Dorothy J. Killam Memorial Lecture Series

2000 Lectures

One Globe/Many Worlds

• October 12, 2000: Democracy and Globalization: Friends and Enemies
• October 19, 2000: Writing Without Borders: the Role of the Creative Artist in a Global Community
• October 26, 2000: Worlding Culture: Transnational Feminist Cultural Studies in an Era of Globalization

The millennial Dorothy J. Killam Memorial Lecture Series "One Globe/Many Worlds" offers the perspectives of three distinguished writers, John Ralston Saul, Neil Bissoondath, and Caren Kaplan, in an effort to capture the paradoxes and tensions present in the global trends that are shaping our world.

At the millennium, our media are so prevalent, all encompassing and easily accessible that almost any opinion or artistic creation, regardless of its geographic point of origin, is available to us at the click of a mouse or the push of a button. We have never before been presented with as many ways to be swayed, moved, affronted, delighted. The influence of disparate ideas and artistic visions upon one another – ideas and visions that can originate at home, on one's campus or in a different hemisphere – has led to a global intertextuality that places all of us within each other's sphere of influence and makes us partners in a broad inter-cultural exchange.

At the same time, however, this optimistic view of global communication and exchange must be balanced by the sober recognition of the existence of vast economic disparities and the proliferation of discordant voices proclaiming the differences of ethnicity, culture and religion.

The 2000 lecture series "One Globe/Many Worlds" will explore some of the tensions and oppositions generated by globalising processes from the perspectives provided by social and political thought, the creative arts and cultural studies.

Democracy and Globalization: Friends and Enemies   

Date: October 12, 2000
Speaker: John Ralston Saul

John Ralston Saul was born in Ottawa and raised in Alberta, Manitoba and Ottawa. He was educated at McGill University and King's College in London. From 1982-86, he lived in Paris before moving to Toronto. Named by the Utne Reader as one of the "100 Visionaries of the World" in 1995, Saul was also named by the government of France as a Chevalier de I'ordre des arts et des lettres in 1996. His work, The Unconscious Civilization, won the 1996 Governor General's Award for non-fiction. Voltaire's Bastards, his best-selling study of "the dictatorship of reason in the West," has been published in nine countries. His novels have also been published internationally. He is among Canada's most distinguished writers and thinkers.

Writing Without Borders: the Role of the Creative Artist in a Global    Community

Date: October 19, 2000
Speaker: Neil Bissoondath

Neil Bissoondath was born in Trinidad. He moved to Canada in 1973, and is well-known for his critiques of multiculturalism. He is part of a very literary family, his mother being the sister of both V.S. Naipaul and the late Shiva Naipaul. Bissoondath hosted Vision TV's respected programme Markings, and was the host and writer for the documentary series Vision World. Bissoondath has written many award-winning books, including Selling Illusions, which won the Gordon Montador Award. His latest novel, The Worlds Within Her, which retraces the memories of a mother and daughter who are confronted by their buried histories, was short-listed for the 1999 Governor General's Award for Fiction.

Worlding Culture: Transnational Feminist Cultural Studies in an Era of    Globalization

Date: October 26, 2000
Speaker: Caren Kaplan

Caren Kaplan was born in upstate New York and grew up in Maine. Her deeply interdisciplinary education includes a Ph.D. in cultural studies from the University of California-Santa Cruz and several years' research at the Centre Américain du Cinéma in Paris. In works such as her Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement, Kaplan brings colonial and post-colonial histories into conversation with feminist post-structuralist theory and cultural geography. One of the generation of scholars who helped create post-colonial studies, she is also one of the critics of the field and a well-informed commentator on the politics of women's studies. Now the Chair of Women's Studies at the University of California-Berkeley, she is at work on a project that concerns new technologies, location and the politics of identity.