Special Events at PAMLA 2012

We are proud to announce some of our special events for this year’s PAMLA conference, to be held on Friday, October 19 through Sunday, October 21, at the Renaissance Seattle Hotel and Seattle University (our sessions on Friday will be held at the Renaissance Hotel; Saturday’s and Sunday’s session will be at Seattle University).

First, we are extremely excited to announce a new event for PAMLA: The Creative Artist Spotlight.  This year, Sandra Cisneros, author of such award-winning works as The House on Mango Street, Caramelo, Loose Woman, and Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, will be our Creative Artist Spotlight speaker on the Friday evening of October 19th.  Sandra will be reading from new and old works, as well as participating in a discussion.  Maxine Hong Kingston said of The House on Mango Street: “Afortunado! Lucky!  Lucky the generation who grew up with Esperanza and The House on Mango Street.  And lucky future readers.”  Gwendolyn Brooks said of Sandra: “Her work is sensitive, alert, nuanceful … rich with music and picture.”  And Studs Terkel said of Caramelo: “It’s a beautiful tale of all migrants caught between here and there.”

Given that our special theme for this year’s PAMLA Forum and for many of our special sessions is “Migration, Immigration, and Movement,” Sandra Cisneros is the perfect Creative Artist to begin our conference.  The Presidential Address on Saturday and the PAMLA Forum on Saturday afternoon will continue the discussion of migration, immigration, and movement, and then our Plenary Speaker for the Plenary Address Luncheon on Sunday will bring the theme full circle.  We are very proud to announce that our Plenary Speaker this year will be José David Saldívar of Stanford University.

José David Saldívar is a scholar of late postcontemporary culture, especially the minoritized literatures of the United States, Latin America, and the transamerican hemisphere, and of border narrative and poetics from the sixteenth century to the present.  Saldívar is the author of The Dialectics of Our America: Genealogy, Cultural Critique, and Literary History (Duke University Press, 1991), Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies (University of California Press, 1997), and Trans-Americanity: Subaltern Modernities, Global Coloniality, and the Cultures of Greater Mexico (Duke University Press, 2012), coeditor (with Héctor Calderón) of Criticism in the Borderlands (Duke University Press, 1991), and editor of The Rolando Hinojosa Reader (Arte Público Press, 1985).  Additionally, he has published numerous articles in journals such as Cultural Studies, American Literary History, The Americas Review, Revista Casa de las Américas, Daedalus, Modern Fiction Studies, and The Global South.  In 2003, he received the Distinguished Achievement Award for Literary and Cultural Criticism from the Western Literature Association; in 2005, he received the Chicano Scholar of the Year Award from the Modern Language Association.

If you haven’t already done so, please submit a proposal to one of our over 130 approved sessions (the deadline for doing so is April 22).  Given these special speakers, the lovely and hospitable conference site of Seattle University, and the lovely Renaissance Hotel Seattle, you really won’t want to miss this year’s PAMLA Conference.  For more information about the conference go to www.pamla.org/2012 or email Craig Svonkin: [email protected] .