The English Department and the English Graduate Student Association at California State University, Los Angeles will host its annual graduate studies conference, Significations, on Friday, April 27, 2018 from 8:30 a.m. - 5p.m. in the University-Student Union at California State University. This year's keynote speaker is Dr. Ali Behdad from University of California, Los Angeles. The title of his talk is “With Henry James on Ellis Island: On Immigration and Governmentality".
Dr. Ali Behdad is the John Charles Hillis Professor of Literature and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at UCLA. He has published widely on issues of travel, immigration, Orientalism, and Postcolonialism. His first book, Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution, challenges prevailing constructions of Orientalism by demonstrating that the cultural hegemony of Orientalism depends on an economy of continual variation which mobilizes a plurality of ideological and discursive positions to address the shifting needs of Orientalism in diverse epistemological and political fields. His new book, Camera Orientalis: Reflections on Photography of the Middle East, explores the ways in which the Middle East has been represented in photographs by Europeans and local photographers in the region during a critical period in the development of photography in the second half of the nineteenth century.