January 28th to February 1st 2013, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Pre-conference events:
Sunday 27th
2pm, Native Campus Community Meet-and-Greet with Alanis King, CSP Conference Room, Angell Hall, Main Campus
Monday 28th
11.30 to 1, Angell Hall 3222
Presentation by Alanis King, an Odawa Playwright/Director originally from the Wikwemikong Unceded Indian Reserve, the first Aboriginal woman to graduate from the National Theatre School of Canada, to English and Ojibwa language undergraduate students.
Tuesday 29th
Symposium Start:
Afternoon, 2pm, Duderstadt Center Video Studio, North Campus
Emilie Monnet is an interdisciplinary artist with Anishnabe and French heritage and a graduate of Ondinnok’s First Nations Theatre training program – in partnership with The National Theatre School of Canada (Montreal, 2007). Emilie co-directed and performed Bird Messengers, for which she was awarded the LOGIQ prize for the most outstanding Art/Culture project of 2011. In May 2012, Emilie directed Songs of Mourning, Songs of Life, a musical theatrical show addressing legacies of genocide and the role of art for collective mourning, in collaboration with the Aboriginal women’s drum group Odaya and the Rwandan traditional musical ensemble, Komezinganzo.
She has two works in development: OKINUM, a one-women interdisciplinary performance inspired by her great great grand-mother, and another theatre collaboration with indigenous artists from the Amazon, Colombia. Emilie’s artistic engagement is inspired by years of social activism with indigenous organizations in Canada and Latin America, and community art projects with incarcerated women and Aboriginal youth. Emilie is the founder and Artistic Director of ONISHKA, an arts organization that fosters artistic collaborations between indigenous peoples worldwide while honoring their richness, diversity and resilience (www.onishka.org).
Evening, Central Campus North Quad, Room 2435:
7pm, Formal Symposium Opening with Heid Erdrich
Poet Heid E. Erdrich, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibwe, was born in Breckenridge, Minnesota, and raised in nearby Wahpeton, North Dakota, where her Ojibwe mother and German American father taught at the Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school.
Erdrich’s poetry often explores themes of indigenous culture, mothering, and the natural world, using the cadence of oral storytelling and a close attention to sound and meter to drive poems rich with sensory and dreamlike imagery. Erdrich is the author of several poetry collections, including Cell Traffic (2012), National Monuments (2008), winner of the Minnesota Book Award; The Mother’s Tongue (2005), part of Salt Publishing’s award-winning Earthworks Series of Native American and Latin American literature; and Fishing for Myth (1997). In a 2006 review, Twin Cities Daily Planet critic Erin Lynn Marsh described The Mother’s Tongue as “an exploration of our culture’s relationship with the term ‘mother’ and of the beginnings of language.”
With her sister, the writer Louise Erdrich, she founded the Turtle Mountain Writing Workshop. In 2008 the sisters co-founded Birchbark House, an organization that promotes literature written in indigenous languages. The sisters describe their vision on the foundation’s website: “We foresee a vital return to our Native American languages through the efforts of elders that are already underway. In creating ways to keep their words alive, through books, films, teaching and more, we will keep our languages viable and more, we will allow the means for creative fluency, the hallmark of a fully living language.”
Wednesday 30th
11:45 a.m. – 12:45 p.m. Marcie Rendon workshop. Duderstadt Center Video Studio, North Campus.
She will lead a ten-minute play, Friends, which was published in Performing Worlds into Being: Native American Women’s Theater, and which she and the group will translate into Ojibwe for possible production in Winnipeg in 2013. We will have a reading of the script and then work together on translation issues. With 298 and 323, in Duderstadt
6:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m. Angel Sobotta Presentation. CSP Conference Room, Angell Hall
Angel Sobotta (Nez Perce), is a Nez Perce language teacher in the tribal headstart, local schools, and at the Lewis Clark State College in Idaho. She is also a writer and documentary filmmaker of projects like, “’Ipsqilaanx heewtnin’ weestesne – Walking on Sacred Ground – the Nez Perce Lolo Trail” and “Surviving Lewis and Clark: The Niimiipuu Story” both winning the Aurora and Telly awards respectively. She is also a theater maker with the Lapwai Afterschool Programs, teaching language by adapting legends and directing the youth, including “Niimiipuum Titwaatit – The People’s Stories,” an anti-bullying project (2012). Angel is a University of Idaho Interdisciplinary Masters student. Her thesis involves an immersion experience for language teachers by adapting the Nez Perce creation story, written in the Nez Perce language, into a stage play.
Thursday 31st
3:30 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. Virginie Magnat workshop, Duderstadt Center Video Studio, North Campus
Virginie Magnat is Assistant Professor of Performance at University of British Columbia, Okanagan. She conducts embodied research on transmission processes among women performers from different cultures, traditions, and generations; and draws from Indigenous epistemologies and methodologies to examine the interrelation of lived experience, embodied knowledge, tradition, creativity, and spirituality. Her essay “Can Research Become Ceremony? Performance Ethnography and Indigenous Epistemologies” appeared in summer 2012 in the Canadian Theatre Review.
She will share a workshop called “Sharing Embodied Cultural Knowledge Through Traditional Songs.” In this session, participants will be invited to share/teach/learn traditional songs from their cultural legacy so that we can get to know each other through our songs.
6.00 -8.30 Swamp Women/ Miiskwaasinii’ing Nagamojig workshop, Duderstadt Center Video Studio, North Campus
Create a new praise song with the Swamp Women, Miiskwaasinii’ing Nagamojig, among Daphne Odjig’s’s paintings. Come, sing, drum and be part of the community!
Friday 1st of February
On Friday morning, we’ll gather for a workshop sharing and video recording in the Duderstadt Center Video Studio. 10-1.
In the afternoon, we end our gathering with a presentation by Margaret Noori, followed by a communal reflection on aesthetics, women and performance. 2.00-4.30, Duderstadt Center, Conference Room 1180, North Campus.
Margaret Noori (Anishinaabe) received an MFA in Creative Writing and a PhD in English and Linguistics from the University of Minnesota. She is Director of the Comprehensive Studies Program and teaches the Anishinaabe Language and American Indian Literature at the University of Michigan. She is also one of the founders of the drum group Miskwaasining Nagamojig, current President of Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures, one of the Clan Mothers who coordinate the annual Native American Literature Symposium, and member of the Anishinaabemowin-Teg Executive Board. Her book Bwaajimowin: A Dialect of Dreams in Anishinaabe Language and Literature is forthcoming from MSU Press and her poetry has recently appeared in the Michigan Quarterly Review, Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas and Cell Traffic by Heid Erdrich. For more information visit www.ojibwe.net where she and her colleagues have created a space for language that is shared by academics and the native community.
She will be work-shopping a chapter from a forthcoming book on Anishinaabe narrative traditions which traces the way “oral” traditions are actually “physical” performance traditions which carry thought into space and allow us to exchange our interpretations of the world around as word which becomes stage dialogue, story, lyrics or poetry.
Contact for information and queries, contact the symposium directors, Margaret Noori and Petra Kuppers: mnoori@umich.edu and petra@umich.edu
Generous Support provided by the Institute for World Performance Studies, the Rackham Dean’s Strategic Funding, OVPR, LSA, the Humanities Institute and the International Institute, the Digital Media Commons – University Library, the English Language and Literature Department, the Women’s Studies Department, the Performance Studies Reading Group, and the Trauma Studies Collective.
List of 2009 Modern Language Association Convention Papers on Midwest Topics
Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009Source: PMLA Vol 124.6 November 2009
DIVISION MEETINGS
American Indian Literatures
213. Languages in American Indian Literatures
“Oshknishinaabezhibiigejig/New Anishinaabe Writers and Why We Need Them,” Janis Fairbanks, Michigan State University.
526. American Indian Literature and Traditional Ecological Literature
“Anishinabe Ecology in Louise Erdrich’s Master Butcher’s Singing Club,” Marie Satya McDonough, University of Chicago.
Black American Literature and Culture
650. Reading and Race in the Obama Era
“The Obama Phenomenon, Race, and Liberalism,” Justin Leroy, New York University.
“From Ellison to Obama: Dreams of Ultraraciality,” Christopher Powers, University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez.
Gay Studies
472. Critical Exuberance
“The Curious Queer Politics of a ‘Post’-racial Obama Nation,” Marlon Bryan Ross, University of Virginia.
“The Neo-New Deal and Why Obama Doesn’t Want to Think about Sex,” Janet R. Jakobsen, Barnard College.
“States of Crisis: Economic Pain and Political Hope in the Age of Obama,” Lisa Duggan, New York University.
Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century American Literature
14. Protomodernisms
“What Did Hamlin Garland Mean by ‘Modernism’?” Christine L. Holbo, Arizona State University.
“The Experimental Realism of William Dean Howells,” Brian McGrath, Rutgers University, New Brunswick.
“Oz’s Colorful Pedagogy; or Modernism in the Kindergarten,” Nicholas Gaskill, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Nineteenth Century American Literature
570. Time after History
“Space into Time: Ambrose Bierce’s Phenomenological Reduction of History,” Jonathan Elmer, Indiana University, Bloomington.
Non-Fiction Prose Studies, Excluding Biography and Autobiography
22. The Open Letter
“The Open Letter from Phyllis Wheatley to Langston Hughes,” James D. B. McCorkle, Hobart and William Smith Colleges.
Poetry
567. Poetry and Publics
“Walt Whitman and the Death of Lincoln,” Michael Cohen, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge.
Prose Fiction
96. Justice
“Something Rogue: Justice and Commensurability in Toni Morrison’s Later Fiction,” Megan L. Sweeney, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Sociological Approaches to Literature
352. Futures of Collectivity
“Susan Glaspell’s Stages of Thought,” Katherine Biers, Columbia University.
ALLIED AND AFFILIATE ORGANIZATION MEETINGS
American Theatre and Drama Society http://www.atds.org/
281. Drama and Lincoln
“Not-So-Civil War: Lincoln’s Image as Presented in Confederate and Copperhead Drama, 1861-63,” Scott Irelan, Augustana College
“Augustin Daly’s ‘Republic of Suffering’: Catharsis for the Middle Class after the Civil War,” Celia Braxton, Graduate Center, City University of New York.
“From Broadway to Gettysburg: Forrest and Lincoln Perform Politics,” David J. Carlyon, Larchmont, NY.
“Suzan-Lori Parks’s Lincoln: An Interrogation Revisited,” Jayne Austin Williams, University of California-Irvine.
750. Presidents and Plays
“’Damn Job’s a Pain in the Ass’: President ‘Chuck’ Smith, Lesbians, and International Adoption in David Mamet’s November,” Robert Vorlicky, New York University.
College English Association http://www2.widener.edu/~cea/
169. The Profane Prairie: Controversial Stories from the Upper Midwest
“Bianca’s Body,” Teresa Milbrodt, Western State College.
“Twin Jack,” Stephen Powers, Gordon College.
“Expect Major Delays,” Zeke Jarvis, Eureka College.
Ernest Hemingway Foundation and Society http://www.hemingwaysociety.org
59. The Hemingway Letters Project: The Making of the Cambridge Edition of the Collected Letters.
Sandra Spanier, Penn State University, University Park; Michael Dubose, Penn State University, University Park; Linda P. Miller, Penn State University, Abington; Robert Trogdon, Kent State University, Kent, OH. 59
698. Hemingway and African American Writers: New Readings and Teachings
“The Unlikely Couple: Ernest Hemingway and Alice Walker (with a few words on Toni Morrison),”Jacqueline Vaught Brogan, University of Notre Dame 698
“Ellison, Hemingway, Wright: Tracing relations inside the Transparent Jug,” Gary Holcomb, Ohio University, Athens.
“Ernest Hemingway and James Baldwin: American Masculinity in Crisis,” Jessica Kent, Boston University
Langston Hughes Society http://www.langstonhughessociety.org/
38. Langston Hughes and Transnational Liberation: Aesthetic Overtures
“Literary Migrations: Transnationalism in the Poetry of Langston Hughes,” Sharon Lynette Jones, Wright State University
“Black Transnationalism and the Political Aesthetics of Ask Your Mama,” John t. Lowney, Saint John’s University, NY
“Langston Hughes and the stereo Acoustics of Global Black Solidarity,” Tsitsi Jaji, University of Pennsylvania.
737. Langston Hughes and Transnational Liberation: Ideological Underpinnings
“Langston Hughes: The Father of a World Black Consciousness Movement,” Tara T. Green, University of North Carolina, Greensboro
“James Mercer Langston Hughes: ‘Poet Laureate,’ ‘Dean of Black American Writers, a Self-Proclaimed ‘Literary Sharecropper,’ ‘Radical Socialist,’ ‘Cultural Ambassador,’ and ‘Possibly One of America’s Earliest Postcolonial Thinkers,” Karima K. Jeffrey, Hampton University
“Engagement in the antifascist Movement and the transnational Liberation of Minorities in the Literary Works of Langston Hughes,” Char Prieto, California State University, Chico
Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature http://www.ssml.org/
67. Sex, Literature, and the Midwest
“Babbitt’s Fairychild,” Marcella Frydman, Harvard University
“ ‘A Fresh Green breast of the New World’: The Great Gatsby and Lolita,” John Rohrkemper, Elizabethtown College
“ ‘It Might Be Something Awful’: The Movement of Sex in the Plays of William Inge,” Michael S. Schwartz, Widener University
“ ‘I’m Fine. I Just Got the Plains’: Geography and Sex in Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County,” Marilyn Judith Atlas, Ohio University, Athens
725. Midwestern Literature: Explorations of Nature and the Natural
“Hamlin Garland and the Landscapes of American Populism,” Jonathan Berliner, University of Southern California
“Familiar with Walden: Gene Stratton-Porter’s Plunge into Indiana’s Swamps,” Carol Elizabeth Dietrich, DeVry University, OH
“Ecology and the National Identity in Lockridge’s Raintree County,” Frederick Oswin Waage, East Tennessee State University
“James Wright, Franz Wright, and Blessing of Compost,” Beverly J. Hogue, Marietta College
Mark Twain Circle of America http://www.honors.illinois.edu/files/mtcircle/
579. Mark Twain in the New Millennium
“Staying Power: Twain’s Place in the Twenty-First-Century Classroom and Beyond,” Jocelyn Ann Chadwick, Discovery Education
“The Reading Group in Huckleberry Finn,” Anthony Joseph beret, Saint Joseph’s University
“Science Fiction’s Modest Witness: Ethical Consciousness and the Narration of Destruction and Creation of A Connecticut Yankee,” Juliana Chow, University of California, Berkeley
For abstracts, visit www.honors,uiuc.edu/files/mtcircle
765. Mark Twain’s Nineteenth-Century Context
“Race, Liberalism, and Huckleberry Finn,” Philip Goldstein, University of Delaware, Wilmington
“Never the Twain Shall Meet: Travel and Double-Consciousness in the Works of Mark Twain and James Weldon Johnson,” Richard Hardack, University of Delaware, Wilmington
“The Persecution and Comfort of Mark Twain’s Fan Letters,” Courtney Bates, Washington University
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