Conferences + Publications
In 2014, I co-edited the collection of essays Migrant Identities of Creole Cosmopolitans, with Dr. Nirmala Menon of the India Institute of Technology (IIT). Published by Peter Lang, this collection offers numerous perspectives on the condition of the displaced migrant in light of the colonial legacies and the often problematic framework of cultural hybridity. Moreover, it offers an array of views on contemporary art, music, performance, and literature as they challenge the latest discourses that define migrant cultures in terms of ‘global cosmopolitanism’.
Migrant Identities of "Creole Cosmopolitans"
One defining question links the essays of this collection: How do aesthetic and stylistic choices perform the condition of dislocation of the migrant and, in doing so, also put pressure on the seemingly global promise of cosmopolitanism?
Migrant Identities of “Creole Cosmopolitans”: Transcultural Narratives of Contemporary Postcoloniality offers a wide array of narratives that complicate the rhetoric of cosmopolitanism and the related discourses of “hybridity.” Many such narratives are under-theorized migrations, such as Dalit narratives from India and inter-island migrations in the Caribbean. Collectively, the essays suggest that there are ways in which the forms of the migrant aesthetics, language, and imaginaries may offer new insights in the interactions between practices and discourses of hybridity and cosmopolitanism by examining their precise points of intersection and divergence.
This inquiry is especially timely because it raises questions about the circulation, marketing, and consumption of narratives of migration, dislocation, and “diaspora.” In addition, the collection addresses in significant ways the question about “beyond postcolonialism” and the future of the discipline.
"Intercultural Understanding for Art Educators"
Race and Pedagogy Conference
Puget Sound University
September 2018
To see more Academic Publications, click here.
Is America Really Full? A Conversation with Artist Wangechi Mutu, December 2018. Published in Transition Magazine, Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Harvard University, December 2020.
MassArt Engaging
Faculty Incubator
As teachers, we are all committed to create environments that invite student growth while we grow with them. This incubator intends to create a space to examine our pedagogical approaches to classrooms designed for the holistic growth of our students.
This incubator is centered on the core idea and practice of understanding: We see
understanding as an orientation toward teaching and learning that honors the whole
student as well as our own integrity. By making space for understanding in our
classrooms, we make space for the domains of affectivity, cognition, kinesthetic
inclinations: feelings, senses, personal experiences, and where we are in the world at any
specific moment. The understanding of the material we teach requires that we ponder
over the layers of context in that material, and that we consider questions of agency,
voice, social and cultural power, and the many implications in and of what we teach.
How can teachers work with students’ resistance to the material? Which skills,
dispositions and practices foster understanding across differences?
Students’ emotional and cognitive resistance to the material we teach can take many
forms. Often in my classes, students resist the material due to the nature of the literary,
critical, and visual text that I teach.
Marika's session maps the genealogy, tools, and applications of Intercultural
Understanding in my teaching, and offers examples to approach the processes of
academic and artistic skill development within this framework. The session also
articulates Intercultural Understanding as a useful tool for teachers to deepen their
own understanding of the range of students’ responses to the class material and to
each other, inside and outside the classroom. Intercultural Understanding for
teachers involves seeing each student in their own rich, dynamic nexus of hopes, fears,
and cultural and personal imaginaries.
January 2018