2001-02 

Cross-Cultural Exchanges in North America

Despite formal borders and sheer distance, North America has for centuries been the site of cultural exchanges on a global scale: among Africans, Asians, Europeans, and First Nations. This year's MacKay lectures consider the workings and consequences of such exchanges from a variety of humanistic and social science perspectives: ethnology, history, and the creative arts.

Lecture One

"Eat the World: Postcolonial Encounters in Quebec City's Ethnic Restaurants"

Laurier Turgeon, Professor of History and Ethnology, Laval University February 7, 7:30 p.m.

Laurier Turgeon is director of CLAT (Centre d'etudes interdisciplinaires sur les langues, les arts et les traditions) at Laval University. His recent work studies intercultural contacts and exchange in colonial and postcolonial contexts. He has edited Cultural Transfer, America and Europe: 500 Years of Interculturation (with Real Ouellet and Denys Delage), Les espaces de l'identite, Les entre-lieux de la culture, and Champ multiculturel, transactions interculturelles. He is writing a book about the cultural transfer of objects between France and North America during the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries.

 

Lecture Two

"Sounds from Outside: Listening to Dante Alighieri and Paul Celan"

Andre Alexis, Award-winning novelist March 21, 7:30 p.m.

Andre Alexis is a playwright, novelist, and short story author. Despair and Other Stories of Ottawa collected his early short stories. His novel, Childhood, won the Trillium Book Award and the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award. He has also been Playwright in Residence at the Canadian Stage Company: his dramatic works include Faith, Lambton Kent, and Hunger, Home. He is writing a novel, Asylum, about the accidental reconstruction of fourteenth-century Florence in the Gatineau hills.

 

Lecture Three

"The Divided Ground: Making a Canadian-American Border(land) in the Wake of the American Revolution"

Alan Taylor, Professor of History, University of California at Davis April 4, 7:30 p.m.

Alan Taylor is the author of Liberty Men and Great Proprietors: The Revolutionary Settlement on the Maine Frontier, 1760-1820, and William Cooper's Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic, which won the Bancroft and Pulitzer prizes, and the just-published American Colonies in the Penguin History of the United States. He is writing a book on the making of a borderland shared by Canada and the United States from the American Revolution through the War of 1812, with a special emphasis on Upper Canada, New York, and the Iroquois Six Nations.

 

MacKay Lecture in History

"The Forgotten Revolutionary: Maurice Spector and the Canadian 'Age of Revolt,' 1920s-1930s"

Ian MacKay, Professor of History, Queen's University, March 14, 7:30 p.m.