Visions of the Nation through Race, Gender, and Space

• Event Date: Wednesday, March 15, 2006
• Time: 4:00 pm (CST)
• Location: Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum, 600 S. Gregory St., Urbana, IL
• Cost: Free Admission

• Talk

Center for Democracy in a Multiracial Society

Round-Table Symposium Keynote Opening Address
Madhu Dubey
Professor, University of Illinois - Chicago

The past year or so has placed before us, events so catastrophic and overwhelmingly horrific as to give us pause; and to instigate in us some reflection on whom we are, or believe ourselves to be. The tsunamis, hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, and attacks that have splashed across the pages of newspapers and magazines, and exploded into the mundane safety of television, movies and personal computers, have revealed that how we value life is not simply a question of universal "national values." Instead, the worth of particular lives varies, in fact, by class, race, region, religion and gender; and suffering, while clearly omni-present in the ether of existence, does not mean the same thing when it is hosted by another, as it does when we and our loved ones are those experiencing it. In addition to running counter to democratic ideals of justice we take to be central to American national identity, our uneven valuing of life is also a question of simple empathy and our capacity for identification with our neighbors, even across lines of apparent difference. Without espousing them in a sentimental mode, Imagining Bodies: Visions of the Nation through Race, Gender, and Space approaches the question of why empathy and identification fail, by considering how the National Body is imagined, contested, represented, and performed in and through contemporary cultural production and social action.