Conceived and organized by Anne A. Cheng. Jointly sponsored by the Department of English and the Center for African American Studies.

Critical Encounters brings together like minds from unlike disciplines in a series of open dialogue before an audience of campus community and the public. The series promotes reflections and debates concerning race, cross-cultural translation, and issues of social justice at the intersection of art, theory, culture, and politics. In bringing together artists and thinkers from disciplines that do not traditionally talk to one another who nonetheless share similar preoccupations, this series of dialogues aims to provide opportunities for unexpected, synergistic exchanges. It also aims to engage departments and units across campus in cross-disciplinary collaborations.

This series represents the drive, on behalf of the Department of English and the Center for African American Studies, to contribute to the development of comparative race and transnational studies at Princeton. It is the assumption of this series that the most engaging and productive way to introduce race studies to Princeton students and the community at large is to foreground the ways in which thinkers, writers, and artists of color are already engaged with larger cultural discourses in the diverse fields of art, cinema, politics, law, philosophy, history, and popular culture. We hope to expand the notion of racial debate beyond black and white and to introduce artists and thinkers of color in cross-cultural, cross-genre, and cross-national contexts. In short, the highly interdisciplinary nature of Critical Encounters offers a crucial framework for re-imagining of what is and how to conduct race studies today and how to think about the Humanities’ potential contribution to social justice.

Critical Encounters hopes to make a significant contribution to the University’s commitment to the arts by offering a forum that bridges the gap between scholarship and the creative arts. The artists, filmmakers, lawyers, philosophers, and scholars featured in these dialogues demonstrate the intimate and productive relationship that can exist between modes of research and creativity. The series is co-sponsored by the Department of English and the Center in African American Studies, with special sponsorship for each event from other departments and programs across the campus.

See the events page for time and location details.

April 3, 2012: “‘Enabling Violations’:  Race, Theater, and Experimentation” a conversation between Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, Founder of Fulcrum Theater and Young Jean Lee, Founder of Young Jean Lee Theater Company
Sponsored by the Center for African American Studies, Department of English, Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Program in Latin American Studies.

February 22, 2007: Fictions of the Archive
Award winning novelist and poet Yvette Christian meets with literary scholar Saidiya Hartman to discuss how creative writers versus scholars use and confront historical knowledge in the archive, especially when confronted by archives haunted by “missing” peoples.
Co-sponsored by the Program in Creative Writing

April 5, 2007: The Uncovered Self in Law and Literature
Constitutional scholar and author Kenji Yoshino converses with cultural critic Anne A. Cheng about the tension between the desire for individual authenticity and the power of social demand, a tension that continues to highlight the limits and productivity of identity politics and the challenges facing the formulation of human and civil right in the 21st century.
Co-sponsored by the Center for Human Values

September 24, 2007: Gender, Memory, and the Making of French Anti-Discrimination Law
Leading feminist historian Joan Scott meets legal scholar Julie Suk to explore how the politics of the veil in French anti-discrimination laws might help American legal and academic systems rethink what constitutes freedom.

April 3, 2008: Possessive Used as Drink (Me): a lecture on pronouns in the form of 15 sonnets
Award winning poet and Classicist Anne Carson collaborates with dancers from the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in a haunting poetry/dance event that explores the politics of the pronoun and the tensile connection between body, ontology, and sociality.
Co-sponsored by the Program in Theatre and Dance and the Center for Human Values

October 16, 2008: Science: Fact and Friction
Editor-in-Chief of Nature magazine Philip Campbell joins bioethics scholar Charis Thompson in a lively debate about the relationship between the idea of “pure science” and the ethical, racial, and gender politics of scientific inquiry, making it pressingly clear that an ongoing dialogue between the Sciences and the Humanities is crucial to how our society imagines the present and the future.
Co-sponsored by the Center for Human Values and the Princeton Environmental Institute

April 29, 2009: Theatre and the Politics of the New Media
Founder of experimental performance company The Builders Association Marianne Weems and theater scholar Shannon Jackson discuss their collaboration across the divide between art and scholarship. They also help us rethink the relationship between actor, theater, physical space, and cyber space.
Co-sponsored by the Program in Theatre and Dance

September 16, 2010: U.S. Constitution in a Time of War:
The Minoru Yasui Trial, a reenactment and conversation
The Honorable Judge Denny Chin from the US Court of Appeals works with Princeton students to present a live reenactment of the Minoru Yasui Trial, the noted civil rights case during the Japanese Internment. Afterwards, Judge Denny will lead a discussion about how the questions of civil rights, law, and national security raised by the Yasui Trial remain powerfully relevant today.
Co-sponsored by the Program in American Studies and the Program in Law and Public Affairs

November 17, 2010: Film screening of "Electric Shadows" by renowned British filmmaker Isaac Julien, followed by a conversation between the filmmaker and literary scholar Eduardo Cadava.
Co-sponsored by the Lewis Center for the Creative Arts

"Theater and the Politics of the New Media" was presented on April 29, 2009.