Ruth Behar: Impossible Homecomings

[audio:https://bcrw.barnard.edu/podcasts-bcrw/2008/Ruth_Behar.mp3|titles=Ruth Behar]

Ruth Behar, Jewish Cuban American anthropologist, writer, and noted feminist, reflects on the recent literature being produced by diasporic women ethnographers, journalists, and writers, addressing their contradictory and often pained relationships to their home countries. Focusing on the work of Latin American and Caribbean women, she includes an account of her own return to Cuba and her complicated search for home. This Rennert Forum on Women lecture, entitled “Impossible Homecomings: Women Ethnographers and the Places They Left Behind,” took place on April 10, 2008 at Barnard College.

Listen using the player above or visit us on iTunes to download and subscribe to BCRW’s podcasts.

Your donation will allow BCRW to continue to grow and develop programming and innovative collaborations rooted in intersectional feminist praxis.

Donate

RECOMMENDED STORIES

Mar 5, 2026

The City and the University: A Symposium

REGISTER The University in/and Crisis Working Group invites you to attend a symposium featuring research and activism by students at Barnard College, Teachers College, and Columbia University. Students will present work that adopts methods drawn from the field of “critical university studies,” and that draws on archives and repositories held on campus and across the […]

Mar 4, 2026

Ethical Student Travel in the Africana World: Gender and Racial Politics, Institutional Challenges, and Best Practices

REGISTER Coming on the heels of the MMUF Distinguished Lecture with Dr. Christopher Loprena, join Neriko Doerr and Devin Walker for a lunchtime conversation on the politics, challenges, and best practices associated with crafting ethical student travel experiences for the 21st century. This event is hosted by BCRW’s Africana Routes, Africana Migrations faculty working group […]

Feb 5, 2026

A Conversation with Marisa Solomon on The Elsewhere is Black

Barnard Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies Marisa Solomon’s new book, The Elsewhere Is Black, examines how waste is a mundane part of poor Black survival and a condition of settler colonial racial capitalism. Tracing the flow of trash and waste across Black spaces, from Brooklyn’s historically Black Bedford-Stuyvesant to the post-plantation towns […]