Introduction

Mosaic takes as its mandate the publication of interdisciplinary essays that open new research avenues. Noteworthy in this respect, the present issue brings the journal’s 2016 publication year to a fitting close. I am taken, for example, with the immediate relevance of “critical refugee studies,” a theme that is broached by this issue’s opening essay. While Alaina Kaus takes as the context for this opening essay the Vietnam War and Vietnamese diaspora in American remembrance, her study might well serve as an incentive for the interdisciplinary analysis of other wars, perhaps especially recent ones, that have been cast in American rhetoric as conflicts between good and evil. For but one other example, consider the essay by Joseph DeFalco Lamperez, another graduate student. In my reading, this is a remarkable and sophisticated exercise in interdisciplinarity, and one that no doubt invites more studies to come. Much more needs to be said about the current issue. Given, however, that this is Mosaic’s last publication of 2016, I must move on to mention our upcoming Symposium.

Readers may recall that my Introduction to the previous issue (49.3, September 2016) focused on the March 2017 special issue: The Mosaic Interviews (50.1). The issue, scheduled to mark the journal’s 50^th anniversary, will collect between two covers all of the interviews that Mosaic has published since 2001 in its “Crossings” series. We will launch this special issue at the 50^th Anniversary Symposium, Living On, to be held at the University of Manitoba from March 9-11, 2017. With the publication of this final issue of the current year (49.4, December 2016), I am writing to invite you, readers one and all, to join us for the March 2017 Symposium.

In the planning stages for some time now, the Symposium promises to be an extraordinary event. Because it will mark both the journal’s transition to the next half-century and its transfer to a new editorship, we have taken movement in trans—as the Symposium theme, taking this theme and event title from Jacques Derrida’s “Living On / Borderlines” (1979). Over the course of two and half days, the Symposium will feature presentations, panels, and workshops involving nineteen invited participants from Canada, Europe, and the United States. We are asking these participants—representing architecture, cultural studies, film studies, comparative literature, music, philosophy, photography, and visual art—to celebrate the journal’s in transit occasion by reflecting on the continuing life of their fields into the next fifty years. Without striving for consensus or conclusion but, to use Judith Butler’s words from “Finishing, Starting” (2009), “something more active, difficult, and dynamic” than that, the Symposium underlines Mosaic’s mandate: that of enabling innovative studies from across the disciplines to survive or live on “in states of relative dissemination” (291-92).

Please consult the Mosaic website (www.umanitoba.ca/mosaic/livingon) for a full description of the March 2017 Symposium, including a bio-bibliographical list of presenters and an event program. Should you be unable to attend the event, The Mosaic Interviews will be available for order, with information on this issue also available on the journal website. Last but not least, we hope to be able to introduce the next Editor of Mosaic at the Symposium.