Fulbright Specialist presents lecture on ‘The Case for Rereading Identity’

York University’s Centre for Feminist Research and Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean (CERLAC) present a Fulbright Specialist Lecture featuring Ricia Anne Chansky from the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez.

Chansky will speak from 2:30 to 4pm on May 24 in 519 Kaneff Tower on “Texts in Crisis: Esmeralda Santiago, Judith Ortiz Cofer, and the Case for Rereading Identity”.

The ongoing fiscal and humanitarian crisis in Puerto Rico inspired Chansky to rethink her obligations as a reader of auto/biographical narratives. While it is an established tenet in auto/biography studies that the self in the narrative is not and cannot be a unified, singular self, much less work in this field attends to readers of narrated lives as mutable participants in life stories.

This presentation examines the diasporic memoirs of Esmeralda Santiago and Judith Ortiz Cofer as a means of building the case for rereading identity as analytical practice. This case for rereading as practice considers the diasporic subject found in (and across) serialized autobiographies; the fluid reader as witness; the gendered self existing between texts, nations, and identities; and, rereading in/as pedagogy.

Chansky is an associate professor of literature at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez. She is co-editor of the journal a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, and of The Routledge Auto/Biography Studies Reader; and editor of Auto/Biography Across the Americas: Transnational Themes in Life Writing and Auto/Biography in the Americas: Relational Lives.

This event, co-sponsored by CERLAC, is free to attend, and RSVP is not required. There will be light refreshments provided.