How has a globalized media affected national identities?

Acclaimed scholars of film, music, literature, history and television will converge on York March 30 for an international symposium on Ethnonationalism, Transnationalism and Media Culture.

The symposium will explore the impact of an increasingly globalized media on the creation, evolution and diffusion of national and transnational identities. Speakers from universities in England, the United States and Canada will talk about media, linguistic communities and geopolitical areas.

Among an international roster of speakers are four from Canada, including two from York:

Anne A. Ihejirika, York University – The Possibilities and Limitations of Translation and Rewriting as Literature in Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God and Maryse Condé’s Windward Heights (La migration des coeurs)
Susan Ingram, York University – Pretty in Pink: Berlin Fashion between Ethno- and Transnationalism
Karim H. Karim, Carleton University – Bollywood and the Non-Resident Indian: Pursuing Government Policy and the Diasporic Dollar
Robert Ventresca, University of Western Ontario – "Write, publish, say what you think": Catholic Transnationalism among European Emigrés during the Second World War. The Case of Jacques Maritain, Yves R. Simon and Don Luigi Sturzo

Five are from the United States:

Debra Ann Castillo, Cornell University – Transamericans
Marija Dalbello, Rutgers University – The Machine Age in a Baroque Empire: A Study of Print Culture in the Borderlands, 1898-1918
Darién Davis, Middlebury College – Performing Brazil Transnationally: Race and Nation in the Shadows of Carmen Miranda
Juan Manuel Espinosa, Cornell University – From High-Brow Culture to Pulp Horror Stories: How Roberto Bolaño Reads the Latin American Boom 
Robert Stam, New York University – Resistance in Brazilian Cinema and Music

And one is from England:

Mirca Madianou, University of Cambridge – Ambivalent Identities: Banal Nationalism and Cultural Intimacy in Greek Television News and Everyday Life

The symposium was organized by York Professors Vermonja Alston and Antonio Ricci. It is sponsored by York’s Vice-President Academic and Vice-President Research & Innovation, the Faculty of Arts, the Departments of English and of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics, Stong College, and the Istituto Italiano di Cultura of Toronto.

For more information, visit the symposium Web site.