The Sixth Biennial Borderlands International Graduate Student Conference: Beyond Marginality: Race, Ethnicity, and Memory

Borderlands, broadly defined, are spaces where people of different ethnicities, cultures, religions, political systems, or linguistic traditions come into contact, often without any one authority exercising complete control. These encounters require both individuals and societies to adapt culturally, politically, economically, religiously, artistically, and technologically to other ways of life, often with unexpected and surprising results. The sixth biennial Borderlands International Graduate Student Conference, “Beyond Marginality: Race, Ethnicity, and Memory” showcases how studying the borderlands reveals marginality as a decentralizing process, treating the marginalized subject as the center of the discourse rather than at its outskirts.

Co-sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center; the UCSB Graduate Student Association; the Virgil Cordano, OFM, Endowment in Catholic Studies in the Department of Religious Studies at UCSB; the Departments of Anthropology, Classics, Comparative Literature, History, Global Studies, History of Art and Architecture, Religious Studies, and Sociology at UCSB; the California Consortium for the Study of Late Antiquity; and the Drake Fund.

SCHEDULE

Friday, April 6^th

3:30-4:30 – Meet & Greet/Refreshments

4:30 – Introductions and Welcoming Comments

4:30-5:30 – Keynote Address by Stuart Smith, Professor of Anthropology and the University of California, Santa Barbara

          Gift of the Nile? Racism, Egyptological Bias, and Ancient Egypt as an African Civilization

5:30-7 – Reception

Saturday, April 7^th

9-10:30 – Coffee Hour

10:30-11:20 – Panel: Perceiving Violence in the Other

Chair: Dylan Nesbit

“Necropolitizar la frontera, obliterear a los Muertos: La fila India (2013) de Antonio Ortuño” – Angela Rodriguez Moreno, Washington University in St. Louis

“Extranjeros Perniciosos: Localism, Foreigner Expulsion, and the Federal Turn in Mexico’s Deportation Regime, 1928-1938” – Aaron Aruck, University of California, Santa Cruz

Saturday, April 7^th

11:30-12:50 – Panel: Categories Shared, Created, and Lived

Chair: Q.Z. Lau

Respondent: Gregorio Gonzales

“Cognition and Conversion in Alta California: Investigating the Spanish Missionary Boscana’s Perspective on the Chinigchinich Religion” – Elisabeth Rareshide, University of California, Santa Barbara

“Achilles’ Revenge: The Construction of Foreign Femininity in Philostratus’ Heroikos” – Chris Bingley, University of California, Los Angeles

“Shared Sacred Space, Saints, and Objects in the Byzantine Mediterranean” – David Williams Royal Holloway University of London

1-2:30 – Lunch

2:30-4:10 – Panel: Labor and Race in the “Workplace”

Chair: Lauren Smyth

Respondent: Casey Walsh

“Race, Slavery, and the Origins of White Supremacy in the XIX Century Causasus—A Global Perspective” – Sergey Saluschev, History, University of California, Santa Barbara

“Remnants of Free Labor Ideology: Immigrant Exclusions and the Contract System in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, 1900-1919” – Erik Bernardino, University of California, Santa Cruz

“Stilicho’s Racial Ambiguity as a Means of Conciliation in Claudian’s Carmina Maiora” – Samuel Stubblefield, University of California, Berkeley

Saturday, April 7^th 

4:20-5:40 – Panel: New Experiences, New Media

Chair: Justin Devris

Respondent: Claudia Moser

“Second Generation Immigrant Writers and Rappers in Italy from 1990 to Today: Rebellion to the Processes of ‘Depersonalization’ and a Birth of a Hybrid Culture” – Francesco Rizzo, Sorbonne University, Università degli Studi di Roma, La Sapienza

“When I Left, I Felt Like I Betrayed Them: Working-Class Latinas Navigate the Implications of a College Education” – Michelle Parra, University of California, Santa Cruz

“Memories of (trans)frontering in contemporary cinema: Alejandro González    Iñárritu facing the complex constructions of ethnicization of human relations in Babel, Biutiful and The Revena” – Laura Grifol-Isely, Sorbonne University

7: Dinner (no-host; directions will be provided)

Sunday, April 8^th

9-10 – Coffee Hour

10-11:20 – Panel: Belonging – When Movement Challenges Categories

Chair: Gokh Alshaif

Respondent: Christopher Nofziger

“Mapping the Moving Border: Mbya-Guaraní Migration during the War of the Triple Alliance” – Marie Tolan, University of California, Santa Cruz

“Producing ‘Legal Citizenship’: Youth in Mixed-Status Families” – Karina Ruiz, University of California, Santa Cruz

“Memory in Latin American Narrative” – Karla Calvino, University of Havana, Cuba; Sorbonne University, France

11:30-12 – Closing Comments

12-1 – Discussion & Reception