Building on the success of last year’s House and Home series, Director Sichel has organized a 2011-2012 series entitled “Revisiting the Contact Zone:  Postcolonial Responses to American Exceptionalism”: A yearlong interdisciplinary study project funded by the Boston University Humanities Foundation. “Contact Zone” will be a series of interdisciplinary seminar talks, some with invited outside scholars and some with paired BU professors. Based on scholar Mary Louise Pratt’s model for the two-way, doubly enriching, and hybrid relations between powerful cultures and those that they colonize, “Contact Zone” is a new model for a richer look at post-colonial discourses.  We will expand the term to include contact zones within American culture – between European American and immigrant communities, between different media, and between the academy and the commercial worlds.

Contact Zone Lecture Series

Imperialism, Sports Culture and Tourism

Imperialism, Sports Culture and Tourism

Monday, April 2, 5:30pm / CAS 200 / 725 Commonwealth Avenue

Charles Lindholm

Professor of Anthropology, Boston University

“Adventure, Danger, and Authenticity”

&

William Moore

Associate Professor of American Material Culture, Boston University

“Gidget and the Waikiki Beachboy:  Assimilation, transgression, and Polynesian culture in postwar American youth fiction”

Transnationalism and the Question of Empire

Transnationalism and the Question of Empire

Monday, March 19, 5:30pm  / CAS 200 / 725 Commonwealth Avenue

Anita Patterson

Associate Professor of English, Boston University

“Henry James, John La Farge, and Impressionist Japonisme”

&

David Brody, Associate Professor of Design Studies, The New School

“Greenwashing in Hawaii: Design, Hotels, and Postcolonial Contact”

Chinese Exclusion

Chinese Exclusion

Thursday, December 1, 5:30pm / CAS 200

Anna Pegler-Gordon, Associate Professor, Michigan State University

“Chinese Exclusion and Photographic Arts of Contact and Evasion”

Wampanoag Cultures

Wampanoag Cultures

Monday, November 7, 6:30pm / CAS 313

Anne Makepeace, film director and producer

We Still Live Here, Âs Nutayuneân

Film screening and discussion on Wampanoag cultural revival

For more information about the film, please visit:

http://www.makepeaceproductions.com/wampfilm.html

Diasporas

Diasporas

Wednesday, October 19, 5:30pm / Room 110, 226 Bay State Road

Marilyn Halter, Professor of History, Boston University

“African and American:

Post-Colonial West Africans and the Remaking of the Atlantic World in the U.S.”

and

Cynthia Becker, Associate Professor, History of Art and Architecture

“From the Backstreets to Mainstreet:

the Changing Aesthetics of the New Orleans Mardi Gras Indians”

Susan Kern, Vernacular Studies

Vernacular Studies

Monday, September 26, 5:30pm / Gabel Museum, Stone Science Building 253

Susan Kern, Asst. Visiting Professor, American Studies, College of William & Mary

“Thomas Jefferson, Vernacular Studies and Contact Zones in Late Colonial Virginia”

Private: Diasporas

Diasporas

Wednesday, October 19, 5:30pm / Room 110, 226 Bay State Road

Marilyn Halter, Professor of History, Boston University

“African and American:

Post-Colonial West Africans and the Remaking of the Atlantic World in the U.S.”

and

Cynthia Becker, Associate Professor, History of Art and Architecture

“From the Backstreets to Mainstreet:

the Changing Aesthetics of the New Orleans Mardi Gras Indians”

Fall Reception

Fall Reception

Tuesday, September 20, 12-2pm / Room 110, 226 Bay State Road

Introduction to the Contact Zone Lecture Series

followed by a social hour for graduate students and faculty

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