Announcements
The Fourth Annual Conference of the South Asian Literary Association (SALA) will be held at the Doubletree Hotel San Diego/Mission Valley, San Diego, CA ;Tel: 1-619-297-5466; on December 26-27, 2003, in conjunction with the MLA Convention.
SALA, founded in 1976, is an allied organization of the Modern Language Association ( MLA). It organizes at least two sessions at the MLA's annual convention and has featured eminent scholars and writers like Homi Bhabha, Lisa Lowe, Bapsi Sidhwa, Wahneema Lubiano, Meena Alexander, Tahira Naqvi, to name just a few. SALA also publishes annually three issues of the scholarly journal, The South Asian Review (SAR ), which is edited by Dr. K.D. Verma (kverma@pitt.edu) at the U of Pittsburgh-Johnstown. Its biannual Newsletter is edited by Dr.Hena Ahmad (hahmad@truman.edu) at Truman State University.
SALA 2003, focussing on the theme of globalization features an exciting program. Among the scholars. creative writers, and filmmakers participating in the conference include Roshni Rustomji Kerns, Moazzam Sheikh , Karen Leonard, Jayasri Majumdar Hart, Feroza Jussawalla, and many others. Scholars from South Asia, Europe, Canada, and all regions of the United States will debate issues of theory, ideology and literary interpretation in relation to a range of topics like Nationalism, Gender, Caste, Cosmopolitanism, Human Rights and Pedagogy.
For inquiries about membership and on-site conference registration, please write to Dr. Cynthia Leenerts, George Washington U, at srcyn@aol.com. For all other queries, write to Lopamudra Basu, Secretary, SALA , at lopabasu@aol.com or Amritjit Singh, President, at asingh@ric.edu. Information on SALA is also available at the official website at http://www-instruct.nmu.edu/english/jsingh/SALA/SALA_mainpage.htm
The Activist Impulse in Ethnic Studies: Safeguarding Rights in Eras of Insecurity
32nd Annual Conference
National Association for Ethnic Studies
April 1-3, 2004
Philadelphia, PA
For information: visit http://www.ethnicstudies.org
David Goldstein-Shirley, Ph.D.
Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences
University of Washington, Bothell
Campus Box 358530
18115 Campus Way NE
Bothell, WA 98011-8246
http://faculty.washington.edu/davidgs
Fulbright AnnouncementPaula W. Shirley, Professor of Spanish at Columbia College of South Carolina, will be a Fulbright Lecturer at the American University in Bulgaria during the spring of 2004. The Fulbright award is in American Studies, and she will teach multi-ethnic literature of the United States focusing on the question of identity, i.e., What do we mean when we say we are "American"?
ReviewA Walk Around the Block: Literary Texts and Contexts. By Eugene Paul Nassar( Syracuse, NY, Ethnic Heritage Studies Center, Utica College of Syracuse University, 1999, 179 pp plus 6 drawings). Batya Weinbaum, First College, Cleveland State University
Nassar’s collection of essays illustrate the fears of the Lebanese immigrant to the US, that “the new country, with all its centrifugal forces, would crush the family and obliterate its past” (p. 162). He shows how through natural myth-making, metaphors become symbols, and the intensity charged feeling becomes the vehicle through which the ethics of an uprooted people keeps its spiritualized landscape alive in the poetization of life and language. Growing up in Utica, NY, he only visits Lebanon once, but has the immigrant-return “gestalt” of placing the context of the uprooted metaphors he had absorbed, circulating around him as a child. He tells of his early interest in cross-cultural comparative study of folklore. It was sparked when he recognized the similarity between the entertaining story told by the Sicilian grandfather of his Italian-American high school date as a teenager and the stories he had heard, as a Lebanese American, from his own neighbors and relatives. Other essays in the collection continue the cross cultural approach begun in his narrative of his personal initiation into the study of folklore and survey texts in numerous languages by authors in Spanish (Cervantes), English (Shakespeare, Chaucer), Italian (Dante), Greek (Homer), German (Mann), Russian (Tolstoy, Doestoevsky), Hebrew (The Old Testament).
As a comparative folklorist, there is no indication that he consulted the texts in the original languages themselves. Skipping across continents, centuries, he uses stories from his own life and the Stith Thomson index to ask ironically why some of the “tales” included in these “masterpieces” are not codified by Dorson, Thomson and Calvino as folklore tales along with the folktales told in Lebanese heritage. He mixes his literary criticism with his own memories and association of stories heard as a son of a millworker in an Italian/Lebanese immigrant neighborhood, and compares the stories his mother told him to stories told scholars in the field collecting lore, thus utilizing his personal experience. Interesting images emerge, such as that of the lettuce leaf as the soul, which he says ask us to recognize the primacy of the commonplace (p. 162) and he points to the sacramentalization of the commonplace, as immigrant groups turn to creation of poetry out of oral, spontaneous folklore.
He finds matriarchy in Lebanon, a feminization of the ancestral village of which female relatives seemed to him to be in charge, and throughout, uses stories of his mother to illustrate the importance of continuity, to link to the past, in any social system (p. 134). He explores how stories flow from one area to another, across continents and centuries, into Sudanese, Indonesian, Spanish, Italian, Lithuanian, and so on. He devotes considerable time to discussing the unusual motif of peasant as trickster, relying in secondary sources (the motif collector) as is common in the field, without the pretense of having read all the different versions in all the original languages.
Nonetheless, the book remains valuable for those who can read it for what it is, rather than for what it isn’t. What it is, is a document of how the folk create (and re-create) poetry. The text should be useful in poetry, folklore, and multicultural literature classes, as well as classes in memoir and in working class immigrant origins. The text also provides a grounded, humane historical perspective on one segment of the US population of Arab Americans, with interesting commentary on gender in traditional cultures woven in, if some what uncritical of its own assertions and assumptions in that regard.