HYPHENATED IDENTITIES /
DISCOURSES, QUESTIONS, AND POLEMICS conference

Please join the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies and the Memory Studies Group at the New
School for Social Research, the East Central European Center of Columbia University, and the Yiddish
Studies Program, and Polish Studies at Columbia University, for a conference on hyphenated identities.

Our inspiration was Horace M. Kallen, Jewish-American philosopher and one of the founders of the
New School. As a proponent of cultural pluralism, in his 1915 essay “Democracy Versus the Melting
Pot”, he resoundingly espoused the concept of hyphenated identities: “a chorus of many voices each
singing a rather different tune.”

A century later, the number of “hyphens,” or multiple identities one embraces, continues to grow
worldwide. Today, academic engagement with identity runs into ongoing real-world negotiations of
self and community: throughout ethnic conflicts, migrations, and political transformations; in wartime
landscapes, and even in stable democracies. Are these hyphenated identities affirmative or limiting?
What happens when one’s identities are in conflict? What are the key discourses — political, cultural,
artistic — that are informed by hyphenated identities? How do minorities negotiate their shifting identities?

The conference will explore the debates on hybrid and complex identities, examining the meanings
that the hyphenated identity carries today within established democracies as well as within those that
have emerged in countries undergoing political transformations.

December 4, 2015, 8.30am-6pm
The New School for Social Research
Orozco Room, A 712, Alvin Johnson/J.M. Kaplan Hall, 66 West 12th Street, New York

Please join the Crit Viz program, coordinators, and students on Tuesday, November 17 at 12:30 in Dekalb 308 for a lunch featuring a talk from our visiting Fulbright Scholar, Andrea Průchová! 

Forging Islamic Power and Place charts the nineteenth-century rise of a vast network of Islamic scholars stretching across Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean to Arabia. He makes use of an impressive range of sources, including official colonial documents, traveler accounts, missionary writings, and above all a trove of handwritten manuscripts in Malay and Arabic, what remains of one of the most fertile zones of knowledge production anywhere in the Islamic world at the time. Writing against prevailing notions of Southeast Asia as the passive recipient of the Islamic traditions of the Middle East, Bradley shows how a politically marginalized community engineered its own cultural renaissance via the moral virility of the Islamic scholarly tradition and the power of the written word. He highlights how, in an age of rising colonial power, these knowledge producers moved largely unnoticed and unhindered between Southeast Asia and the Middle East carrying out sweeping cultural and religious change. His focus on Thailand’s so-called “deep south,” which has been marginalized in scholarly studies until recent times, helps lay the groundwork for a new generation of scholarship on the region and furthers our understanding of the present-day crisis in southern Thailand.


Francis (Cisco) Bradley is a scholar of social and cultural history set in diverse contexts. Throughout his career, his interests have settled on the historical agency exhibited by people marginalized by global or local forces who face myriad challenges including dislocation, cultural destruction, social alienation, or structural or physical violence. This has led him to investigate histories in a variety of contexts including port cities, mobile intellectual or artist communities, and inhabitants of maritime settings, where people are stitched together through viable, if vulnerable social networks of their own making.
His academic work has focused on mobility and networks in maritime or trans-regional settings with early articles appearing in Journal of Asian Studies, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, and Journal of the Siam Society that focus on movement, dislocation, social genesis, and piracy. He explores these issues deeply in his first book, entitledForging Islamic Power and Place: The Legacy of Shaykh Da'ud bin 'Abd Allah al-Fatani in Mecca and Southeast Asia, which is in press with University of Hawaii Press. The affiliated website is: www.patanistudies.com. Bradley is also working to build a comprehensive bibliography on piracy studies which is publicly available atwww.wordpress.com/piracystudies.

You are invited to attend the fourth lecture in this fall’s SSCS Lecture Series, on Monday, November 30, at 5:30, in the Alumni Reading Room at the Pratt Library. Jennifer Telesca, Assistant  Professor of Environmental Justice at Pratt Institute, will present her research on "Science as Alibi: On the Technocratic Paradigm of Governing Bluefin Tuna." The SSCS lecture series is sponsored by the program in Critical Visual Studies. The Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies invites faculty and scholars from around the world to present their work to the Pratt community. Students in the Critical Visual Studies Symposium seminar will introduce speakers and prepare questions for a Q&A session after each presentation. The lecture is free and open to the public.

You are invited to attend the third lecture in this fall’s SSCS Lecture Series, on Wednesday, October 21, at 5:30–7:30 PM, in the Alumni Reading Room at the Pratt Library. Richard Shusterman, Dorothy F. Schmidt Eminent Scholar in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy, Florida Atlantic University, will present his work on "Somaesthetics: From Pragmatism to Contemporary Art." The SSCS lecture series is sponsored by the program in Critical Visual Studies. The Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies invites faculty and scholars from around the world to present their work to the Pratt community. Students in the Critical Visual Studies Symposium seminar will introduce speakers and prepare questions for a Q&A session after each presentation. The lecture is free and open to the public.

You are invited to attend the second lecture in this fall’s SSCS Lecture Series, on Wednesday, September 30, at 5:30–7:30 PM, in the Alumni Reading Room at the Pratt Library. Christoph Lindner, Professor of Media and Culture at the University of Amsterdam, will be presenting his research on "Slow Art, Fast Architecture, and the End of the High Line." The SSCS lecture series is sponsored by the program in Critical Visual Studies. The Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies invites faculty and scholars from around the world to present their work to the Pratt community. Students in the Critical Visual Studies Symposium seminar will introduce speakers and prepare questions for a Q&A session after each presentation. The lecture is free and open to the public.