Monica Hanna is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at the United States Naval Academy (Annapolis).  She studies contemporary US, Latin American, and European literatures, specializing in US Latin@ literatures, with particular focus on transnationalism and literary representations of national histories. She has published in various journals including Callaloo. She is also the founding co-editor of Global Graffiti, an online journal.

Jennifer Harford Vargas
Jennifer Harford Vargas is Assistant Professor of English at Bryn Mawr College. Her research and teaching interests include Latina/o literature, hemispheric American studies, theories of the novel, race and ethnicity, decolonialism, and testimonial narratives in the Americas. She is currently working on a book manuscript on Latina/o dictatorship novels.

Edrik López
Edrik López is an Assistant Professor of English at Fairfield University in Connecticut. He received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 2009.  He teaches course on American Poetry, Literary Theory, Ethnic Literature, and Cultural Studies. His most recent articles include, “Sycorax and Son,” and “The Trope of the Nostalgic Jíbaro in U.S. Puerto Rican Literature.”
http://www.fairfield.edu/academic/profile.html?id=285

Claudia Milian
Claudia Milian is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Romance Studies & African & African American Studies at Duke University. Milian teaches courses on U.S. Latina/o cultural productions, comparative African American and U.S. Latina/o epistemologies, Central American literature, and critical race studies in the Americas. Among her research interests are approaches to mestizaje and creolization, transnational identities and cultural representations in new world postcolonial studies, with an emphasis on migration, the malaise of alienation, and citizenship. Milian is currently working on a book that remaps how double consciousness, color-lines, and the borderlands are deployed by Africana, Chicana/o, and Latina/o subjects. At the same time, she is working on a new theoretical grammar that explores the relationship between (Africana) blackness and (Latina/o) brownness, their intersections, overlapping discourses, and differences.
http://aaas.duke.edu/people?subpage=profile&Gurl=%2Faas%2FAAAS&Uil=claudia.milian

Elena Machado Sáez
Elena Machado Sáez obtained her PhD in English from SUNY Stony Brook and is currently an Associate Professor of English at Florida Atlantic University, where she teaches American, Caribbean and US Latino literatures. Machado Sáez is coauthor of The Latino/a Canon and the Emergence of Post-Sixties Literature (Palgrave Macmillan 2007) as well as the essay, “The Formation of a Latino/a Canon,” in the Routledge Companion to Latino Literature (September 2012). She has published articles in Anthurium, Contemporary Literature, Latino Studies, MELUS, Phoebe, and Small Axe, and is completing a book manuscript on the market aesthetics of Caribbean diasporic historical fiction.
http://www.fau.edu/english/facultypages_machado.php

Enmanuel Martínez
Enmanuel Martínez is a Ph.D. student in the Program in Comparative Literature at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Enmanuel’s research interests include 20th and 21st century Latin American and U.S. Latino/a literature, post-colonial trauma studies, as well as queer nationalism and trans-nationalism. He was recently awarded the 2012 Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship.

Ernesto Martínez
Ernesto Javier Martínez is Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and of Ethnic Studies at the University of Oregon. He is the author of On Making Sense: Queer Race Narratives of Intelligibility (Stanford University Press, Fall 2012), as well as the co-editor, with Michael Hames-García, of Gay Latino Studies: A Critical Reader (Duke University Press, 2011).
http://ethnic.uoregon.edu/profile/martinez

Julie Avril Minich
Julie Avril Minich is Assistant Professor of English at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Her research and teaching interests include Chicana/o and Latina/o cultural studies, feminist theory, queer theory, and disability studies. She is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Accessible Citizenships: Disability, Nation, and the Cultural Politics of Greater Mexico.
http://www.units.muohio.edu/english/people/faculty/I_P/MinichJulie.htm

Paula M. L. Moya
Paula M. L. Moya is Associate Professor of the Department of English at Stanford University. Her publications include essays on race and ethnicity, feminist theory, multicultural pedagogy, and Latina/o and Chicana/o literature and identity. She is the author of Learning from Experience: Minority Identities, Multicultural Struggles (UC Press 2002) and the co-editor, with Hazel Rose Markus, of Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century (W.W. Norton 2010) and, with Michael Hames-García, of Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism (UC Press 2000). She also co-edited with Linda Martín Alcoff, Michael Hames-García and Satya Mohanty a collection of essays entitled Identity Politics Reconsidered (Palgrave 2006). Her current book project is a scholarly study of literature written by women of color in the last three decades of the 20th century.
http://www.stanford.edu/~pmoya/

John “Rio” Riofrio
John “Rio” Riofrio is Assistant Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at the College of William & Mary. He has published on the confluence of Latin American and Latino studies, is at work on a book-length manuscript entitled Continental Shifts: Hemispheric Migrations and the Struggles over Latino/a Identity in the Americas, and writes opinion pieces in Huffington Post on topics ranging from Arizona’s ban in Ethnic Studies, to a media review of CNN’s Latino in America, to cable television’s obsession with big, white families.

José David Saldívar
José David Saldívar is a scholar of late postcontemporary culture, especially the minoritized literatures of the United States, Latin America, and the transamerican hemisphere, and of border narrative and poetics from the sixteenth century to the present. He is the author of The Dialectics of Our America: Genealogy, Cultural Critique, and Literary History (Duke University Press, 1991), Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies (University of California Press, 1997), and Trans-Americanity: Subaltern Modernities, Global Coloniality, and the Cultures of Greater Mexico (Duke University Press, 2012), coeditor (with Héctor Calderón) of Criticism in the Borderlands (Duke University Press, 1991), and editor of The Rolando Hinojosa Reader (Arte Público Press, 1985).
https://www.stanford.edu/dept/DLCL/cgi-bin/web/people/josé-david-sald%C3%ADvar

Ramón Saldívar
Ramón Saldívar is the The Hoagland Family Professor in Humanities and Sciences and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. His teaching and research areas have concentrated on the areas of cultural studies, literary theory, modernism, Chicano narrative, and post-colonial literature. He is also interested in the history of the novel and nineteenth and early twentieth-century British and American comparative studies. He is the author of The Borderlands of Culture: Américo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary (2006), Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference (1990), and Figural Language in the Novel: The Flowers of Speech from Cervantes to Joyce (1984). He was recently awarded the highly prestigious National Humanities Medal (2012).
http://www.stanford.edu/~saldivar/biography.html

Silvio Torres-Saillant
Silvio Torres-Saillant is Professor of English and Latino-Latin American Studies at Syracuse University. His research and teaching interests revolve around some central concerns pertaining to the enduring legacy of the colonial transaction spearheaded by the Christian West starting over five centuries ago. As such, his projects touch on race, ethnicity, intellectual history, imperial violence, the problem of culture and civilization, diaspora, migration, the tension between the ethnic and the human, and the necessity to interrupt the logic of maltreatment that informs the corporate capitalist system spawned by the colonial transaction. He is the author of El Tigueraje Intelectual; An Intellectual History of the Caribbean; Diasporic Disquisitions: Dominicanists, Transnationalism, and the Community; El retorno de las yolas; Introduction to Dominican Blackness; The Dominican-Americans (with Ramona Hernández); and Caribbean Poetics. He has also co-edited The Challenges of Higher Education in the Hispanic Caribbean, Desde la orilla: Hacia una nacionalidad sin desalojos, and Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage (Vol. IV).
http://as-cascade.syr.edu/profiles/pages/torres-saillant-silvio.html


The 2012 Anne & Loren Kieve
Distinguished Speaker Lecture

About the Kieve Distinguished Lecture

Through the generosity of the Anne and Loren Kieve Distinguished Speaker Fund, the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity is able to bring leading scholars, public intellectuals, and artists to address the Stanford community on vital issues relating to race and ethnicity.
The Anne and Loren Kieve Distinguished Speaker series began in November 2005 and has continued to bring outstanding scholars in race and ethnicity to speak each year. This lecture is free and open to the public as well as to the Stanford community.
To attend, please RSVP to Tracy Holmes at tcholmes@stanford.edu


Sponsors
African & African American Studies
American Studies
Asian American Studies
Clayman Institute for Gender Research
CCSRE (Kieve Endowment & Ramón Saldívar)
Chicano Studies
Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS)
Department of Comparative Literature
Department of Anthropology
Department of English
Department of German
Department of Sociology
Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages (DLCL)
Program in Creative Writing
El Centro Chicano
Feminist Studies
Department of French and Italian
Graduate and Undergraduate Studies (Deans Weersing & Saller)
Stanford Humanities Center
Iberian and Latin American Cultures (ILAC)
Institute for Diversity in the Arts (IDA)
Jewish Studies
Modern Thought and Literature (MTL)
Native American Studies
Provost Etchemendy's Office
Stanford Institute for Creativity & the Arts (SiCa)
TransAmerican Studies Working Group
Vice Provost of Graduate Education (VPGE) Graduate Dean Pat Gumport

http://ccsre.stanford.edu/junotdiaz/index.html

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