Coffee Hour with Arun Saldanha

Saldanha
Event Date & Time
| -
Event Location
445 Blegen Hall

269 19th Ave S
Minneapolis, MN 55455

Enjoy a free catered lunch, a presentation by Arun Saldanha with the Department of Geography, Environment and Society at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, and conversation with students, staff, and faculty from the GES Department. Lunch will be available starting at 12:30 p.m. and Saldanha will present from 1-2 p.m. Those joining us for lunch are encouraged to pre-register. Please RSVP using the event registration link above by the end of the day on Monday, November 4th. 

Prince and Minnesota: the dialectic of genius and mediocrity
Drawing from an edited collection based on a university symposium, Prince from Minneapolis, this talk will go over some key questions a cultural geographer could ask about the relation of this global superstar to his hometown and home state. Fundamental to Prince's aesthetic and persona, Saldanha will argue, is how as a black teenager in North Minneapolis he managed to depart from the strongly normative whiteness and polite asexuality of the dominant culture -- often conceptualized as "Minnesota nice" -- and lean on countercultural tendencies in South Minneapolis to invent new sounds and looks. Asking why Prince chose to not only stay put, but proclaim to the world he was from here, is asking why such genius could emerge and sustain itself despite as well as thanks to the conformism. This paradoxical situation Saldanha will provocatively call a dialectic of mediocrity and genius. Given the Minneapolis Uprising in the name of George Floyd in 2020 instigated one of the most intense US and global reckonings with structural racism, it will also be fruitful to speculate what Prince would have thought of this renewal of the idea of revolution. Saldanha will do this with the help of a short-lived stencil on the Greenway.
 
Arun Saldanha is a cultural and historical geographer with research interests in music, travel, capitalism, gender, and the history of colonialism. He is author of Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race (University of Minnesota Press, 2007) and Space After Deleuze (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), and coeditor of books on feminist theory, food studies, and critical race thinking.


 


 
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