Colloquium
Spring 2008: State Violence: Symbolic, Legal, Realized
By focusing on the State, the series will provide the opportunity to discuss the ways in which violence operates in tandem with other institutional and symbolic mechanisms as a dimension of racial subjection in the global present.
- April 16 - UCSD Ethnic Studies Graduate Student Panel (see below for more information)
- April 23 - Brian Klopotek, University of Oregon, Anthropology
- April 30 - Dylan Rodriguez, UC Riverside, Ethnic Studies
- May 7 - Eithne Luibheid, University of Arizona, Women's Studies
- May 8 - Kumeyaay Cultural Repatriation Committee Presentation on the Repatriation of Human Remains and UCSD - Location: Barona Community Center - RSVP required (see below for info)
- May 14 - Tayyab Mahmud, Seattle University School of Law
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May 21 - Alumni Lecture: Lisa M. Cacho, Assistant Professor, Latina/Latino Studies, Asian American Studies, Gender and Women's Studies, and English, University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign
- May 28 - Randall Williams, Ph.D., UCSD Literature Department; Lecturer, UCSD Ethnic Studies Department
The Ethnic Studies Department Colloquium meets each Wednesday at 3:00pm in SSB 107 from the second through the ninth week of each quarter, unless otherwise announced. For more information, please contact the Ethnic Studies Department, 858-534-3276 or ethnicstudies@ucsd.edu
Ethnic Studies Graduate Students: Work in Progress Panel
Angela Kong: Tracing the legacy of Prop 209:
Asian Americans in California's Public University
Juliana Smith: Freedom Dreams:
Political Exile, U.S. Social Movements and Revolutionary Cuba
Social Science Building, Room 107
Reception Follows in SSB 103
Angela Kong: Tracing the legacy of Prop 209: Asian Americans in California's Public University
Passed in 1996, Prop 209's California Civil Rights Initiative declared the use of race in public education, employment, and contracting as illegal, arguing for justice and equality for California residents. Forty years ago, the Civil Rights Act attempted to rectify racism by implementing race-conscious policies or affirmative action to alter the historical legacy of discrimination. The Civil Rights Act and California Civil Rights Initiative had the same aim – to eliminate racism. However, the intended outcome demanded by civil rights activists in the 1960s - to gain access to resources and rights for blacks and other communities of color and the rhetoric behind Prop 209 - to end "favoritism" toward minorities, was gravely different. To understand diversity within this current era requires a discussion of reverse discrimination, colorblindness, and the racial positioning of Asian American students in higher education. The particular racialization of Asian Americans provides insight to how this minority group is strategically placed within the discourse of diversity for conservative and progressive policy-making. My research interrogates the impact of race-neutral and colorblind policy in California's public universities. Through the lens of Critical Race Theory in Education I examine the ways in which race is used to produce educational inequities at public universities. My research attempts to understand: 1) how society's definition of diversity shapes the political positioning of Asian American students alongside other students of color on college campuses and 2) how Asian Americans respond to and change the meaning of diversity on college campuses.
Juliana Smith: Freedom Dreams: Political Exile, U.S. Social Movements and Revolutionary Cuba:
For the social movements in the U.S. that followed a trajectory of radical black thought (Republic of New Africa, Revolutionary Action Movement, Black Panther Party and others), advocating for a socialist domestic policy, self determination and an anti-imperialist foreign policy, meant finding inspiration in Cuba’s 1959 Revolution. While many looked to Cuba only symbolically, others began to look at Cuba as a safe haven from political neutralization, assassination, or incarceration. Recently, historian Robin Kelley coined the term “freedom dreams,” to signify the importance of where political activists, artists, and intellectuals draw inspiration from. Understanding the influences and the dreams that social movements had and modeled themselves after is imperative to understand the movement itself. This talk examines the continuity of U.S. social movements, revolutionary Cuba and black activists that exiled from the U.S. What is the relationship between those three that may continue to shape radical black thought and the freedom dreams of the next social movements? I argue that the experience of political exile goes beyond its political category, to teach us important lessons about social movements, their legacies, their lessons, their triumphs and losses, and the consciousness that has developed as a result. The political exile experience urges us to push past a win/loss paradigm of analyzing social movements and focus on both win, losses and ties. I trace this relationship by looking at the history of U.S. political exiles in Cuba, the exchange of radical black thought between those in the U.S. and Cuba, and interviews from current political exiles.
Ordinary and Extraordinary Trauma:
Race, Place, Hurricane Katrina, and the Tunica-Biloxi Tribe*
Brian Klopotek
Assistant Professor, Ethnic Studies
University of Oregon
Social Science Building, Room 107
Reception Follows, SSB 103
Two quotes about displaced people of color made by privileged white women more than sixty years apart illustrate the striking parallels between the extraordinary trauma inflicted by Hurricane Katrina and the ordinary trauma inflicted by everyday racism and colonialism:
“Almost everyone I’ve talked to says, ‘We’re going to move to Houston.’ What I’m hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this — this is working very well for them.”– Former First Lady Barbara Bush to reporters while visiting Katrina evacuees in the Houston Astrodome, September 2005
“All the young people are anxious to move to Houston, Texas, where they will be free of racial discrimination and feel they will have a better chance. Unless they can be content with their present very meagre scale of living, this seems the best plan, for Marksville is a small town with limited opportunities for work and with very strong color prejudice. Before moving they wish information as to their rights to sell the land or possible money aid.”
– Anthropologist and BIA employee Ruth Underhill,
speaking of the Tunica-Biloxi tribe in an official report, October 1938Like Barbara Bush, Ruth Underhill failed to appreciate the deep connection of a people and their culture to place, did not challenge the oppressive local conditions from which the people sought relief, and did not comprehend that racial orders would simply be reconstituted in a new context without significant intervention. The Katrina/New Orleans example is instructive in demonstrating what was at stake when Underhill casually suggested that the Tunica-Biloxis give up their ancestral home. Like most Americans, however, Underhill envisioned Tunica problems as predominantly racial, when in fact their problems emerged from both their racial status and their status as an indigenous nation in a colonial society. This paper explores these themes as part of an ongoing effort to theorize the distinctions and convergences between race and indigeneity in American studies, ethnic studies, and American Indian studies and develop a comprehensive, holistic approach to studies of race and empire.
* co-authors Brenda Lintinger and John Barbry, Tunica-Biloxi Tribal Nation
'Death Was Swiftly Running After Us:' White Supremacy, Radical (Racial) Genealogy, and the Statecraft of Disaster
Dylan Rodríguez
Associate Professor, Ethnic Studies
University of California, Riverside
Social Science Building, Room 107
Reception Follows in SSB 103
Drawing from the final chapter of the forthcoming book Suspended Apocalypse: White Supremacy, Arrested Raciality, and the Filipino Condition (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), this lecture engages a radical interrogation of deathly sociality as the condition of our historical present: How do the overlapping and often symbiotic logics of white supremacy, racist bodily violence, statecrafted racial genocide, and racial militarization produce a social form in which that which is apocalyptic becomes commonly accepted as more or less “normal” or “given?” More specifically, how might we understand the material genesis of the post-19th century Filipino condition as an arrangement of force and marshaling of capacities for dominance that cannot be sufficiently described through the conventional rubrics of empire, colonialism, or warfare?
This lecture elaborates a fundamental theoretical and political concern with the fundamental illegibility of the particular and utterly foundational Filipino encounter with the material formation of U.S. white supremacy as 1) a perpetual militarized conquest of (cultural, political) territories in ostensibly domestic (“conquered”) and materially alien or global (“frontier”) sites; and 2) a genocidal national and (global) racial project that is multilayered and versatile in its institutional mobilizations and singular in its production of particular conditions of historical inescapability for peoples who are and have been subjected to the material logics of genocide.
Thus, if we can understand that the regimes of racial terror and the statecraft of white supremacist nation building do more than simply fabricate or discursively construct and profile racially pathologized bodies, but also continually disarticulate and dislocate these bodies such that we cannot avoid moments of genealogical contact between, for example, the Native American, indigenous Filipino, and ilustrado or colonial petit bourgeoisie Filipino body, in the case of the transpacific movement of U.S. frontier conquest into the Philippine archipelago at the turn of the 20th century; or the Black American, Negrito/Aeta Filipino, and so-called “diasporic” Filipino body at the turn of the 21st century, than what are we to do politically with this structure of unavoidability and contact?
Dylan Rodríguez received his Ph.D. and his M.A. degrees in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Rodríguez is an interdisciplinary scholar-activist whose interests traverse the fields of critical race studies and cultural studies. Among his political- intellectual collectives, he has worked with and/or alongside such organizations as Critical Resistance, INCITE!, the Critical Filipino and Filipina Studies Collective , and the editorial board of the internationally recognized journal Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict, and World Order.
Sexuality, Migration and the Shifting Line Between Legal and Illegal Status
Eithne Luibheid
Associate Professor, Women's Studies
& Director, Institute of LGBT Studies
University of Arizona
Social Science Building, Room 107
Reception Follows in SSB 103
Focusing on the U.S. campaign to secure recognition of same-sex couple relationships within immigration law, this article brings the scholarship about the social construction of undocumented immigration into critical conversation with sexuality studies. Challenging neo-liberal representations of legal or illegal immigrant status is a sign of individual character, rather than as an outcome of multiple relations of power, the article highlights the central role of sexual regimes in constructing the distinction between legal and illegal. The article further explores, however, how sexual regimes always function in relation to cross-cutting hierarchies of race, gender, class, and geo-politics. This suggests that the campaign for recognition of same-sex couples must address the multiple underpinnings of the il/legal distinction or else risk benefiting only the most privileged. The article then examines how recognized couple relationships provide the technology through which the state and its assemblages attempt to manage the risks associated with immigration, and, over time, to transform legally admitted immigrants into “good” neo-liberal citizens—while threatening those who do not measure up with potential illegalization. These dynamics raise important questions about citizenship, surveillance, discipline, and normalization that merit consideration by those struggling for recognition of same-sex couples within immigration law. They also enable us to further reconceptualize the legal/illegal distinction as an ongoing (rather than one-time) production, anchored in multiple relations of power that include, but are not limited to, sexuality. I conclude by questioning whether and to what extent sexuality may provide a locus for renegotiating the distinction between legal and illegal immigrants and its associated logics of violence.
Eithne Luibheid is Director of the Institute for LGBT Studies and Associate Professor of Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona. She is the author of Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border (University of Minnesota Press, 2002); co-editor of Queer Migration: Sexuality, U.S. Citizenship, and Border Crossings (University of Minnesota Press, 2005); editor of a special issue of GLQ on “Queer/Migration” (2008); co-editor of a special issue of Women’s Studies International Forum on “Representing Migrant Women in Ireland and the E.U.” (2004); and the author of various articles and book chapters.
Special Traveling Colloquium, Thursday, May 8, 3:00-5:00pm:
An Invitation from the Kumeyaay Cultural Repatriation Committee
Presentation on the Repatriation of Human Remains and UCSD
Barona Community Center, Lakeside, California
Please RSVP to Ross Frank, rfrank@ucsd.edu by Friday May 2 if you are planning to attend. Limited bus transportation is available. The bus will leave UCSD at promptly at 2:00pm and return to UCSD at 6:00pm. Please reserve a seat by indicating in your RSVP that you would like a seat on the bus; if you plan to carpool, we still need your RSVP.
Directions to Barona Community Center from UCSD (about 30 miles driving distance; allow about 1hr drive time):
- Take ramp onto LA JOLLA VILLAGE DR - go 2.1 mi
- Take ramp onto I-805 S - go 2.0 mi
- Take the CA-52 exit onto CA-52 E - go 11.2 mi
- Take the MISSION GORGE RD exit - go 0.3 mi
- Bear Left on MISSION GORGE RD - go 2.4 mi
- Continue on WOODSIDE AVE - go 0.5 mi
- Turn Left to take ramp onto CA-67 N toward RAMONA - go 3.5 mi
- Turn Right on WILLOW RD - go 0.9 mi
- Turn Left on WILDCAT CANYON RD - go 4.3 mi
- Continue on BARONA RD - go 2.0 mi
- Arrive at 1095 BARONA RD, LAKESIDE
The Kumeyaay Cultural Repatriation Committee (KCRC), a cooperative group of representatives from each of the 13 Kumeyaay Bands in San Diego County, formed in 1998 to recover and properly culturally affiliate human remains removed from their original resting place. In 2006, the Kumeyaay Cultural Repatriation Committee requested the return of two burials removed in 1976 during a field class excavation from the site of the UCSD Chancellor's House under NAGPRA, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Under NAGPRA, human remains must be repatriated to a Native American claimant that either establishes direct ancestry or likely "cultural affiliation".
Radiocarbon dating indicates that this double burial took place about 10,000 years ago. Claims of scientists have often provoked custody battles around the disposition of burials of such very great antiquity, such as in the case of "Kennewick Man". Scientists maintain that the age of these remains recovered at UCSD places them at the earliest period of known human habitation in North America, as old or older than the tiny handful of comparable burials, such as Kennewick Man, Spirit Cave Woman, and Minnesota Man. According to some researchers, the importance of these individuals lies in the possibility of identifying the oldest genetic heritage of Native Americans, or possibly of an even older population that is hypothesized to have entered North America along an ice-free route at Pacific shoreline.
These and other repatriation issues will be presented and discussed from the perspective of the KCRC at the first Ethnic Studies Colloquium, held outside of the UCSD campus.
For more information about the UCSD Kumeyaay remains at issue, see: http://www.kumeyaay.com/?p=395
Migration, Identity & Resistance
along I-5: Lessons of the Ghadar Movement
Tayyab Mahmud
Associate Dean for Research & Faculty Development and
Professor of Law, Seattle University School of Law
Social Science Building, Room 107
Reception Follows, SSB 103
Agency and resistance of the subaltern rarely get sufficient attention in studies of immigration and immigrant identity-formation. This presentation aims to bring such agency and resistance into relief through the story the Ghadar Movement that unfolded along I-5 in early 20th century. Confronted by xenophobia, racism, discrimination under the law, and war-induced security regimes, the first generation of immigrants from colonial India formed a revolutionary anti-colonial political party. While based in north-west United States, the operations and influence of the party quickly spread throughout the plantation colonies of Britain and India itself. While brutally crushed in the United States and in colonial India, the Ghadar Movement helped forge the identity of an “Indian” and left a lasting imprint on India’s independence movement. The presentation seeks to draw lessons of this story for the present conjuncture.
Tayyab Mahmud is the Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Development and a Professor of Law at the Seattle University School of Law. Before joining Seattle University, Professor Mahmud was Professor of Law and Chair, Global Perspectives Group, at the John Marshall Law School in Chicago. Before going to law school, he taught International Relations at various universities in Pakistan and the United States. After law school, he practiced complex litigation with the San Francisco-based firm Pettit & Martin. He started his career as a law professor at Cleveland-Marshall College of Law. He was a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Law School in 1997-1998, and a Visiting Professor at Seattle University School of Law in 2003-2004. Professor Mahmud, who has served as Co-President of the Society of American Law Teachers (SALT), is a member of the Executive Committee of the Board of Governors of SALT and a member of the Board of Directors of Latina/o Critical Legal Studies (LatCrit). He has served on the editorial boards of The American Journal of Comparative Law, Hastings Int’l & Comparative Law Review, Journal of Third World Legal Studies and the Journal of Humanities Research.
Alumni Lecture: Wednesday,May 21, 3:00pm:
Ambivalent Allies or Reluctant Rivals?
Rethinking Representations of Black and Latino/a Conflict
Lisa Cacho
Assistant Professor, Latina/o Studies
and Asian American Studies
University of Illinois, Urbana-ChampaignSocial Science Building, Room 107
Reception Follows in SSB 103
This talk examines how African Americans and Latinas/os were represented in relation to one another within mainstream media coverage of the 2006 Immigrant Rights Movements. Cacho argues that supporters of both African American “citizens” and Latina/o “non-citizens” had to negotiate racialized and gendered discourses of black criminality and Latina/o illegality, revealing the ways in which African Americans and Latinas/os necessarily must negotiate their respective exclusions from political and legal rights in relation to one another.
UCSD Ethnic Studies alumna, Lisa Marie Cacho (Ph.D., 2002), is an Assistant Professor of Latina/o Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her areas of interest and expertise include discourses of racial deviance as they are articulated in narratives of immigration, segregation, and/or militarization. Her work on Proposition 187 has been published by Cultural Values. And her most recent published work can be found the 2007 Summer issue of the Latino Studies Journal—an article which examines racialized death, deviance, and devaluation. She also has chapters forthcoming in the following anthologies: Immigrant Rights in the Shadows of United States Citizenship, Strange Affinities: The Sexual and Gender Politics of Comparative Racialization, and Capital Q: Marxisms after Queer Theory.
A Duty to Intervene?
On the Constitution of Subjects for Empire
Randall Williams
Lecturer, UCSD Ethnic Studies Department
Ph.D., UCSD Literature Department
Social Science Building, Room 107
Reception Follows, SSB 103Great imperial powers, especially democratic ones, cannot justify themselves on the basis of power or greed alone. No one will buy it. Modern imperialism needed a legitimizing instrument to socialize people into its ethos. To do that it needed two things: a ghost and a mission. … After the Cold War, Western power was deprived both of a mission and a ghost. So the mission has appeared as human rights.
—Eqbal Ahmad, Confronting Empire
In this lecture from his forthcoming book, Appealing Subjects: Reading Across the International Division of Justice, Randall Williams will consider the placement of the recent film “Hotel Rwanda” in the discourse of human rights. Taking as its periodization the post-World War II era as well as the post-Cold War moment which Ahmad analyzes, Williams reads human rights discourse as the privileged legitimizing instrument for Western imperialism through the continual reproduction of subjects in need of rescue by the West. Specifically he will discuss the ideological role which the Rwandan genocide of 1994 has come to play in the fortification of the (neo)liberal-imperial ethos. The right and duty to intervene and its attendant material, filmic and epistemic brutalities are the “lessons of Rwanda” and the subject of this talk.
Randall Williams is currently a lecturer in the Ethnic Studies Department at UCSD. He received his Ph.D. in Literature from UCSD (2006). He also worked a number of years as a Research Analyst/Strategic Campaigner for the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union (HERE-IU).
For more information about the Ethnic Studies Colloquium, please contact the UCSD Ethnic Studies Department, 858-534-3276 or ethnicstudies@ucsd.edu