On the Double, or Inauthenticity
Tuesday | September 19, 2023 | 6:00pm | Sanders Theatre

Speaker: Viet Thanh Nguyen, Interlocutor: Min Song.

The first of six, this opening lecture addresses what it means to write as an other, especially given writing’s power both to save and to destroy the other. The lecture also lays out the methodology of the lectures, an embodied, autobiographical criticism that emerges from the tension between the humanities and the bare life of refugees.

Min Hyoung Song is the Chair of the English Department and Director of the Asian American Studies Program at Boston College. His most recent book is entitled Climate Lyricism.

Introduction by Bruno Carvalho, Interim Director of the Mahindra Humanities Center.

On Speaking as an Other
Tuesday | October 17, 2023 | 6:00pm | Sanders Theatre

Speaker: Viet Thanh Nguyen, Interlocutor: Laila Lalami.

Timed to coincide with the release of Nguyen’s book, A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial, this lecture highlights some of the book’s themes and problems, especially concerning writing memoir as both an individual and a collective story, the perils of betrayal, and the difference between private secrets and open secrets.

A limited number of signed copies of A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial will be available for purchase at the venue starting at 5:00pm. Other books by Viet Thanh Nguyen will also be available for purchase at this time. The book sale is hosted by the Harvard Book Store.

Laila Lalami is currently Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California at Riverside. Her most recent novel, The Other Americans, was a national bestseller, won the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction.

Introductions by Bruno Carvalho, Interim Director of the Mahindra Humanities Center, and Glenda Carpio, Chair of the Department of English, Harvard College Professor, and Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature at Harvard University.

On the Death of Asian Americans
Tuesday | December 5, 2023 | 6:00pm | Sanders Theatre

Asian Americans exist at the juncture of exclusion and inclusion. Asian American culture and politics is more unified in the face of exclusion and less unified in the face of inclusion. This lecture looks at this dynamic as it is dealt with in literature, which has also been one of the most successful ways for Asian Americans to achieve inclusion through narrative plenitude.

Introductions by Bruno Carvalho, Interim Director of the Mahindra Humanities Center, and Catherine Nguyen, Assistant Professor of Asian Diasporic Literatures at Emerson College.

On Crossing Borders
Tuesday | February 20, 2024 | 6:00pm | Sanders Theatre

Colonization violated borders and redrew them, generating political, economic, and cultural consequences that are still being lived and felt. Part of the literary and cultural response has been to find the right forms that can speak back to colonization; the ones that interest this lecture cross or abolish (generic) borders and invent new styles like “horrific surrealism.”

Introductions by Bruno Carvalho, Interim Director of the Mahindra Humanities Center, and Jesse McCarthy, Assistant Professor of English and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University.

On Being Minor
Wednesday | March 20, 2024 | 6:00pm | Memorial Church

What does it mean to be a “minor” writer? From a minority, from a small nation, from the conquered, from the displaced, from spaces that are inevitably politicized or forgotten or overlooked? Art and politics explicitly overlap for the writer who is forced to be minor or who chooses to be minor, and whose aesthetic strategies and archives can and must be eclectic.

Introductions by Bruno Carvalho, Interim Director of the Mahindra Humanities Center, and Ju Yon Kim, Patsy Takemoto Mink Professor of English and Harvard College Professor.  

Note: Lecture 5 is at Memorial Church instead of at Sanders Theatre. Ticketing for Lecture 5 will be announced in Spring 2024.

On the Joy of Otherness
Tuesday | April 16, 2024 | 6:00pm | Sanders Theatre

To write as an other is to remember the conditions and origins of one’s otherness, which are usually unhappy, both individually and collectively. What are the possibilities in finding joy as an other?

"On the Joy of Otherness" is the sixth and final Norton Lecture with Viet Thanh Nguyen.

Introductions by Bruno Carvalho, Interim Director of the Mahindra Humanities Center, and Howie Tam, Assistant Professor of English at Brandeis University.