HYBRIDITY
Examining Processes of Circulation, Collaboration, and Conflict
Latin American Studies Center
Annual Student Conference
May 5-6, 2016
Special Events Room, 6137 McKeldin Library
Save the date for LASC’s 2016 student conference, an annual event that started 11 years ago! Activities include pre-conference graduate student workshop, 23paper presentations, keynote panel with four visiting scholars, art exhibition, reception with live Brazilian music, and specially brewed Latin American libations.
In a dynamic collection of papers, students presentations and keynote panelists will examine the "hybrid" (híbrido, hybride, ibrid) as a contested concept, phenomenon, and category of analysis. The term encourages us to consider processes of mixture, and transgression; of boundaries, their construction and contestation; of exclusive and inclusive cultural practices and ways of thinking. Cultural groups circulate, collaborate, and clash, continually forming new social configurations and spaces.
Schedule of Events
THURSDAY
3:30-3:45, check in, director’s welcome
3:45-5:00pm, Panel 1: Power of Markets and Policy Making
5:00-6:30pm, Panel 2: Strategic Images of Gender and Sexuality
6:45-8:30pm, pre-conference workshop (informal discussion of scholarly texts about “Hybridity") and opening reception
FRIDAY
9:00-9:30am, check in, bagels and coffee, director’s welcome
9:30-10:30am, Panel 3: Educating Youth and Struggles for Inclusion
10:30am-12pm, Panel 4: Discourses of Identity and Resistance
12:30-2:00pm, KEYNOTE PANEL
2:15-3:30pm, Panel 5: Negotiating Latino Citizenship
3:30-4:30pm, Panel 6: Rhythmic Remixes and Sonic Movements
4:30-5:15pm, Art and Performance Exhibitions
5:15-7:00pm, Reception with live Brazilian music (DC Choro) and artisan beers brewed especially for LASC by Olive & O’Higgins.
Friday Keynote Panel: Perspectives on "Hybridity" in Latin America and the Caribbean
Join us for the keynote discussion, a multi-disciplinary conversation open to audience participation with the following panelists:
Dr. Benjamin Cowan, George Mason (History and Art History)
Dr. Paul B. Miller, Vanderbilt (French and Latin American Studies)
Dr. Scott Freeman, American University (Anthropology)
Dr. Joanne Rappaport, Georgetown (Anthropology)
Dr. Merle Collins, UMD (English)
Moderator: Dr. David Sartorius, UMD (History)
Panelist Biographies:
Merle Collins
Merle Collins is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Maryland. She holds a master's degree in Latin American Studies from Georgetown University and a PhD in Government from the London School of Economics. She is a distinguished Grenadian writer of fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and critical essays. Her most recent essay, entitled “What happened? Grenada: A Retrospective Journey, assessing the Grenada Revolution and its aftermath,” was published in 2015. In 2013, she published a biography of Dame Hilda Bynoe, the first female Governor in the British Commonwealth. She is producer of a documentary, Saracca and Nation, which explores African influences on Caribbean culture. In 2011, Peepal Tree Press re-issued her 1997 novel,Angel, and a short story collection, The Ladies are Upstairs. She is founder of the Hyattsville-based Carivision Community Theatre.
Benjamin Cowan
Ben Cowan received his BA from Harvard University and his MA and PhD from UCLA. His interest in right-wing radicalism, morality, sexuality, and 20th-century imperialism has led him to research focused on Cold War Brazil, with a specialization in the cultural and gender history of the post-1964 era. Cohan's most recent book is Securing Sex: Morality and Repression in the Making of Cold War Brazil (2016). He has also published articles in American Quarterly, The Journal of the History of Sexuality, The Hispanic American Historical Review, and Radical History Review. At George Mason, Dr. Cowan teaches on broad hemispheric topics as well as right-wing activism, masculinity, sexuality, and modernization in Brazil.
Scott Freeman
Scott Freeman is an environmental anthropologist who works extensively in both Haiti and the Dominican Republic. He is currently concerned with the bureaucracies of international aid projects and how bureaucratic and financial procedures in international development undermine conservation interventions. His work also examines cooperative and rotational labor forms in both the Dominican Republic and Haiti, and how aid interventions have attempted to coop various forms of agricultural solidarity. In the Dominican Republic, he has conducted research on sustainable fishery programs and the relationship between NGOs and coffee cooperatives. In Haiti, his research has covered the vetiver perfume industry and soil conservation/reforestation efforts.
Paul B. Miller
Paul B. Miller is a PhD in Comparative Literature and he is committed to comparative approaches to the literatures, languages, music and cultures of the Francophone, Hispanic and Anglophone Caribbean. His book is titled Elusive Origins: The Enlightenment in the Modern Caribbean Historical Imagination (2010), in which he discusses the legacy and re-evaluation of the impact of the Enlightenment in the Caribbean as reflected in six modern Caribbean authors from across linguistic and national boundaries. His current book project is about the “Winward Passages” and constellates key moments of cultural exchange and dialogue between Cuban and Haitian intellectuals.
Joanne Rappaport
Joanne Rappaport, an anthropologist with a joint appointment in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Department of Anthropology at Georgetown University, received her PhD in sociocultural anthropology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her interests include: ethnicity, historical anthropology, new social movements, literacy, race, collaborative research methodologies, and Andean ethnography and ethnohistory. Rappaport has published four single-authored books in English: Cumbe Reborn: An Andean Ethnography of History; The Disappearing Mestizo: Configuring Difference in the Colonial New Kingdom of Granada; Intercultural Utopias: Public Intellectuals, Cultural Experimentation, and Ethnic Pluralism in Colombia; and The Politics of Memory: Native Historical Interpretation in the Colombian Andes and has coauthored Beyond the Lettered City: Indigenous Literacies in the Andes with Tom Cummins. Together with Abelardo Ramos, Graciela Bolaños, and Carlos Miñana, she coauthored ¿Qué pasaría si la escuela…? 30 años de construcción de una educación propia. She is currently serving as Vice-President of the Latin American Studies Association and in 2016 will become President. Her current work focuses on the field notes of Colombian sociologist and founder of the methodology of participatory action research, Orlando Fals Borda.
David Sartorius (Moderator)
David Sartorius specializes in colonial Latin American history with a focus on race and the African diaspora in the Caribbean. He is the author of Ever Faithful: Race, Loyalty, and the Ends of Empire in Spanish Cuba, and the co-editor of two special issues of journals dedicated to transnational history: "Dislocations across the Americas" (Social Text, 2010) and "Revolutions and Heterotopias" (Journal of Transnational American Studies, 2012). He is the author of essays about free-colored militias, race and historical memory, slave provision grounds, the 1812 Spanish Constitution, and the place of Darwinism and anthropology in nineteenth-century Cuba. His current research considers the use of passports in Cuba. Sartorius received his PhD from the University of North Carolina and held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Maryland's Latin American Studies Center before joining the Department of History. He is currently a member of the editorial collective of Social Text and the editorial board of The Americas, and is co-director of the Tepoztlán Institute for the Transnational History of the Americas.
