Historical Ruptures

July 14, 2022 from 10:45 to 12:00

Room Number: TRS 1-077

Join the Meeting: https://ryerson.zoom.us/j/98033012453?pwd=K254MGQzV0UxblJiYnFsQjVVb3pjZz09

Chair: Simone Alexander (Seton Hall U)

Speakers:

Clara A.B. Joseph (U Calgary), “Rupture Games Colonizers Played in 17th Century India: Christians versus Christians”

Alexander Sara-Davis (U Toronto), “Dreams of Intervention: Reception as Rewriting in Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being”

Owen Seda (Tshwane U Technology), “Solipsistic breakthroughs or stymying collectives? Historical duels in August Wilson’s Radio Golf

Paper Summaries:

Clara A.B. Joseph (U Calgary), “Rupture Games Colonizers Played in 17th Century India: Christians versus Christians”

Through close readings and historical analyses of primary sources, this paper revisits events in the early period of European colonialism in India that demonstrate how and why native Christians challenged rupturing games of the colonizers. The paper, thus, aims to unsettle postcolonial presumptions about colonization as a Christian event.

Alexander Sara-Davis (U Toronto), “Dreams of Intervention: Reception as Rewriting in Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being”

When postcolonial fiction builds narratives out of experience, questions of authenticity and ethics haunt any escape that authors or readers desire from their fiction’s historical context. This paper argues A Tale for the Time Being offers readers and writers a path towards radical futures through radical readership.

Owen Seda (Tshwane U Technology), “Solipsistic breakthroughs or stymying collectives? Historical duels in August Wilson’s Radio Golf

The paper analyzes Wilson’s Radio Golf, a play that demonstrates Du Bois’s “double consciousness” and Mazrui’s “crisis of transclass man”. Historical duels play out among the principal characters to show history not always as linear progression but rather, a crisis of reading on the basis of individual positionality.