The Center for Bilingual/Bicultural Studies has announced the launch of a new web-based e-journal entitled "e-merging: voices on the new diasporas."
"e-merging" will explore the immigrant, ethnic and diasporic experience of MIT undergraduate and graduate students through autobiographical essays, poetry, short stories, creative nonfiction and artwork.
"Many of our students define themselves as transnational, translingual and transcultural. Many have been raised in a language or a country that is not their language or country today. Unlike previous generations who emphasized assimilation, these students refer to borderlands, to living in the interstices, to the in-between, to hybridity, to a third space or a third culture," said Isabelle de Courtivron, the Ann F. Friedlaender Professor in the Humanities and McVicar Faculty Fellow.
"We hope that this journal will create a forum for those in our diverse student population who wish to explore, through writing and art, their hyphenated or plural identities and experiences," she said.
The new journal is open to all MIT undergraduates, graduate students and recent alumni. Its editors encourage instructors to bring this project to the attention of students who are writing or have written such papers for their classes.
The deadline for first issue is Saturday, April 10. Send submissions (15-page maximum) to e_mergingsubmit@mit.edu. They will be reviewed anonymously by a board of students and faculty advisors.
--Sarah H. Wright
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on March 31, 2004.
