Discrepant Engagement: A Symposium of Interdisciplinary Writing

The symposium’s title is in homage to Nathaniel Mackey’s seminal, critical text on African Diasporic cross-cultural practice, Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing, and centers on student-driven discourse inspired by the CalArts MFA Creative Writing Program’s four concentrations: Image + Text, Writing+Performativity, Documentary Strategies, and Writing + Its Publics.

Resonance/Instability/Witnes, features MFA CWP students Steph Smith, Christine Imperial, Simone Zapata, Sarah Yanni and Shirley Kim-Ryu. Through the subjectivity of an immigrant daughter, Sarah Sophia Yanni will explore how poetry can be a pathway to sense-making within forms of chaos. Writing within/through the hyphenated identity of a Filipino-American, Christine Imperial will investigate both the promise and grief of ambivalence for the post-colonial poet. In its correspondence between objects, relationships, and time, Simone Zapata will discuss the colon and its shift away from equivalence and towards resemblance. Steph Smith will present a nascent theory of the fourth person which explores the strategic destabilization of the subject position within the text. SJ Kim-Ryu will address post-colonial queerness as the final process of liberation for all.