Danuta Hinc on Panel at AWP in Los Angeles

Danuta Hinc was on a panel "Contemporary Multiethnic American Fiction: Obsessions and Innovations" at 2016 AWP Conference in Los Angeles, CA.

The panel focused on questions of "ethnic fiction." How does "ethnic fiction" question the aesthetic assumptions of a more mainstream Western mode of storytelling? How do they implicitly or explicitly challenge the geopolitical and cultural borders of the literary "canon"? Hinc's paper explored questions of identity. What does it mean to live on the peripheries of history, political systems, and language? What are the spaces we inhabit to preserves our identity? The paper investigated survival through metaphors and memories, and defined multiple approaches to how identity can shift between the personal and the popular, between language and silence, between the sacred and the forbidden.