Writers, Masses, Multitudes
Liberation Movements and the Neo-Liberal World Order

A Lannan Literary Symposium
February 13-14 2007
Georgetown University

The two-day symposium will engage questions such as tribal activism and resistance in India; the critical legacies of decolonization in the academy; climate change and its relationship to human emancipation; literature and the aesthetics of resistance; and other topics.

NGUGI WA THIONG'O . GANESH DEVY . KIM STANLEY ROBINSON . DAKXIN BAJRANGE CHHARA OMEKONGO . DINAW MENGESTU . NOKUTHULA MAZIBUKO . HENRY SCHWARZ

BLACK THEATRE ENSEMBLE . AWAAZ ("VOICE")

Click for event schedule

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SPONSORS
Lannan Literary Programs . Program on Justice and Peace
Office of the College Dean . Lacay Lecture Fund . GU Lecture Fund . Department of English

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Books provided by Rod Smith
Bridge Street Books
2814 Pennsylvania Ave NW (at M St NW)

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The Georgetown University Lannan Literary Programs sponsors annual readings, talks, seminars, and symposia from the world of contemporary writing. For further information, please visit http://lannan.georgetown.edu. Henry Schwarz, Director, Program on Justice and Peace, schwarzh@georgetown.edu. Mark McMorris, Director, Lannan Literary Programs, mcmorrim@georgetown.edu.

 

Schedule

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 13

4:00 - 4:30PM (Copley Formal Lounge)
WELCOME & INTRODUCTION
Henry Schwarz, Program on Justice and Peace

4:30 - 5:45PM
SYMPOSIUM I (Copley Formal Lounge)
Masses as a problematic for framing relationships between groups and their leaders.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Ganesh Devy, Kim Stanley Robinson, DaKxin Bajrange Chhara, Nokuthula Mazibuko, Dinaw Mengestu.

6:00 - 7:30PM
Break for dinner.

8:00 - 9:00PM (ICC Auditorium)
READING / PERFORMANCE

Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Lannan Distinguished Reader at Georgetown University, 2007
Reading from his recent work.

9:15 - 10:30PM (ICC Foyer)
OPENING RECEPTION

Books will be available for purchase and signing.

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WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 14

10:00 - 10:45AM (Copley)
LECTURE & DISCUSSION

“After Amnesia: Culture and Development.” Ganesh Devy rethinks center and margin in literary history.

11:00 - 11:45AM (Copley)
LECTURE & DISCUSSION

“Abrupt Climate Change and Human Emancipation: Terraforming Earth.” Kim Stanley Robinson asks whether the Earth has a future.

12:00 - 1:00PM
Break for lunch.

1:15 - 2:15PM (ICC)
SYMPOSIUM II
The critical legacies of decolonization.

An excerpt from Manthia Diawara’s film Who’s Afraid of Ngugi? will frame this discussion of decolonization and the academy. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Nokuthula Mazibuko, Dinaw Mengestu, and others.

2:15 - 2:45 (ICC)
LEGACIES: THEATRE

Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s “This Time Tomorrow” in a dramatized reading by the Black Theatre Ensemble.

3:00 - 4: 30PM (ICC)
FILM & PERFORMANCE
A user’s manual for the construction of a radical theatre.

DaKxin Chhara, Ganesh Devy, and Awaaz, Georgetown's South Asian theatre group, stage an improvisational talk and performance: “Acting Like a Thief: Ordinary Crime and Resistance.” Accompanied by screenings of Acting Like a Thief (dir. Shashwati Talukdar) and Bulldozer (dir. DaKxin Chhara).

5:00 - 6:00PM (ICC)
KEYNOTE ADDRESS
The Lacay Lecture Series, 2006-2007

"The Word Made Flesh: Literature and the Aesthetics of Resistance" by Ngugi wa Thiong'o.

6:00- 6:30PM (ICC Galleria)
LACAY RECEPTION

6:30-7:45PM
Break for dinner.

8:00 -9:00PM (ICC)
READING

Kim Stanley Robinson reads from his recent fiction.

9:00 - 10:00PM (ICC Foyer)
RECEPTION & BOOKSIGNING

 

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DaKxin Chhara is an award winning filmmaker, playwright, actor, director and activist from the Chhara community of Ahmedabad, in western India. His Five Plays is forthcoming from Orient Longman, New Delhi. He teaches on the faculty of the National Tribal Academy at Tejgadh, Gujarat, and is a Fellow, Bhasha Research and Publication Centre in Baroda. He has produced cultural programs for the Information Department of Gujarat State; directed over 50 television programs for Tara Gujarati Channel; and directed 8 documentaries on the 2000 earthquake for Gujarat government. His independent documentaries include Fight for Survival; Bulldozer; Thought for Development, and his theatrical credits as Writer, Director and Actor include Budhan; Pinya Hari Kale Ki Maut (Death of Pinya Hari Kale;Encounter; Majhab Hameen Sikhata; Aapas Mein Bair Rakhna; Bhoma; Khoj; Ulgulan; Muje Mat Maro…Saab; Kahaniyon Ka Rang Manch; Child Pornography; Balko No Bhavishya Khatra Ma (Future of child, in danger); Pollution Ki Karo: No Entry; Ek Nai Pehchan. He is the Founder of Budhan Theatre in Ahmedabad. He has organized the International Convention of Nomads and Denotified Tribes 31st Aug. 1998; Cultural Expression of Slum children of Ahmedabad, 2003 by Sneha Prayas; National Convention of Nomads and Adivasis, 2005; ‘Samvad’ Film Festival in Gujarat Social Forum, 2006.

Ganesh Devy is General Editor for a 50 volume series on Literature in Indian Tribal Languages under the Sahitya Akademi Project (18 Volumes Published till 2006), and has authored approximately 120 research articles in journals and anthologies in India and outside India. He contributes frequently to newspapers The Times of India and The Hindu. He has founded and edited three magazines: Setu (English & Gujarati) A Journal of Literary Translation 1983-90; Dhol:  A Journal of Tribal Dialects in 10 editions 1998 to date; Budhan (English):  A Journal of Denotified & Nomadic Tribes, 1998 to date. He has received numerous awards, including the1992 Katha Award for Translation; 1994 Central Sahitya Academi Award for After Amnesia; 1999 Gunther Sontheimer Award for Innovative Cultural Work; 2001 SAARC Literary Award for Innovative Contribution to  Literature  and Social Reform; 2003 Prince Claus Award (Netherlands); 2006 Bhasha  Bharati Award for book in Gujarati, Aadivaasi Jaane Chhe. He has founded several important institutions: Bhasha Research & Publication Centre,1996 for the study of Tribal Languages, Literature and Arts; Adivasi Academy, Tejgadh, 1999 for Research and Training in Tribal Studies; Denotified & Nomadic Tribes Rights Action Group, 1998, a national network of activists for the human rights of the nomadic communities.

Omékongo Dibinga is a spoken word artist, rapper,  actor, activist, and Founder & CEO of Free Your Mind Publishing. A first generation Congolese-American, Omékongo writes and performs poetry in English, French and Swahili.  His first CD, A Young Black Man's Anthem: Love, Afrika and Revolution Revisited, won the 2003 Cambridge Poetry Award for Best CD. His fourth and most recent CD is a rap & spoken word hybrid entitled, Reality Show. He has lectured at universities and poetry venues nationwide and has performed in South Africa, England, Congo-Kinshasa, Tanzania, France, Cuba, and Canada.  A dedicated educator for over 20 years, Omékongo focuses his talents on bridge building between young Africans throughout the Diaspora and helping to improve cultural understanding among all races.

Nokuthula Mazibuko, writer and filmmaker, was born in 1973 in Soweto, South Africa. She is writer and director of the documentary films Lady Was a Mshoza (1999) and The Gift of Song (2000). Her films on South African writers have appeared in the series Mantswe a Bonono (2005). A writer for numerous educational television and radio programs, she spent two years with the BBC’s African Bureau as a director and producer of news and short features. Ms. Mazibuko has published two novellas for young people, In the Fast Lane (2003)and A Mozambican Summer (2006). She is currently World Literature Residency fellow at George Washington University, in Washington, DC.

Dinaw Mengestu was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1978.  In 1980 he immigrated to the United States with his mother and sister, joining his father, who had fled the communist revolution in Ethiopia two years before. He is a graduate of Georgetown University and of Columbia University's MFA program in fiction. He is the recipient of a 2006 fellowship in fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts. His first novel, The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears, will be published this March by Penguin Riverhead. He has also recently reported stories for Harper's and Jane magazine, profiling a young woman who was kidnapped and forced to become a soldier in the brutal war in Uganda, and for Rolling Stone on the tragedy in Darfur. The Lannan Visiting Writer at Georgetown University for spring 2007, Mengestu lives in New York City.

Henry Schwarz is Director of the Program on Justice and Peace. He is an expert in literary theory and cultural studies; Marxism, theory of history; South Asian literature; film. His books include Contributions to Bengal Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Approach (1998); Blackwell Companion to Postcolonial Studies (1999); Writing Cultural History in Colonial and Postcolonial India (1997); Reading the Shape of the World: Toward an International Cultural Studies (1996); and various articles on colonialism, Third World literature, Peace Studies, and literary and cultural theory in general. Schwarz earned his Ph.D. from Duke University, an M.A. from Rutgers University and B.A. from McGill University. He is an associate professor of English at Georgetown University.

Kim Stanley Robinson is an American science fiction writer, probably best known for his award-winning Mars trilogy. He has been widely acclaimed by readers and critics since the beginning of his career, and is considered by many to be one of the finest living writers of science fiction. His work delves into ecological and sociological themes regularly, and many of his novels appear to be the direct result of his own scientific fascinations, such as the 15 years of research and lifelong fascination with Mars which culminated in his most famous work. He has, due to his fascination with Mars, become a member of the Mars Society. His major novels are: The Wild Shore (1984), The Gold Coast (1988) and Pacific Edge (1990) (The California Trilogy), Red Mars (1993), Green Mars (1994), and Blue Mars (1996) (the Mars Trilogy), Forty Signs of Rain (2004), Fifty Degrees Below (2005) and Sixty Days and Counting (2007) (the Washington Trilogy).

Born in 1938, Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s early work was written in English under the name of James Ngugi. Novels such as The River Between (1965), A Grain of Wheat (1967), and Petals of Blood (1977) established his reputation as the foremost writer in post-Independence Kenya. In the 1970s, he abandoned English for Gikuyu and Swahili, writing his critical apologia on this subject in Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (1986). Other Anglophone works of literary and cultural criticism include the trans-Atlantic Homecoming: Essays on African and Caribbean Literature, Culture, and Politics (1972), Barrel of a Pen: Resistance to Repression in Neo-Colonial Kenya (1983), and Moving the Center: The Struggle for Cultural Freedom (1993). Subsequent to the performance of his play, Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want), he was imprisoned without charge by the Kenyan authorities in a maximum security prison at the end of 1977. The period of his incarceration produced two notable works: the Gikuyu novel Caitaani Mutharabaini, published in translation as Devil on the Cross (1987), and his memoirs, Detained: A Writer's Prison Diary (1981). The novel Murogi wa Kagogo was recently published in English as Wizard of the Crow (2006), from a translation by the author. Having lived and taught for many years in the United States at universities such as Yale and NYU, Ngugi is currently Director of the Center for Writing and Translation, and Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature, at the University of California, Irvine.

For an expanded biography of Ngugi wa Thiong’o, see:
http://www.humanities.uci.edu/icwt/news/ngugi_bio.html

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