2005-06 Seminar

EPISTEMOLOGIES OF BELONGING: INDIGENEITY AND DIASPORA

Co-convened by Tina Campt and Orin Starn

About the Co-Conveners:

Tina Campt

Tina Campt, who came to Duke in 2002, is Associate Professor and Interim Director of the Women’s Studies Program. Her work focuses on gender, memory and racial formation among African diasporic communities in Europe, and Germany in particular. Campt is the author of Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender and Memory in the Third Reich. She is co-editor with Michelle M. Wright of a special issue of the journal Callaloo on the Black German experience, and together with Paul Gilroy, co-edited the volume, The Black Atlantic: Traveling Cultures, Counter-History and Networked Identities. Campt is currently beginning work on a comparative project examining the role of memory in the articulation of Black German and Black British diasporic identities in postwar Europe.

Orin Starn

Orin Starn is an Associate Professor in the Cultural Anthropology Department and has been at Duke since 1992. He works on questions of history, culture, and politics across the Americas, especially in the Andes and Native North America. His latest book is Ishi’s Brain: In Search of America’s Last “Wild” Indian. He is also the author of Nightwatch: The Politics of Protest in the Andes, and the co-editor of The Peru Reader: History, Culture, Politics and Between Resistance and Revolution: Cultural Politics and Social Protest. Starn is beginning research on two new projects, one about Machu Picchu, the famous “Lost City of the Incas,” and the other about the cultural politics of golf with a focus on North Carolina’s own famous Pinehurst resort.

Fellows:

Read more about our fellows' research interests here.

Christof Galli, Perkins Library
Bayo Holsey, Assistant Professor, African and African American Studies
Micaela Janan, Associate Professor, Classical Studies
Ranjana Khanna, Associate Professor, English
Leela Prasad, Assistant Professor, Religion
Linda Rupert, Graduate Student, History
Karin Shapiro, Visiting Assistant Professor, History
Yektan Turkyilmaz, Graduate Student, Cultural Anthropology

About the Topic

The 2005-2006 seminar will probe the genealogies, possibilities, and paradoxes of epistemologies of belonging across human societies past and present. Every society draws complex boundaries between the familiar and the foreign, the included and the excluded, or, in Primo Levi’s phrase, the drowned and the saved. Very often the rhetoric of belonging invokes territory and homeland, and group identity pivots around a feeling of connection and entitlement to a particular patch of ground. At the same time, the realities of deterritorialization and diaspora have heightened enunciations of longing for real or imagined originary “native” homelands. James Clifford’s recent articulation of a notion of “indigenous diasporas” offers one particularly evocative model for expressing the complex simultaneity of rootedness and upheaval in the world today. Central to the work of the seminar group will be an emphasis on the dynamic imbrications of discourses of diaspora and indigeneity. Rather than engaging these terms as oppositional or mutually exclusive conceptions, we are interested in exploring the intersections, overlaps, perforations, and the multiple ways in which diaspora and indigeneity in fact draw on and mutually influence their respective formations.

We invite proposals from members of the Duke community who will bring expertise about a particular case and part of the world, and, at the same time, are open to comparative and theoretical exploration and debate. Our aim is to assemble a group that includes specialists in a variety of historical periods, geographical areas and cultural formations as well as scholars with diverse theoretical orientations to make for provocative, interdisciplinary dialogue.

We expect that the seminar will take up a series of broadly interrelated questions. What links place and identity in terms of both a past and a present? What do mobility, migration, translocality and (re)settlement have to do with concepts such as indigeneity and diaspora? How do histories of colonialism and nation-state formation figure into genealogies of indigeneity, diaspora, and belonging? How do the concepts of blood and race figure into the discourses of autochthony and homeland? What about the role of gender and the body? Of individual and historical memory? What has been the significance of urbanization, displacement, political violence, and other dynamics of upheaval for the making and unmaking of imagined communities of identity? How do the politics of heritage, tradition, and authenticity define the terms of belonging and exclusion and in what ways do they situate different communities in differential relation to one another? What does the quickening pace of globalization mean for present and future epistemologies of belonging? We imagine that still other questions will emerge during the course of the seminar itself.

The seminar will meet weekly. Some meetings will be devoted to presentations by seminar participants or to readings chosen by the group along the way in the year. Others will involve outside visitors, film screenings, and other activities. Collaboratively and collectively, it is our hope and intention to make the seminar a lively, varied, and congenial forum for thought and conversation.