Panel

Cultural critics and scholars have, in recent years, converged on the concept of diaspora as providing interactive understandings of identity and belonging that depart from the extremities of individualism and nationalism. But does invoking diaspora encourage genuine dialogue across the boundaries that define ethnicity? How much do the artistic descriptions of diaspora consciousness differ from canonical Modernism? Is diaspora an alternative or accomplice to globalization?

Moderator
Kobena Mercer, Senior Fellow of the Vera List Center

Participants
Michele Wallace, CUNY, author of Invisibility Blues
David Scott, Johns Hopkins University and University of the West Indies, author of Refashioning Futures: Studies in Post-Colonial Criticism
Nicholas Mirzoeff, SUNY- Stony Brook, author of Diaspora and Visual Culture