last modified:2009-09-22 14:52:31
Border Crossings
| September's Border Crossing Event | October's Border Crossings Event | November's Border Crossing: La Angry Xicana |
Join us This Fall for Three Unforgettable Presentations by
a Photographer, a Poet, and a One-Woman Act
This fall the Department of Languages & Literature is proud to host a series of lec tures and workshops with a poet, a photographer and a performance artist. With generous funding from the Dee Council and hard work and organization from Professors Karin Baumgartner, Angela Espinosa, Gema Guevara, and Eric Laursen the Border Crossings series will illuminate “borders” from ethnic, cultural, artistic, linguistic, and personal angles. This series is in conjunction with the department’s 2009-10 intellectual theme of Border Crossings. The performances are free and open to the public.
In this series the invited artists cross borders conceptually and stylistically through their chosen media and topics. These pre-sentations and performances surpass traditional literary and language boundaries by asking the audience to investigate common literary and linguistic traditions.
Award-winning photojournalist Zoriah will give a lecture and presentation on Sept. 22, 2009 at 5:15 p.m. in the new Carolyn Tan-ner Irish Humanities Building (CTIHB) about documenting human crises in developing countries. Zoriah’s work has been featured in The New York Times, BBC News, The Wall Street Journal and many more of the world’s leading media outlets. An exhibit of Zoriah’s images will accompany the lecture and he will donate the photographs to the Department of Languages & Literature.
On Oct. 19 at 5:30 p.m. in CTIHB, the department welcomes poet Dragica Rajčić who will read selections from her work and talk about her experience fleeing Croatia when war broke out in 1991. Rajčić now lives in Switzerland where she works as a professional writer and social worker. She has become famous for her “broken lan-guage” in which she has published five books of poetry, prose and plays, many of which describe the displacement and suffering felt by war victims.
The series concludes on Nov. 16 at 7 p.m. with a performance of Adelina Anthony’s one-woman act La Angry Xicana. Anthony’s work addresses colonization, feminism, trauma, memory, gender, race/ethnicity, sexuality, in/migra-tion, health, environment, and issues generally affecting the lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender/two-spirited com-munities. In her performances, she deftly utilizes critical comedy or dramatic force to impact her many audiences. This performance will be held in the UMFA Auditorium and the department encourages the community participate.
In addition to the public lectures each artist will conduct a workshop that will guide students to thoughtful reflection on borders (geographic, linguistic, cultural, political, and identity). These workshops are part of the core curriculum of the Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies program.
The Thomas D. Dee II Endowment provides funds for projects that improve teaching in the College of Fine Arts and the Col-lege of Humanities at the University of Utah.
~Adelaide Ryder