Afternoon Lecture with Birgit Brander Rasmussen
Afternoon Lecture with Birgit Brander Rasmussen
Please join us as Birgit Brander Rasmussen presents "Guerrilla Philology, Guerrilla Linguistics: Sequoyah's Achievement Reconsidered" (co-sponsored with the Department of English)
This event supports "Entangled Trajectories," a conference to be held at the George Washington University.
This talk will detail how Sequoyah's famous Cherokee Writing System lays the groundwork for making the literary an alternative homeland during a time of massive territorial displacements of native peoples and at the same time provides a linguistic bullwark against colonization and cultural genocide. My reading of Sequoyah's work will focus particularly on the production of the Cherokee writing system, exploring its links to indigenous pictography, and on Sequoyah's performative politics (including deft re-deployments of what Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has called the Trope of the Talking Book). The talk will position Sequoyah as an major anti-colonial theorist who anticipates in important ways the work of twentieth century thinkers like Franz Fanon; Sequoyah's work constitutes an important, overlooked, contribution to philology, linguistics, and theories of writing.
Birgit Brander Rasmussen is Associate Professor of American Studies at Yale University. Her talk will detail how Sequoyah's famous Cherokee Writing System lays the groundwork for making the literary an alternative homeland during a time of massive territorial displacements of native peoples and at the same time provides a linguistic bullwark against colonization and cultural genocide. Her reading of Sequoyah's work will focus particularly on the production of the Cherokee writing system, exploring its links to indigenous pictography, and on Sequoyah's performative politics (including deft re-deployments of what Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has called the Trope of the Talking Book). The talk will position Sequoyah as an major anti-colonial theorist who anticipates in important ways the work of twentieth century thinkers like Franz Fanon; Sequoyah's work constitutes an important, overlooked, contribution to philology, linguistics, and theories of writing.