Imagining California Inaugural Talk: Imagine This: The (Re)generation of Place

Seeded by sorrow, the evolving work that Cherríe Moraga will present journeys through her home-country of California, marking her footsteps alongside Native ecologies and Chicanx genealogies. In part, it is reflective of a queer embodied half-century inquiry—writing of place and out of place, perhaps unknowingly inspired by a once paradisal Califas of women of color warriors.

Here, nature and the implicate order of its elements (fire, air, water, and earth) become illuminated signposts along the road toward an interrelational “State” of being and the formation of a living politic of radical optimism in the face of global despair. Audience Q&A and a reception will follow.

Cherríe Moraga is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at UCSB and also serves as the Co-Director of Las Maestras Center for Xicana[x] Indigenous Thought, Art, & Social Praxis. She is an internationally recognized poet, essayist, and playwright and the co-editor of the avant-garde 1981 feminist anthology, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. She is the author of several collections of her own writings, including A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness. Three earlier works, Loving in the War Years, The Last Generation, and Waiting in the Wings: Portrait of a Queer Motherhood were published in new editions by Haymarket Books in 2022 and 2023. In 2019, Native Country of the Heart—A Memoir was published to great acclaim by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. She is the recipient of numerous awards including the United States Artists Rockefeller Fellowship for Literature, the Barnard Medal of Distinction, and the American Studies Association Lifetime Achievement Award.

Sponsored by the IHC’s Imagining California series