Fannie and Alan Leslie Center for the Humanities at Dartmouth College

Ruth Ozeki - Hybrid Vigor: Mixing science and fiction, splicing politics with poetics, and crossbreeding points of view

In her talk, Ruth Ozeki will speak about novel forms of miscegenation and how science and technology provide fertile ground for feminist, cultural, and literary inquiry.

Ruth Ozeki has emerged as one of the key voices in contemporary Asian American culture. Her work as a novelist and a filmmaker examines the struggle of mixed-race women for cultural identity in the contemporary United States, and in the contexts of transnationalism and global capitalism.

The novel for which she is best known, My Year of Meats, describes documentary film maker Jane Takagi-Little's experience of producing a "reality TV" show for Japan in which "real" American housewives are shown each week preparing "tasty and wholesome meats" for their families. The show is sponsored by the American Beef Conglomerate Beef-Ex, and is part of its attempts to open up the Japanese market - largely dominated by the consumption of fish - to the American meat industry. As astute social satire, the novel also intervenes in several scholarly debates: David Palumbo-Liu has read the novel to posit the importance of sentimentality as a political strategy, whereas Monika Chiu reads the novel as intervening into the discourse on post national globalization.

Ozeki's film Halving the Bones describes how a mixed-race woman returns some of her Japanese grandmother's ashes to her Japanese mother, who lives in Connecticut and was unable, or unwilling, to travel to Japan for the funeral. The film tells a transnational family history that highlights the disruption of origins, and the power of those disrupted origins to haunt.

There will be a screening of this film in Carson L01 on Tuesday May 1, 2007 at 5.00pm. There will be a brief discussion with Ruth Ozeki before the screening and a Q and A session afterwards.

"Ruth Ozeki is bent on taking the novel into corners of American culture no one else has thought to lookâ but where she finds us in all our transcultural and technological weirdness." - Michael Pollan, author of "Omnivore's Dilemma"

Sponsored by the Leslie Center for the Humanities, Women and Gender Studies Program, the Office of Institutional Diversity and Equity, the Office of Pluralism and Leadership and the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding.

Haldeman Center is situated on North Main Street next to Carson.

Related Link : http://www.ruthozeki.com