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New College, African Studies, and Women and Gender Studies Institute are pleased to invite you to the international and interdisciplinary conference Gender, Material Culture, and Culture Diplomacy, to be held on October 7-9, 2010 at University of Toronto, St George Campus.
This conference offers a forum to analyze, document, and exhibit intersecting imageries, functions, and representations of material culture and its connection to cultural diplomacy in Africa. It interrogates the production, circulation, consumption, and appropriation of material objects and artefacts, such as beads, pottery, and cloth, and their multiple and gendered meanings in changing social, economic and political contexts. Cloth, for instance, from cotton production, ethical consumption and fair trade exigencies, fashion, and cultural diplomacy bears multiple resonances and symbolic meanings in identity politics, power and social relations, trade, and economic exchanges. As a fetishized and iconic symbol of identity, a medium of cultural diplomacy, a commodity in the global economy, a symbolic object of exchange, memory and ritual, and a museum artefact, cloth conveys symbolic, mercantile meanings and social functions, which are both stable and remarkably fluid in different, often conflicting, socio-cultural, political, and economic spheres.
This conference invites a critical and reflexive engagement with material culture and cultural diplomacy—the symbolic, functional, instrumental, and transactional use of material objects as symbols of protest, resistance, negotiation, identity, memory, power, and agency. It will address a series of interrelated questions such as: What are the roles of various actors—artisans, feminists, activists, artists, scholars, producers, and traders—in constructing, deconstructing, appropriating, embodying, and visualizing material culture?
Marieme Lo, PhD
photographs ©marieme lo
CONTACTS
Marieme Lo, PhD: marieme.lo@utoronto.ca or call (416) 946 3218
Netta Kornberg: kornberg.netta@gmail.com
Sarah Nesib: sara.nesib@utoronto.casponsors
Dean, University of Toronto at St George, Dean, University of Toronto at Scarborough, New College, African Studies, ASA- African Students Association (UTSC), IMANI (UTSC ), Center for Diaspora and Transnational Studies, BSA- Black Students Association, CARSSU, Caribbean Students Union, Women and Gender Studies Institute, Le Centre d'Études de la France et du monde francophone" (CEFMF), private collectors and Toronto-based designers.
All events are free and open to the public - Registration at: gmccd.ut@gmail.com