Saturday, October 31th 9:00 – 10:30

Session Room: Studio Theatre

1) Laura Fasick
Sympathy and Empathy While Reading Global Literature

I approach this conference’s themes of nationalism and consumerism from the perspective of a university teacher who regularly General Education classes. Such classes are intended to encourage critical thinking on issues related to globalism, environmentalism, and more.  In most cases, students respond sympathetically to the plight of individuals in nations where sweatshop labor is commonplace and where individual incomes tend to be dramatically lower than those of average Americans.  Yet in recent years, non-fiction studies of explosively developing countries, such as Leslie T. Chang’s Factory Girls and Evan Osnos’s The Age of Ambition, not to mention novels from Mohsin Hamid‘s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia to Kevin Kwan‘s Crazy Rich Asians, have pointed out a new factor.  No longer merely the producers of consumer goods, inhabitants of developing countries are increasingly becoming consumers.

It is at this point that my students’ sympathies end.  Even as they acknowledge their own love of shopping and of “good deals,” they build their hopes for the world’s future on citizens of other nations never embracing an equivalent consumerism.  They justify these hopes by arguing those people could and should be satisfied with relatively little since even that little would be a substantial increase from before.  Yet Chang and Osnos, to name just two representative authors, argue exactly the opposite: that the result of prolonged deprivation and lack of consumer choice has been an explosion of consumer desire.

More than a century ago, John Ruskin deplored the tendency of the comfortably off to hold the poor to higher standards of self-restraint and foresight than they held themselves.  I would argue the same tendency continues today as the recently poor of other countries become, in my students’ eyes, easily-despised consumers and not just easily-pitied sweatshop victims.

2) Nick Garside, Wilfrid Laurier University, Brantford
Celebrating the Invasive: The Hidden Pleasures and Political Promise of the Unwanted

The presence of an “invasive” has long been associated with value laden terms like foreign, disruptive, unwelcome, detrimental and dangerous.  Given that the invasive is not authentic to place the often unchallenged responses to their attendance include hyper-management, direct management and consistent control, but most typically eradication.  The reason most often given for eradication of the individual species is preservation of the integrity of the collective environment.  While much of the language (authenticity, conservation, purity, natural) associated with conservation and restoration projects has rightly been challenged and shown to have dangerous racist (amongst other) connotations, this line of argument will not be the focus of the presentation.   Rather, I will focus my attention on the disruptive and playful promise that may emerge from claiming the language of the invasive as a political metaphor for envisioning one’s political agency.  Specifically, I argue that by attaching the idea(l) of an invasive or feral identity onto ones notion of citizenship, individual political agents can challenge traditional concepts of place while concurrently better performing their democratic roles as expanders of the public sphere and celebrants of tension filled, pluralist and joyful political space.  To conclude I argue that if political terrain is envisioned as a place for nomadic adventure, playfulness, autonomy, creativity, and joy – that is a place where we can remember and perform what it is we as progressive environmentalists are struggling for – it can become a way to perform our commitment to freedom while offering the means to recall the revolutionary past and re-envision a revolutionary future within the messiness of the present.

3) Sonja Boon, Memorial University
Dusting for Fingerprints: Bodily Traces, Embodied Memories, and the Forensic Self

In 1997, after a week-long stint as a cleaner in a Dutch care home, I lost my fingerprints. Just as I lost one essential marker of bodily identity, I gained another: the care-home residents, most of whom hailed from the former Dutch colony of Suriname, recognised in me the bodily signs of a shared ethnic and racial heritage, the one and only time that this mixed heritage has been correctly read.

In this paper, I juxtapose these experiences to consider the politics of bodily and embodied identity. I confront the tensions that emerge when the data of the bodily self – here symbolized through the fingerprint – encounters the lived subjectivities of the embodied self – an entity shaped and formed through the complex ambiguities of mixed race and ethnicity as they emerge in social encounters. What happens when bodily “truth” is erased? Further, what happens when racial and ethnic ambiguity – as represented by my chameleon-like ability to “pass” through a range of ethnic and racial identities – is fixed by those who assert my racial and ethnic “truth”? Finally, given this ambivalent encounter between erasure and recognition, is it possible that my corroded fingerprints were not an accident of lost gloves, but rather, a form of bodily resistance?

I employ an autoethnographic approach that weaves together memory work (Chang) with histories of fingerprinting (Beavan, Cole, Galton, Samuels), autobiographical writings on hybridity and mixture (Anzaldúa, Brand, Goto, Wah) and critical scholarship in life writing (Cook, Couser, Kadar et al., Wexler).