2009-10 Colloquium:
Privatizing the Public; Interrogating the Private
How is it that, at this current moment of neoliberalism in crisis (the crisis of the very doctrine of private property), we’re seeing an increasing turn to privatization as the resolution for social contradictions? Whether it’s the notion of a post-racial state as the re-rendering of race as a private issue, the debate around public health-care, or the continuing privatization of public education, ‘the private’ increasingly encroaches on the public, while remaining largely uninterrogated. What we’re asking is: what are the dangers of turning to the private for the resolution of political problems? How is the notion of the private being used to redefine the parameters of a local, national and global public? We’re asking speakers, regardless of their specific topic, to meditate on these questions, and to consider how the move toward a privatizing of the public has affected or may affect their own work?
The Ethnic Studies Department Colloquium meets Wednesdays at 3:00pm in SSB 107 on the selected dates below. For more information, please contact the Ethnic Studies Department, 858-534-3276 or ethnicstudies@ucsd.edu
Fall 2009: Black Diaspora Studies
Ethnic Studies and Black/African Diaspora Studies: Shared Histories and New Formations -- A discussion led by Gabriel Mendes, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, UCSD Ethnic Studies and Urban Studies & Planning; (please see below for information about readings); Reception Follows |
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Spectacles, Spectres and Monstrosities: From Don Imus to the New Jersey Four - Sara Clarke Kaplan, PhD, Assistant Professor, UCSD Ethnic Studies; Reception Follows |
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Race and the New Biocitizen -
Dorothy Roberts, Professor, Northwestern University School of Law,
Northwestern University Departments of African American Studies, Sociology,
and the Institute for Policy Research |
Winter 2010: Indigenous Studies
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Spring 2010: Critical Gender and Sexuality Studies
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Fall 2009 Colloquium:
Wednesday, October 14, 3:00pm:
Ethnic Studies and Black/African Diaspora Studies:
Shared Histories and New Formations -- a discussion
led by Gabriel Mendes, Ph.D.,
Assistant Professor,
UCSD Ethnic Studies and Urban Studies & Planning
As this year marks the 40th Anniversary of the formal establishment of both Black Studies and Ethnic Studies within the U.S. academy, the Ethnic Studies Department will devote its first colloquium of the year to a community-wide exploration of the relationship between the two fields. The point of departure will be Nikhil Pal Singh’s Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (2005). An important work in intellectual history and political thought, Black is a Country is a text that transcends disciplinary and categorical boundaries, while being rooted in critical frameworks that are hallmarks of both Black/African Diaspora Studies and Ethnic Studies. The colloquium will consider such questions as: What does it mean to participate in the interdisciplinary fields of Black/African Diaspora Studies and Ethnic Studies in a society whose idealized self-image is that of being “Post-Racial”? How do these fields negotiate the relationship between radical politics and the production of knowledge? Do these fields conceive of race, racialization, and the meaning of racism in the same or in different ways?
Readings: The readings for this colloquium are readings for two ethnic studies courses, ETHN 230, Departmental Colloquium (Chapter 1) and ETHN 289, African American Intellectual History (Chapter 4). These readings are available through UCSD Library Course Reserves (on e-reserve): http://libraries.ucsd.edu/resources/course-reserves/index.html
Click on “Students-Find your course reserve materials”, then do a search by department and you will see a list of department course reserves.Reception Follows
Wednesday, October 28, 3:00pm:
Spectacles, Spectres and Monstrosities:
From Don Imus to the New Jersey Four
Sara Clarke Kaplan, PhD
Assistant Professor
UCSD Ethnic Studies
In April of 2007, radio and TV shock-jock Don Imus instigated a national ideological storm when he referred to the largely Black members of the Rutgers University women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed hos.” In the end, not only Imus and the Scarlet Knights, but hip-hop artists and producers, queer political pundits, and homophobic-slur-spouting Black actor Isaiah Washington had become part of the ensuing debate. This talk situates the Imus/Scarlet Knight controversy in the context of two contemporaneous sociopolitical events: the dropping of all charges against members of the Duke University lacrosse team accused of sexual assault, and the conviction and sentencing of four young black lesbians — the so-called ‘New Jersey Four’ — for assault and attempted murder. By tracing the coetaneous production and disavowal of Black monstrosity from the airwaves to the newsrooms and the basketball court to the courtroom, it asks how both the ostensibly queer-positive, anti-racist, and feminist popular and scholarly declamations of Imus and the widespread sexual-racial panics surrounding the two legal cases relied upon revised popular discourses of Black sexual and domestic deviance to delineate proper political subjects such as ‘chaste Black women’ or ‘harmless homosexuals,’ while maintaining (Black) sexual deviance as an appropriate target for and criminal object of state and extralegal violence.
Reception Follows in SSB 103
Friday, December 4, 3:00pm (Special Location: Cross Cultural Center Comunidad Room):
Race and the New Biocitizen
Dorothy Roberts
Professor, Northwestern University School of Law,
Northwestern University Departments of African American Studies and Sociology,
and the Institute for Policy Research
Some writers have celebrated a new biological citizenship arising from individuals’ unprecedented ability to manage their health at the molecular level. My lecture will examine the role of race in the construction of the new biocitizen in light of the recent expansion of race-based biotechnologies and neoliberal reliance on private resources for people’s welfare. I will critique how science, big business, and politics are converging to support a molecularized understanding of race, health, and citizenship that helps to preserve social inequities.
Reception Follows, Cross Cultural Center
This event is co-sponsored by UCSD Cross Cultural Center
You are cordially invited to meet Dorothy Roberts and members of the UCSD Ethnic Studies Department faculty at a special brown bag lunch before the colloquium in Social Science Building, Room 103 from 12:00noon-1:30pm.
Dorothy Roberts is the Kirkland & Ellis Professor at Northwestern University School of Law, with joint appointments in African American Studies, Sociology, and the Institute for Policy Research. She has written and lectured extensively on the interplay of race, gender, and class on legal issues concerning reproduction, bioethics, and child welfare. She is author of the award-winning books Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty; and Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare, as well as co-editor of six books on constitutional law and gender and law. She has also published more than 70 articles in books and scholarly journals, including The Harvard Law Review, The Stanford Law Review, and The Yale Law Journal. Professor Roberts serves on the boards of directors of The Black Women’s Health Imperative, The National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, and Generations Ahead. She is also a member of the executive committee of Cells to Society: The Center on Social Disparities and Health, the Braam Foster Care Oversight Panel in Washington State, and the Standards Working Group of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine. She recently received awards from the National Science Foundation and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for a book project on race consciousness in biotechnology, law, and social policy.
Winter 2010 Colloquium:
Spring 2010 Colloquium:
Colloquium Archive:
Spring 2009 Colloquium
Wednesday, April 8, 3:00pm:
Campus-Based Community Centers: Havens, Harbors, and Hope for Student Success
Edwina Welch, Ed.D.
Director, UCSD Cross Cultural Center
Cross Cultural Center Comunidad Room
Out of a legacy of campus activism new programs emerged to address needs and concerns for universities to be more inclusive of women, LGBT, and people of color communities. The UC San Diego Cross-Cultural, Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender (LGBT), and Women Centers are products of this historical legacy. But many questions have been left unanswered concerning center’s effectiveness and campus impact. This talk will highlight a dissertation project meant to investigate these questions. The development of a new organizing construct, the UC Sam Diego Campus Community Centers proved important to student success. Students are able to find places of personal validation and at the same time connect across historical group boundaries. Research shows that participants engaged with the Campus Community Centers felt a keen sense of belonging and validation from interactions with the sites. Emergent data on engagement, physical setting, relationship building, and meaning making proved salient. Ultimately, understanding how organizational linkages create student success can align organizational mission and structure to empirical research in the field of retention and student success.
Wednesday, April 15, 3:00pm:
Black Literature in Anthropology’s Wake
Gina Dent, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Feminist Studies, History of Consciousness and Legal Studies
UC Santa Cruz
Social Science Building, Room 107
This talk will focus on the traffic between academic and literary ideas of black culture. The larger work from which it is drawn narrates the recursive movement from race to culture in nineteenth and twentieth-century African-American fiction, arguing for the role of anthropology in that movement and evaluating its political legacy. A second layer of the analysis troubles the current polarities between ethnic and cultural studies and attends to the gendering and aesthetics of the forms of cultural representation.
Reception Follows
Wednesday, April 22, 3:00pm:
Ancient Hatreds,
Postmodern Violence:
American Liberalism and the
Depiction of Gender, Ethnicity,
and Religion during the 1990s
Balkan Conflict
Neda Atanasoski, Ph.D
Assistant Professor
Feminist Studies
UC Santa Cruz
This talk addresses the impact of the 1990s Yugoslav wars of secession on U.S. political and cultural discourses. It suggests that these discourses produced a gendered perspective on ethnic and religious violence that has been constitutive of post-Cold War American liberalism, humanitarianism, and militarism. Contending with several prominent
explanations about the origins of the conflict that contrasted ethnic and religious formations in the Balkans to an idealized vision of American secular tolerance, the talk explores how conceptions of Balkan difference structured western feminist writings about rape warfare and shaped the prosecution of rape as a war crime for the first time.
Wednesday, April 29, 3:00pm:
Song and Sentiment: Imelda Marcos and Musical Kinship Politics
Christine Bacareza Balance, Ph.D.
UC President's Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of Music
UC Riverside
Imelda Marcos is most famously known as a former dictator's wife, fashion icon, the “original Material Girl”, and owner of those 1,200 pairs of shoes. Yet, as David Byrne's 2005 song cycle, "Here Lies Love", reminds us it was namely through music and the particular form of the kundiman, or love song, that Imelda was able to charm audiences -- voters in the Philippine countryside, international heads of state, and even Hollywood and New York elite. By singing, the former First Lady performed a type of affective labor within a larger network of gendered political acts that political scientist Mina Roces designates as the Filipina’s field of informal power. Working with the rubric of palabas, a Filipino cultural trait of both “spectacle and appearance” that translates into a politics of affect, Balance considers the ways in which Imelda Marcos-themusical-performer enacted political power through performances of emotion and created an alternative kinship politics.
Wednesday, May 6, 3:00pm:
"Indigenous Studies Engages Ethnic Studies"
Discussion led by graduate students:
Maile Arvin, Michael Bevacqua, Rashné Limki, Angie Morrill and Ma Vang
This colloquium will follow a different format from the usual speaker presentation.Kick-starting the discussion set for the "Indigenous Studies Engages Ethnic Studies"symposium on Friday, May 8th, we will use the colloquium time to pose and solicit questions regardinghow and whyindigeneityis a productive,though underused,analytic in Ethnic Studies.
In this proposed mini-seminar format, we ask that attendees read at least two of the articles suggested on the symposium website: http://iss0509.blogspot.com/2009/02/suggested-readings.html. For the first article, we would like everyone to read Andrea Smith's "American Studies Without America." This will bea common starting point to our discussion, as we questionhow we as critical race and ethnic studies scholars can study not only legacies of oppression but traces of radicaltransformation that may not be fully realized or understood yet. For Andrea Smith, the transformative analytic is to begin with the assumption that America should not,and will not, always exist. How does this echo and/or change the conceptual starting points that we alluseas critical race and ethnic studies scholars?
For the second article, we'd like you to choose. We encourage you to look over the list and choosearticles related to your own work (for example, ethnographers may find Audra Simpson's "Ethnographic Refusal" particularly provocative; cultural studies scholarsmay relate mostto Noenoe Silva's "The Importance of Hawaiian Language Sources," etc.).
Wednesday, May 13, 3:00pm:
California Cultures in Comparative Perspective:
Summer Graduate Student Fellows Roundtable
Myrna García
Creating and Contesting “Sin Fronteras” Imaginings:
Rights, Politics, and Community in Mexican Chicago, 1968-1986
In 1974, Rudy Lozano co-founded the Chicago chapter of El Centro de Acción Social y Autonomo- Hermandad General de Trabajadores (CASA), a Los Angeles-based, Marxist-Leninist organization for immigrant rights. Lozano was a key CASA activist for immigrant and labor rights, who was killed in 1983. This paper examines the strategies that Lozano used to fight for the rights of undocumented workers. Drawing on extensive interview and archival material, I argue that Chicago’s mexicano community created and relied on mexicanidad as a key strategy in claiming social citizenship in the United States. Mexicanidad, a collective identity that included U.S. citizens and non-citizens alike, challenged the newly devised civil rights framework, marking the 1970s a critical historical moment in Mexican Chicago.
Michelle R. Gutiérrez
Unlikely Strategies of Resistance:
The Role of Veterans’ Organizations for Mexican Americans in Post World War II San Diego
This paper analyzes the formation of a Veterans of Foreign War (VFW) and Ladies Auxiliary by Mexican Americans in San Diego, California in 1955 and 1958 respectively as a strategy to expand their social and cultural space and fight discrimination in post World War II San Diego. Among the thousands of veterans and military personnel working at North Island Naval Station in California, Mexican-American World War II veterans formed this military-based community in the context of workplace discrimination and hostility within predominantly white veteran’s organizations. I argue that more than an effort to be included and represented in a city built on white dominance and militarism, Mexican-Americans employed the VFW as a network to combat workplace discrimination and as a tool to negotiate and rearticulate their positionality within the greater San Diego.
Angela Morrill
Terrains of Sovereignty
In this paper I briefly outline the arguments of both Western concepts of sovereignty and the ways sovereignty is used in Indian Country to express modes of self-determination. Within the separate definitions lies a larger disruption, one that once recognized may lead to articulations of sovereignty outside of the nation-state model for indigenous peoples.
Ma Vang
Hmong Statelessness:
The Un-rescuable Refugee Figure
This paper explores the current event of Hmong refugees in Thailand and their repatriation back to Laos as a paradigmatic case that shows how the statelessness of refugees calls attention to the precariousness of sovereignty and state borders. It examines how the event in Thailand unravels the relationships between the US, Thailand and Laos that continues to produce the Hmong condition of statelessness. I contend that nation-states reconstitute themselves in moments of uncertainty to re-affirm their hegemonies, which makes vulnerable the status of non-citizens. In addition, this paper traces the “secret” path of the US back to the war in Laos through Thailand to illustrate how these three nation-states constitute the systematic dispersal of refugees with the US as a privileged site of providing rights and refuge.
Wednesday, May 20, 3:00pm:
“We Were Family Once”: Constructing National Identity at the Periphery of Nation-States
Barbara Reyes, Ph.D.,
Associate Professor, Department of History,
University of New Mexico
This work in progress examines traditional conceptualizations of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands that reduce its study to the interrelationships and conflicts between colonial European empires, or simply underscores movement and/or processes across the modern international border. Reyes highlights the commonalities, links, and relational dynamics of two historiographic entities, the Mexican North and the American Southwest, as both the U.S. and Mexico nation-states engaged in concerted efforts to consolidate control of their respective frontier and border spaces, and developed particular strategies to construct notions of national identity and loyalty among their frontera/border populations. This paper explores the role of public education in the construction of these notions, particularly the enduring impact of the U.S.-Mexico War, as the historical links between the Spanish speaking communities north of the international border and the communities of the northern states of Mexico are discursively embedded or, alternately, obscured in the twentieth century public school historiography of both nation-states.
Wednesday, May 27, 3:00pm:
Immigrants and the U.S. Labor Movement
Justin Akers-Chacon
Ph.D. Candidate
Professor, Chicano Studies
San Diego City College
As the debate over immigration continues unabated into the first year of the Obama Administration, U.S. labor unions have positioned themselves as a prominent national advocate for the legalization of the nation's undocumented workforce. Not only have the organizations pledged to support and lobby for legislative action, rank and file unionists and key locals across the country played a role in organizing the mass marches of May 1st, 2006, where an estimated three million undocumented workers stayed home from work and marched in cities across the country for legalization. Labor's active support for the integration of the nation's undocumented workforce is a recent phenomenon, and represents a gradual demographic and political shift taking place within labor, as it adapts to survive and grow in an increasingly globalized economy.
Wednesday, June 3, 2:00-5:00pm: Ethnic Studies Honors Symposium, Location: UCSD Cross Cultural Center
Winter 2009 Colloquium
Ethnic Studies Alumni Lecture: (Re) Framing the Nation: The Afro-Cuban Challenge to Black and Latino Struggles for American Identity |
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California Cultures in Comparative Perspective Summer Graduate Fellows Roundtable |
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The Insolence of the Filipina:
Sons and Lovers (and Mothers) in the Heart of American Darkness |
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The Threshold of Extreme Private Eros: Militarized Occupations |
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Which Way Watts? Popular Memory vs. the Archive Description |
Wednesday, February 4, 3:00pm: Ethnic Studies Alumni Lecture
(Re) Framing the Nation:
The Afro-Cuban Challenge to Black and Latino Struggles for American Identity
Monika Gosin, Ph.D. Alumna
UCSD Ethnic Studies Department
This talk will present work from my dissertation, which focuses on conflicts among Cuban Americans and African Americans in Miami and the complexity of Afro-Cubans’ experiences of race and racialization in the United States. The dissertation analyzes the Miami African American and Cuban exile communities’ reactions to the two most controversial immigration waves from Cuba, the 1980 Mariel exodus and 1994 Balsero crisis as reported on in the African American Miami Times and the Spanish language El Nuevo Herald. Reports found in the Miami Times, predominantly painted Cuban immigrants as an economic threat, and discourses in the Herald affirmed the presumed inferiority of blackness. However, the dissertation argues the newspaper discourses and their connection to dominant notions of race and the racial order, represents an indictment of U.S. exclusionary practices that require complicity from minority and immigrant groups. Using analysis from this case and from relevant literature, the study theorizes about the broader issue of African American/Latino conflict and the centrality of ideologies of exclusivity and white supremacy in the construction of the U.S. nation. In addition, through interviews with Afro-Cubans, who are often ignored in scholarship on African American/Cuban conflict, the study challenges the idea of bounded African American and Latino communities, revealing overlaps that can allow possibilities for interethnic understanding and alliances.
Reception follows in SSB 103
Wednesday, February 11, 3:00pm:
California Cultures in Comparative Perspective Summer Graduate Student Fellows Roundtable
"Raza Sí, Migra No": Herman Baca and the Chicano Movement Debate
on Immigration in the California Borderlands
Jimmy Patino
Ph.D. Candidate, History Department
This paper traces the emergence of the Chicano movement of the 1960s and 70s in the San Diego borderlands to assess how activists addressed the increasingly pressing issue of Mexican immigration. I argue that the activism led by local activist Herman Baca was a significant departure from the ambivalence most movement activists exhibited toward immigration. Baca combined the movement ideology of chicanismo with mentorship by ethnic Mexican activists of the previous generation to address the increasing Border Patrol harassment occurring in his borderlands community. This local occurrence indicated an important attempt to deal with the human consequences of political-economic globalization.
Bawdy Amusements and the Undergarments of "Progress"
at San Diego's Panama-California Exposition (1915-1916)
L. Chase Smith
Graduate Student, Literature Department
This paper looks at the 1915-1916 Panama-California Exposition held in San Diego as exemplifying how industries of vice played a constitutive rather than antithetical role in the period's self-proclaimed dedication to social and scientific "progress." The management of respectability, morality, and decency obviated by the often legal regulation of displays on the Isthmus – an area of mechanical thrill rides, vaudeville, and dancing – points to the nation's struggle to mark the outer limit of racial, sexual, and class norms in the context of its shifting geopolitical boundaries and immigration laws. I situate California, Mexico, Hawaii, and Panama as territories that not only comprised the primary foundations of the Exposition's deviant attractions but also as part of a larger cartography of what I call a transpacific borderlands, in order to demonstrate how ideas of vice, race, and sexuality circulated along continental and oceanic pathways in the Pacific Rim both at the time of the Exposition and the decades preceding it.
Campus Based Community Centers:
Haven's, Harbors, and Hope for Underrepresented Student Success
Edwina Welch, Ed.D., Director of Cross-Cultural Center
My study explores the relationship between underrepresented and marginalized student college experience and UC San Diego Campus Community Center organizational practice. The UC San Diego Cross-Cultural, LGBT, and Women Centers emerged out of historical legacies that left unanswered questions concerning program effectiveness and campus impact. Findings show that participants engaged with the Campus Community Centers felt a keen sense of belonging and validation from interactions with the sites. Emergent data on engagement, physical setting, relationship building and meaning making proved salient across all participants and increased belonging and personal effectiveness. Research shows that institutional belonging is a key marker for retention particularly for under-represented and marginalized students. Ultimately, understanding how organizational linkages create student success can align organizational mission and structure to empirical research in the field of retention and student success.
Reception Follows
Wednesday, February 18, 3:00pm
The Insolence of the Filipina:
Sons and Lovers (and Mothers) in the Heart of American Darkness
Harrod J. Suarez
Ph.D. Candidate in American Studies
University of Minnesota
Lecturer, UCSD Ethnic Studies Department
Of what use is representation? Does it deliver on the promise of racial justice, as identity politics, liberal multiculturalism, and various nationalisms allege? Is it a necessary fiction, beyond which lies the threat of meaninglessness? For this talk, I examine two texts (Carlos Bulosan's America Is in the Heart and Brian Ascalon Roley's American Son) to develop a twofold critique. On one hand, the critique aims at representations of masculinist nationalism that depend on excluding women in both novels. On the other hand, it aims at representations that seek to counter these exclusions, as they appear in American Son. In contrast to this unending cycle, the Filipina mother of Roley's novel refuses the terms of representation. Whereas the masculine characters of both texts struggle in the attempt to speak for themselves, she recognizes the dilemmas representational strategies pose. Many characters try to speak for her as well, but she renders their attempts futile and does not aspire to represent herself. For her, no representation is safe. Such a move does not mean she accepts invisibility and erasure; to the contrary, her presence persistently disrupts the text and stymies its efforts at resolution. Drawing on the work of feminist, queer, and Asian American studies, this paper questions the efficacy of the representational strategies that often preoccupy our critical, epistemological, and political engagements.
Wednesday, February 25, 3:00pm
The Threshold of Extreme Private Eros: Militarized Occupations
and the Spectacle of Asian-Black Feminist Transgression
Setsu Shigematsu
Assistant Professor
Media & Cultural Studies, UC Riverside
Shigematsu analyzes the cross-racial sexual politics of Japanese radical feminists and African-American GIs stationed in Okinawa during the Vietnam War in the early 1970s through a discussion of the film Extreme Private Eros. This avant-garde text presents a set of vexed relations that exposes the limitations of "progressive-transgressive" cross-racial encounters and a portal to reconsider existing approaches to Asian-Black relations. Through examining the cross-racial relations that take place in the outposts of U.S. empire in military colonies such as Okinawa, I demonstrate the imperative to theorize through and beyond national and racial identity formation, to consider the contradictory intersections of liberation movements inthe contact zones of militarized neo-colonial occupations. Through a consideration of subjects, bodies and territories which do not properly belong to existing paradigms of African American or Asian American studies, I wish to engage in a broader discussion about disciplinary method, academic production, and the limits of current modes of critical inquiry.
Which Way Watts? Popular Memory vs. the Archive Description
Danny Widener
Assistant Professor, UCSD History Department
The Watts Writers Workshop was arguably the best known of the community-based cultural projects begun in South Los Angeles after the 1965 Watts riots. Under the guidance of founder and prominent screenwriter Budd Schulberg, the WWW comprised an integral part of a community-wide "black arts renaissance" today remembered as a signal moment of black creativity, local autonomy, and multiethnic struggle against the forces of racist indifference and federal malfeasance. Yet in the case of the WWW, the archives and popular memory tell two distinct stories. This talk will discuss the disjuncture between the two visions, and invite participants to explain which they find to be the most compelling.
Fall 2008 Colloquium
UCSD Ethnic Studies Graduate Student Panel: Work-in Progress: |
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The bees who gave me the sweetness of the k'ahoolal (Maya knowledge) |
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Cancelled |
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Alumni Lecture: Suturing the Mother:
Fixing Identity by the Dark of Camera Lucida |
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Touching Histories: Personality, Race, and Disability in Sex Studies of the 1930s |
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Faculty Workshop Panel |
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Sherene Razack, Ph.D., Professor, Sociology and Equity Studies in Education, The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto |
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TBA |
Ethnic Studies Graduate Students:
Work-in Progress Panel
Redefining Boundaries:
Projects of Indian Inclusion within the Nations of the U.S. and Mexico
María Teresa Ceseña, Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Ethnic Studies
UC San Diego
Social Science Building, Room 107
Reception Follows in SSB 103
This project examines parallel programs in the United States and Mexico relating to land holding, self-determination, and cultural recognition as part of the Indian New Deal carried out by Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Ejido program carried out by Lázaro Cárdenas during the 1930-1940s, a period that was key in (re)defining relationships between indigenous peoples and the modern nation-state. Next, it locates Mexico’s Museo Nacional de Antropología and the United States’ National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) as contemporary examples of institutions that continue to discursively shape perceptions of native peoples, and their relationship with/in the nation-state. This work is an attempt to understand how Native American and Mexican relations have been influenced over the years by public discourses about racial and national identities, and through legal and cultural programs that put these discourses into practice.
Detainment and Imprisonment of Immigrant Women
and the Policing of Borders
Martha Escobar, Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Ethnic Studies
UC San Diego
Escobar ‘s dissertation, Incarceration of Immigrant Women and the Border Politics of Motherhood, considers the experiences of migrant women that were imprisoned or jailed in California and later deported. She explores the ways that national borders and boundaries defined along racial and ethnic lines are negotiated and policed through the gendered criminalization of immigrants. Escobar highlights how the dominant framework used to discuss immigration centers on the binary between “good” and “bad” immigrants and shows how this debate re-criminalizes people that deviate from “American-ness.” She maintains that the mainstream immigrant rights discourse negotiates between the racial boundaries of whiteness and blackness, privileging whiteness and ultimately maintaining that “immigrants are not going to be another Black problem.” Escobar explores how a patriarchal relationship between interpersonal and state violence develops to discipline migrant women. She argues that both the U.S. and Mexico participate in maintaining the constructed disposability of bodies that “fail” to perform “American-ness” by collaborating in institutionalizing violence against migrants.
Wednesday, October 15, 3:00pm:
The bees who gave me the sweetness of the k’ahoolal
Maya knowledge)
Julio López-Maldonado, Ph. D.
Native American Studies
University of California, Davis
Social Science Building, Room 107
Reception Follows in Social Sciences Building, Room 103
As part of my research I conducted a systematic review of the Maya linguistic and writing system and its interpretation from a broad and multidisciplinary framework. As a bee biologist I reviewed and studied the beekeeping section in the ancient Maya book ‘Madrid Codex’ which contains the most extensive descriptions of the sociobiological development of the stingless bees Melipona beecheii. I applied a bio-cultural approach and entomological empirical testing within an emic perspective of the theory of knowledge or “indigenous epistemology” in order to understand the complex morphology of their glyphical compounds.
By applying the comparative and analogical mode used in systematics for the insects classification, I discovered that the phonetic and the meanings of the glyphical compounds revealed their correct identity as iconical referents, not only when analyzed through syntagmatic relations and context within the narrative, but also by following some phonetic laws from their geometric rearrangement.
It was only after I translated/decoded the entire beekeeping narratives when I started to understand that the Maya writing system is in fact highly sophisticated, rich in literary and philosophical concepts. One of the most amazing outcomes of my research was to confirm that the scribe who painted the beekeeping section observed, analyzed and wrote similar observations with the same species of bees, which I was able to film, record and study more than 2000 years later. This bio-cultural phenomenon demonstrated that the Maya certainly developed and reached an astonishing level of knowledge within all its complexity.
Wednesday, October 22, 3:00pm: Cancelled
Alumni Lecture: Wednesday, October 29, 3:00pm:
Suturing the Mother: Fixing Identity by the Dark of Camera Lucida
Ruby C. Tapia, Ph. D.
Department of Comparative Studies
The Ohio State University
Social Science Building, Room 107
Reception Follows in SSB 103
Taking a cue from Roland Barthes’ declaration in Camera Lucida that “[he] decided to derive [his] theory from the only photograph which existed for [him]” (a photograph of his mother as a child), this discussion puts forth a theory of maternal visualities buttressed by evidence of a pattern, evidence of a tropic trinity that appears, again and again, to mediate U.S. American visual encounters with threats of physical, cultural, and spiritual annihilation: race, death, and the maternal. This trinity has historically appeared via a variety of imaging technologies, including, but by no means limited to, photography. Yet it is Barthes’ reflections on photography that illumine the “fixing” logics of racial and maternal ideologies, as well as the fixing relationships between race, death, and the maternal that appear in all mediums of visual culture in moments of identificatory crises, both large and small.
Touching Histories:
Personality, Race, and Disability in Sex Studies of the 1930s
David Serlin, Associate Professor
&Science Studies
UC San Diego
Social Science Building, Room 107
Reception Follows in Social Science Building, Room 103
“Touching Histories” investigates a set of psychological and anatomical studies of young disabled women conducted during the late 1930s by Dr. Carney Landis, a Columbia University psychologist and colleague of Alfred Kinsey. The results of Landis’s research, The Personality and Sexuality of the Physically Handicapped Woman (1942), deployed racially and sexually marked categories to demonstrate how physically and developmentally non-normative women were both socially and sexually deficient. This presentation examines the psychic and social properties of touch in Landis’s studies in order to historicize the linkages between disability, racial identity, and sexual subjectivity in the early decades of the twentieth century.
Wednesday, November 12, 3:00pm: Faculty Workshop Panel
Social Science Building, Room 107
Reception Follows in Social Science Building, Room 103
Aural Miscegenation: Brokering the Sounds of Desire
and Pleasure at a World Beat Record Company
Roshanak Kheshti, Ph.D.
Department of Ethnic Studies
University of California, San Diego
This work-in-progress talk traces the social life of sounds by interpreting the production and distribution practices at San Francisco-based Kinship Records, a company that promotes world-beat music through a multicultural ethos that imagines the world interconnected as one global family. Notions like hybridity, syncretism, mixing and blending, which have long been used both popularly and academically in describing the musical afterlife of cross-cultural interaction, are rejected here. Instead, I employ the language of miscegenation in the analysis of musical exchange so as to keep the discursive genealogy of this process—gendered and racialized cross-fertilization and eroticism—in the foreground.
'Under the Strain of Color':
Antiblack Racism and Black American Mental Health in the Early Post-WWII Era
Gabriel N. Mendes, Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Ethnic Studies
University of California, San Diego
Using a March 1947, Negro Digest article titled, “Brown Breakdown” as a point of departure, this paper charts the development of a new discourse on the nature and meaning of mental health and illness among black Americans in the early post-World War II period. And, it examines the emergence of a small movement to challenge mainstream psychiatry on matters of race, as well as establish new institutions for the care and treatment of the black mentally ill.
Wednesday, November 19, 3:00pm:
Death Worlds Where Bad Things Happen:
Contemporary Settler Violence Against Aboriginal Peoples
Sherene Razack, Ph.D.
Sociology and Equity Studies in Education
University of Toronto
Social Science Building, Room 107
Reception Follows in SSB 103
One way in which the now popularized concept ‘space of exception’ may be described is ‘natural disaster’ or even more accurately, ‘naturalized disaster.’ In spaces of exception, bad things happen – naturally, inevitably. Violence can take place with impunity. To recall Agamben, nothing committed against those in spaces of exception can be considered a crime. If not a crime, then surely a natural or naturalized disaster? I explore the deaths of Aboriginal peoples in custody in the Canadian context considering whether the spaces they inhabit operate as spaces of exception.
Wednesday, December 3, 3:00pm: TBA
For more information about the Ethnic Studies Colloquium, please contact the UCSD Ethnic Studies Department, 858-534-3276 or ethnicstudies@ucsd.edu