BCRW Fall 2015 Newsletter
A Note From BCRW Director Tina Campt
I first set foot on the Barnard campus in 1982, at the tender age of 17, at a reception for admitted students. I entered Barnard Hall, gazing down that impressive hallway at the other young women assembled there. The next thing I remember was looking for a payphone, calling my godmother in Queens and asking her to come get me. I was convinced I wasn’t cool enough for Barnard. Fifteen years later, I returned to campus at the invitation of Janet Jakobsen, who asked me to give a seminar as part of BCRW’s Difficult Dialogues Project. The seminar was held in 101 Barnard Hall (where I’d turned on my heels and fled fifteen years prior) and the conversation and community in that room was a revelation. I was finally cool enough! After a year of learning, dreaming, and scheming with BCRW’s amazing staff and advisory board, I’m thrilled to embark on my inaugural year as Director.
The fall semester begins with events that explore transnational feminist knowledge and creative production in the Caribbean, starting off with the second iteration of Caribbean Feminisms on the Page. We welcome back Barnard alum Edwidge Danticat ‘90 in conversation with rising literary talent Victoria Brown. BCRW will also host Policing the Crises, a conference engaging the legacy of Caribbean cultural theorist Stuart Hall and his contributions to feminist and neoliberal critique. Finally, BCRW Associate Director Tami Navarro will offer a lecture on the effects of neoliberalism on young women in the US Virgin Islands.
October’s events tackle crucial concepts for feminist theory and activism. The Keywords/Key Questions Symposium launches a groundbreaking collection of essays on Disability Studies. Senior Activist Fellow Katherine Acey queries the possibilities for intergenerational activism at a BCRW lunchtime lecture. Denise Ferreira da Silva asks us to think past the limits of resistance as the ultimate goal of feminist theory and praxis. We end the semester with a series of lectures by feminist scholars who reflect on the history of women’s movements, the planet, and their respective futures. This year’s Helen Pond McIntyre lecturer, Anna Tsing, applies a feminist anthropology approach to the anthropocene. Nina Ansary ‘89 and Sally Benson offer unique insights into the women’s movement in Iran and renewable energy resources.
We look forward to seeing you at some or all of these thought provoking events!
HIGHLIGHTS
Farewell, Anne & Nicci! Welcome, Avi!
We wish a warm and fond farewell to our exceptional Program Manager, Anne Jonas and our indispensable Post-Baccalaureate Fellow, Nicci Yin, who will each embark on new paths in graduate school. Though we will miss them tremendously, we are also delighted to extend a warm welcome to our new Program and Media Manager, Avi Cummings, who joins us from the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, where he was Director of Grassroots Fundraising and Communications. Before SRLP, Avi organized for racial and economic justice, prison abolition, and queer and trans liberation.
The Scholar & Feminist Online Double Issues 12.3-13.1: The Worlds of Ntozake Shange
The latest issue of BCRW’s peer-reviewed, open-access journal Scholar and Feminist Online celebrates the work of Barnard alumna Ntozake Shange. This double issue, entitled “The Worlds of Ntozake Shange,” is edited by Kim F. Hall, Monica L. Miller, and Yvette Christiansë and features Shange’s body of work and its continuing impact within and outside the academy. From her creation of the choreopoem to her lasting linguistic innovations, Shange has long been a creative force, contributing much to both intellectual and artistic productions. Authors in this issue include Farah Griffin, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Soyica Diggs Colbert, Jennifer DeVere Brody, and many more. The issue also includes videos on teaching Shange, produced by Hope Dector. Available free online at sfonline.barnard.edu.
BCRW is hiring student research assistants for fall 2015! Read more here.
FALL EVENTS
Caribbean Feminisms on the Page
Edwidge Danticat and Victoria Brown
September 17, 2015 | 6:30pm
Diana Center Event Oval, Barnard College
MacArthur fellow Edwidge Danticat ‘90 and debut novelist Victoria Brown come together in this second event of the Caribbean Feminisms on the Page series, which places distinguished writers in conversation with emerging authors to discuss issues including feminism, diaspora, and method. Danticat is the author of several books, including the novel Breath, Eyes, Memory and her family memoir Brother, I’m Dying, which was a 2007 finalist for the National Book Award. This year, she will publish a picture book, Mama’s Nightingale, and a young adult novel, Untwine. Victoria Brown is the author of Minding Ben, a novel about a teenager from Trinidad working as a nanny in New York City. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, NBC news, New York Magazine, The Sunday Salon Fiction Zine, and Babble. She teaches in the English Department at LaGuardia Community College, and is currently at work on her second novel.
Easy Money and Respectable Girls: Neoliberalism and Expectation in the US Virgin Islands
via reanimationlibrary.org
Tami Navarro
Wednesday, September 30 | 12pm
BCRW, Barnard Hall 101
In St. Croix, a disproportionate number of middle and upper-middle class young women are employed by the Economic Development Commission (EDC), an initiative that grants tax incentives to businesses based in the US Virgin Islands. In this lecture, BCRW Associate Director Tami Navarro examines questions of gender, racial inequality, and widening class divisions by looking at how neoliberal expectations of privatization clash with community demands for solidarity.
Policing the Crises: Stuart Hall and the Practice of Critique
September 24-26, 2015
Columbia University
Co-sponsored by Columbia School of the Arts, the Heyman Center for the Humanities and Humanities Institute at SUNY Stonybrook
Using key works by preeminent post-colonial intellectual and cultural theorist Stuart Hall (1932-2014), the conference will examine how Hall’s theorizations of neoliberalism, race, ethnicity, feminism, nationality, and politics can help us think through some of the most urgent problems today: police violence, mass and racialized incarceration across the United States, as well as concerns around economic, environmental, social and religious justice across the world.
October 1 | 6:15-8pm
October 2 | 9-5:30pm
James Room, 4th floor Barnard Hall
This symposium will mark the publication of Keywords for Disability Studies, a collection of 60 essays that identify and define key terms in the field. The event includes an artists’ panel on October 1 featuring Sunaura Taylor, Riva Lehrer, and Park McArthur, and speakers on October 2 discussing their terms and identifying key questions for the next stage of disability studies scholarship. This event will be fully accessible and all are welcome.
Image credit: Just Seeds Artist Cooperative
Katherine Acey
October 13 | 12pm
BCRW, Barnard Hall 101
Drawing on more than four decades of working in multiple movements, BCRW Senior Activist Fellow Katherine Acey discusses what aging and activism looks like and the challenges and opportunities for intergenerational dialogue and work that advances social justice feminism. Acey is currently the Executive Director of GRIOT Circle.
Hacking the Subject: Black Feminism, Refusal, and the Limits of Critique
Denise Ferreira da Silva
Oct 22 | 6:30pm
James Room, 4th floor Barnard Hall
BCRW’s newest working group, Practicing Refusal: Thinking Beyond Resistance, kicks off with a public lecture by distinguished ethicist and feminist theorist, Denise Ferreira da Silva. Refusing gender as the only critical tool for describing females’ socio-historical trajectories, she extends Hortense Spillers’ reconfiguration of ‘woman’, the female and the feminine, in ways that dis/order the modern grammar of the patriarch. Ferreira da Silva is associate professor at the Institute for Research on Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice, University of British Columbia.
The Untold Story of Women in Iran: A Conversation with Nina Ansary
Nina Ansary
Thursday, November 5, 2015 | 6:30
Diana Center Event Oval, Barnard College
Author and Barnard alum Nina Ansary will be in conversation with Richard Bulliet, Columbia Professor of History and Middle East Studies, on Ansary’s widely anticipated book Jewels of Allah. Based on her doctoral thesis on the women’s movement in Iran, Jewels of Allahshatters stereotypical assumptions of women in Iran today and challenges the dominant narrative of the demise of women since the Islamic Revolution of 1979.
This event is co-sponsored by the Middle East Institute at Columbia University.
Helen Pond McIntyre Lecture
A Feminist Approach to the Anthropocene: Earth Stalked by Man
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
November 10, 2015 | 6:30pm
James Room, 4th Floor Barnard Hall
Using feminist anthropology, this lecture explores the awkward relations between what one might call “machines of replication”—those simplified ecologies, such as plantations, in which life worlds are remade as future assets—and the vernacular histories in which such machines go feral in counter-intentional forms. This lecture explores contingent eruptions and the patchy, fractured Anthropocene they foster. Anna L Tsing is a Professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz, and the acclaimed author of Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection and In the Realm of the Diamond Queen.
Roslyn Silver ‘27 Science Lecture | An Energy Plan for the 21st Century
Sally Benson
Nov 17, 2015 | 6:30pm
Sulzberger Parlor, 3rd floor Barnard Hall
Driven by ever growing global energy demand, concerns over affordable energy supplies, and environmental benefits, we have embarked on a transition to a low-carbon energy system that relies more heavily on renewable energy resources. Sally Benson, Director of the Global Climate and Energy Project and Professor in the Department of Energy Resources Engineering at Stanford University, presents an energy plan based on the ground-breaking technology and policy research taking place today.
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