Gender, Race and Culture Focus of Graduate Student Symposium

Gender, Race and Culture Focus of Graduate Student Symposium
RICE NEWS OFFICE
March 12, 1998

Blues singer Billie Holiday, black power and white supremacy in post-emancipation
Virginia, and sexuality in imperial England are some of the topics for an upcoming
graduate student symposium at Rice.

The Rice Graduate Student Symposium "Rewriting the Master Narrative: Women,
Race and Culture at the Millennium" will be March 13-15 in the Kyle Morrow
Room of Fondren Library. Sponsored by the English department, it is free and
open to the public.

Farah Griffin, professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, will
be the keynote speaker. Her talk, "Lady of the Day: Billie Holiday’s Challenge
to Black Studies and the Politics of Respectability," will be presented
at 7 p.m. Friday, March 13, in the Kyle Morrow Room.

Griffin received her bachelor’s degree from Harvard and her doctorate in American
Studies from Yale. In 1995, Oxford University Press published her first book,
"Who Set You Flowin’?: The African American Migration Narrative."
It is an interdisciplinary study of 20th century African American migration
as depicted in painting, music and literature.

Susan Wood, Rice professor of English, Laurie Clements, Niobe Ñgozi,
Robin Reagler and student poets will read selected poems from 5-7 p.m., Saturday,
March 14, in the Kyle Morrow Room.

Wood is the author of a book of poems titled "Campos Santos."

Clements’ poems have appeared in Cream City Review, Gulf Coast and Southern
Plains Review.

Ñgozi is a Houston-based performance artist who recently presented in
Austin "Lorde: A One-Woman Performance Based on the Life of Poet-Essayist
Audre Lorde."

Reagler’s poems have appeared in North American Review, Ploughshares, Denver
Quarterly, Iowa Review and American Letters and Commentary.

Panel discussions set for March 14-15 will cover topics such as transformation
of sexuality, displacing the middle-class female, sexuality in England from
1820 to 1920, and black power and white supremacy.

For more information call the English department at (713) 527-4840.