Michaeline A Crichlow is Associate Professor of Sociology and of African and African American Studies at Duke University. She is interested in projects related to citizenship, nationalism and development mainly in the Atlantic and Pacific regions. Michaeline's current projects are focused on the sorts of claims that populations deemed diasporic make on states, and how this reconfigures their communities and general sociocultural practices. She is also interested in development's impact on social and economic environments, and the way this structures and restructures people's assessments of their spaces for the articulation and pursuit of particular kinds of freedoms. She has attempted to project these perspectives in her new book, Globalization and the Postcreole Imagination: Notes on Fleeing the Plantation (July 2009) and her current project, Power and its Subjects: Development Dilemmas, Postcolonial Restructuring of Rural Spaces/Places/Identities and State Reconfiguration. The title for the Spring 2011 Colloquium series is "Our America: Cross Currents and Intimate Dialogues in the Making of a Hemisphere." The idea of America has long been dissected and reconstituted by a number of ideologues, theorists, policymakers, artists, activists, and ordinary people. Each has sought to craft a new existence that distinguished itself from "Old World" tyranny and tensions, significantly through the creation of imagined communities of identity and belonging, based on various cultural, political-economic, and social criteria. In a "New World" where delineations of territory and definitions of home have shifted as populations, resources, and hegemonies respond to global and local forces, debated claims to "our America" (to borrow from 19th century Cuban intellectual Jose Marti) reveal "America" to be an extraordinarily malleable notion, one that shapes and reflects understandings of belonging, identity, rights, and justice--across shifting borders and diverse conceptualizations of region and hemisphere. Emphasizing anthropological and historical approaches, this course will explore "our America" as simultaneously sites of empirical practice and imagined ways of being, where the interfaces, or cross currents among "American" ideas, dialogues, and communities raise questions about the ways data inform categories of analysis as well as categories of experience