27th Annual Literary Festival at ODU: October 4-8, 2004

Creative Migrations: New Writing from the Global Diaspora

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, Director of the 2004 ODU Literary Festival