Leila Abdelrazaq
Leila is a Palestinian author and artist born in Chicago and currently living in Detroit. Her debut graphic novel, Baddawi (Just World Books 2015) was shortlisted for the 2015 Palestine Book Awards and has been translated into three languages. She is also the author and Illustrator of The Opening (Tosh Fesh, 2017) as well as a number of zines and short comics. Her creative work primarily explores issues related to diaspora, refugees, history, memory, and borders. She is co-founder of Maamoul Press, a multi-disciplinary collective for the creation, curation, and dissemination of art by marginalized creators whose work lies at intersections of comics, print making, and book arts.
In her artist talk, Leila will share images from her career as an artist and writer and talk about how her thinking about borders, nationalism, and national identity have shifted over time. She will share how this shift is reflected in how she approaches her work and tells stories.
Bita Bell
Bita Bell is a movement artist, dance teacher, and music composer born in Iran. She attended the United World College of Hong Kong where she began her studies in Theatre and the Arts as well as her social activism. She received her Bachelors of Arts from Earlham College in music composition, while choreographing and making dance films independently. Bitawill graduate in May 2019 with her Masters of Fine Arts degree in dance making and pedagogy from The Ohio State University Department of Dance.
Dam Noosh is choreographed and performed by Bita Bell, music composition in collaboration with musicians and performers Audrey Liston and Sarah Jaegers.
Dam means to inhale and to be on the edge. Noosh means to taste and is a feminine noun. Combined together, Dam Noosh is a way of brewing Iranian herbal tea, constructing multi-layered linguistic meanings into one communal activity of drinking tea. In this solo performance senses of smell, touch, taste, visual and audio are stimulated for a visceral experience of an autobiographical narrative that struggles to transcend boundaries of identity.
Alexandra Chreiteh
Badou Fall
Badou fall is a PhD Candidate in the OSU Department of French and Italian.
In his talk “Deconstructing Borders: Migritude and Linguistic Barriers in African Studies” Badou Fall will offer a critical analysis of the existence of linguistic borders in the discipline of African studies. Borders are usually thought of in their material aspects and are often understood in relation to the freedom of mobility of humans. Yet, they can function in a symbolic way and manifest themselves in our academic disciplines. The discipline of African studies itself has been conceived in linguistic borders of Francophone, Anglophone which ultimately confine African studies into area studies that fail to reflect its universal aspect. This bordered conception of African studies contributes to the persistence of coloniality as this linguistic division is the product of the colonial matrix of power. Furthermore, this linguistic separation fails to demonstrate the linguistic and cultural richness of Africa and undermine the development of non-Europhone literature in African Literature. Thus, the deconstruction of these linguistic borders contributes to a cultural flexibility of African studies and denotes that languages are bridges rather than barriers that limits the commonalities of humans. In fact, the emergence of migritude literature showcase the uniqueness of the African context in relation to the postcolonial conditions of the African immigrants in western metropoles.
Harry Kashdan
Harry Kashdan is a postdoctoral researcher in The Global Mediterranean at OSU. His research ocuses on the food cultures of the contemporary Mediterranean, with particular attention to how experiences of migration and diaspora are expressed in Italian, Arabic, and Sephardi Jewish literature. His current projects examine the literary qualities of Mediterranean cookbooks. In his teaching and research he is committed to a multidisciplinary examination of the Mediterranean, drawing on historical, literary, and anthropological sources and methods
Harry Kashdan’s talk “Borders on the Table: Culinary Exchange and Commensality in the Mediterranean” traverses a variety of shifting borders on the Mediterranean table. Using examples from contemporary film and literature, Harry Kashdan examines the foods Mediterranean subjects share with their neighbors, and explore under what circumstances such culinary exchanges are authorized or forbidden. Some borders seem to dissolve when eating together, while some grow only more impenetrable in the face of the other.
Johanna Sellman
Johanna Sellman is Assistant Professor of Arabic Literature in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at OSU. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from UT Austin. At OSU, she teaches courses on Arabic literature, culture, and translation. Johanna has authored articles on the changing meanings of exile in post-1990s Arabic literature, Arab-Nordic theater, and on pedagogies of teaching the Arabic language through literature. Her current book project, Borders of Belonging: Imagined Citizenship in Arabic Migration Literature analyzes the transformations of Arabic migration literature in an era of mobility, displacement, and globalization.
Lucille Toth
Lucille Toth is an Assistant Professor of French at OSU-Newark. Trained in contemporary dance, her research interests lie at the intersection of dance, literature, medical humanities and migration studies. Her first book Le virus et ses mouvements traces the links between AIDS and dance in France in order to challenge contemporary cultural, political and artistic metaphors about contamination. Her new project Moving Borders, Moving Bodies confronts migration and movement with current discourses on purity and identity. In addition to being a scholar, Lucille Toth is also a choreographer, currently working on On Border(hers), an all-women dance based on testimonies of female immigrants.