The University Forum, Friday, June 15, from 2:00-5:00 p.m., “Immigration: Collision, Assimilation, or Integration?” complements the adult and child/adolescent panels on immigration, the theme for this part of our meeting. We are delighted that Homi Bhabha and Richard Shweder will participate. Bhabha is the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities in the Department of English, director of the Humanities Center, and senior advisor on the humanities to the president and provost of Harvard University.
He is one of the world's most influential writers and speakers on immigration, especially as it is expressed in literature. His 1994 book, The Location of Culture, is the bible of immigration studies. He is wonderful at describing “walking the streets of Bombay” or commenting on the writings of Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison, or Derek Walcott. How does the dominant group manage the cultural practices of outsider immigrants? How do the outsiders resist and adapt to pressures for assimilation?
Richard Shweder is the William Claude Reavis Distinguished Service Professor of Human Development in the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago. He is an astute, psychologically minded cultural anthropologist who challenges us to confront our biases against foreign customs that feel repugnant to the dominant majority when they are imported into our liberal democracies. He has described Norway wanting to place young children in foster care because their South Asian Indian parents slept in the same bed with them and fed them hand to mouth. Or he dares us not to immediately regard female circumcision as genital mutilation when sought by young women in the United States from, say, Sierra Leone, Sudan, or Somalia.
Adrienne Harris, psychoanalytic writer and cultural commentator, will be the discussant. She has taught and written about the work of Homi Bhabha. Harris is affiliated with the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. Her presentations at APsaA have been outstanding. Robert Paul will moderate and comment. He is Charles Howard Candler Professor of Anthropology and Interdisciplinary Studies at the Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts at Emory University and a practicing psychoanalyst. Carmela Perez, the reporter, from the Institute for Psychoanalytic Education affiliated with the New York University School of Medicine, has commented on issues related to immigration for public media.
Stanley Coen M.D., is a training and supervising analyst and senior associate director for academic affairs at Columbia University.
Adrienne Harris, Ph.D., and Robert Paul, Ph.D., contributed to this article. Nancy Chodorow, Ph.D., and Jeffrey Prager, Ph.D., helped select speakers.