Signs of Resistance, Signs of Resurgence: Indigenous Literacies, New Media, and Anti-Colonial Imaginaries in Native American Literature and Culture
Birgit Brander Rasmussen (Associate Professor of English, Binghamton University SUNY)
with a response by Zehra Arat (Political Science, UConn)
Wednesday, October 25, 2023, 12:15pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)
The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.
What would American literature look like if it began in 901?
Ancient and diverse literary cultures interacted for centuries before Europeans arrived in the Americas. Peoples, corn, stories, and technologies moved along trade and migration routes connecting the continents for millennia.
Many around the world continue to believe, incorrectly, that European settlers brought literacy to these continents. The colonial conflict brought multiple forms of literacy into contact and conflict. In the “textual conflict zone,” indigenous literacies, like pictography, become signs of resistance in the colonial era that are reclaimed as signs of resurgence in the digital present.
Contemporary Native writers, artists, and activists use digital media to connect past and present, pictography and digital media. Digital Indigenous literacies invite new ways of thinking about literature, writing, history, and even time itself.
Birgit Brander Rasmussen is Associate Professor in the English Department at Binghamton University (SUNY), located on unceded Onandaga land. She wrote the award-winning book Queequeg’s Coffin: Indigenous Literacies and Early American Literature and co-edited The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness.
Zehra F. Kabasakal Arat is Professor of Political Science at the University of Connecticut. She studies human rights, with an emphasis on women’s rights, as well as processes of democratization, globalization, and development. In addition to her scholarship, she has been active in professional organizations in various capacities (e.g., Founding President, Human Rights Section of APSA); she has served on the editorial boards of several journals and book series and is currently the editor of the book series “Power and Human Rights” by the Lynne Rienner Publishers. Her work is recognized by several awards, including the APSA Award of Distinguished Scholar in Human Rights (2010).
Access note
If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpretation, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.
