Harvard dean shares insight at workshop

“The world is being reshaped everyday when we get up,” Diana Sorensen, dean of humanities at Harvard University and professor of romance languages and literature and comparative literacy, told 40 Viterbo community members and guests on April 23 in the Reinhart center.

Sorensen presented her paper, “Latin America and Geographic Imaginaries of the 20th and 21st Centuries,” as the keynote speaker of the Latin American Studies Teaching Workshop held at Viterbo April 23-24 in collaboration with the UW-La Crosse and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the UW-Milwaukee. 

“The world and its imaginaries are constantly expanding and contracting, mirroring the tectonic plates of geographies,” creating a sense of instability in geographical imaginaries, Sorenson said.

Sorenson addressed how the world is mapped along different spatial lines, based on cultural literacy, language and translation. 

“The awareness of distance in our world requires the need for cultural and linguistic specificity,” Sorensen said. Sorensen used the example of our perception of China in Wisconsin. China is far away; thus China should be culturally different. 

“Yet the intense focus on distance causes exhaustion of cultural differences,” Sorensen said. 

As the world becomes smaller, a global culture begins to advance, Sorensen said. A trip to California today will consist of experiencing parts of Indian or Mexican cultural, both homogenizing and merging the community. 

However, even a global culture will not create a utopia. Literal boundaries exist between countries, Sorensen said, but don’t stop there.

“Multiple borders exist within a localized area,” Sorensen said. “An immigrant represents the reality of permanent exclusion.” Borders exist within the same city based on race, language, technology, and economics.        

With the introduction to a global culture comes world literature. Sorensen described herself as a strong believer in world view and learning non-native languages. 

“The knowledge gained from world literature can experience the flattening gaze of translational discrepancies,” Sorensen said.  Not all words in one language are translatable in another.  Sorensen said in translations it is possible to miss the point of the original author. 

Sorensen stressed the importance of communication and bilingual understanding in a world that races toward a more and more global culture. 

The Teaching Workshop continued on April 24 where break-out sessions were attended by participants from other universities to discuss the different disciplines in Latin American studies. Michael Krueger, Viterbo senior ministry major from Greendale, Wis., presented, “Uncovering the history of ‘Los Immigrantes Cubanos,’” a joint project done with Molly Simones, senior biochemistry major.