Heidelberg: Interdisciplinary Conference

Heidelberg: The interdisciplinary conference
12 – 14 April 2012
“’Wid mi riddim, wid mi rime’: Cultural Flows in Caribbean and South Asian Diasporic Poetry and Performance”

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The interdisciplinary conference “’Wid mi riddim, wid mi rime’: Cultural Flows in Caribbean and South Asian Diasporic Poetry and Performance” seeks to explore the significance pertaining to cultural flows in contemporary British and North American poetry written by authors of Caribbean or South-Asian origins. It is the first to approach these issues from a comparatist perspective, which promises important new insights. For this purpose, the narrow definition of ‘poetry’ will be broadened to include related aesthetic forms like dub poetry, performance or popular music. The 18 conference papers in the panels Musical and Poetic Forms, Performance and Diaspora, Negotiating Gender, Heritage and Cultural Memory, Form, Poetics and the Canon will focus on three guiding questions: How do postcolonial lyrical forms of the Caribbean and South-Asian diaspora(s) relate to national canons? To what extent do these forms share overarching features of cultural exchange? In what ways do they embrace hybridity in terms of language, images and genre, and which functions does this hybridity fulfil? In this context, the conscious selection of junior and senior researchers from different disciplines, cultures and countries is designed to overcome the limitations of national academic discourses and Eurocentric, neo-colonialist views on Caribbean and South Asian cultural expressions. A public round table discussion and a poetry reading by South Asian British poet Daljit Nagra will make the topic accessible to a wider audience from both inside and outside academia.

Organized by Dr. Anne Brüske (Transcultural Studies, Heidelberg), Dr. Caroline Lusin (English Department, Heidelberg)

Main Location: Internationales Wissenschaftsforum Heidelberg, Hauptstraße 242, 69117 Heidelberg