PROLOGUE
by Festival Director, Luisa Igloria
Against the contemporary experience of the global - and of American multiculturalism
- the idea of the diaspora in the 21st century applies to more than its
previous association with the experience of one group of people fleeing
from persecution.
Today's world is characterized by shifts in our perception of geographies
and borders - dictated not just by travel and migration, but also by wars,
tribal and ethnic conflicts; changes in the flow of capital and the management
of economies; the collapse and creation of nation-states; the effects
of technology, of national and international policies.
Whatever their reason for negotiating place, like seeds or spores scattered
over the earth, people are constantly moving, migrating, immigrating;
abandoning one way of life in order to take up another; inhabiting new
countries or cultures, sometimes returning to places they thought they
had left for good. They are haunted by nostalgia or liberated by it; or
else they oscillate in the many gaps between these states. They become
exiles, whether by choice or by force of circumstance.
In their passage, they bring with them much more than their personal
or worldly belongings. They carry their hopes and griefs, the colors,
textures and memories of place and home, their feelings both of connection
and disconnection, and always their visions for change. They bring their
songs, their poems, their forms of art - and the influence on all that
they come in contact with is ideally cross-fertilizing, enriching.
The 27th Annual Literary Festival at Old Dominion University invites
the public to listen to and be intrigued, unsettled, entranced, provoked,
exhilarated and ultimately transformed by the vision of multiple worlds
at play, in collision, in flux - as defined in the works of some of the
most luminous writers from the global diaspora today.
Luisa A. Igloria
Associate Professor
Creative Writing Program & Department of English
Director, 2004 ODU Literary Festival |
