Film Screening and Director Q&A with Anthony Banua-Simon.

Cane Fire (2020) examines the past and present of the Hawaiian island of Kauaʻi, interweaving four generations of family history, numerous Hollywood productions, and troves of found footage to create a kaleidoscopic portrait of the economic and cultural forces that have cast Indigenous and working-class residents as “extras” in their own story.

Audra Simpson, Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University

Author of the award-winning book Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States, Audra Simpson is a political anthropologist whose work is rooted within Indigenous polities in the US and Canada and crosses the fields of anthropology, Indigenous Studies, American and Canadian Studies, gender and sexuality studies as well as politics.

Join us for a conversation with Matthew Jacobson (co-director of the Yale Public Humanities Program and the Sterling Professor of American Studies, History & African American Studies at Yale) and Robin D. G. Kelley (the Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at the University of California, Los Angeles) on Professor Jacobson’s new book, “Dancing Down the Barricades: Sammy Davis Jr. and the Long Civil Rights Era, A Cultural History” (University of California Press, 2023). This event will be in-person only at the New Haven Free Public Library (Ives Library, 133 Elm Street) but will be recorded and published on Yale Public Humanities’ YouTube channel. This program is presented as part of the ongoing “Democracy in America” series, a collaboration between the New Haven Free Public Library and Public Humanities at Yale.

All are invited to this one day display of collections material and a video screening about an essential story of New Haven in 1831: the visionary – and thwarted – proposal for a Black college that would have been America’s first historically Black college (HBCU).

Come to the Beinecke Library on Sunday, September 10, 2023, between 12noon and 4pm, and learn more about the proposal – and about the town meeting held on the same date 192 years ago, September 10, 1831, that blocked the college with resolutions drawn up by top leaders of New Haven, many of them connected with Yale.

This event is co-sponsored by Beinecke Library and the Greater New Haven African American Historical Society.

You will be able to see original newspapers, pamphlets, and maps, from 1831 and that era on display in the library’s courtyard level reading room, along with facsimiles and some contemporary secondary sources about the story.

There will be multiple screenings of the short documentary film, “What Could Have Been,” produced by the library. The film is also on YouTube (https://youtu.be/gmXF3N62Olo). With a run time of about 25 minutes, the documentary will be screened in a library classroom on Sunday, September 10, beginning at 12:30pm and be screened again every half hour or so, with the last screening about 4pm.

Kindly note: all visitors who go to the reading room will need to check any and all bags, coats, and other personal belongings in secure lockers on the library’s ground floor before going to the reading room.

Participants are also encouraged to visit the Grove Street Cemetery, 227 Grove Street, nearby the library. The cemetery is the final resting place of many of the key figures who promoted and supported the Black college proposal and to many of its main opponents.

Join the Yale African American Affinity Group for a book club discussion of On Juneteenth by Annette Gordon-Reed.

Weaving together American history, dramatic family chronicle, and searing episodes of memoir, Annette Gordon-Reed’s On Juneteenth provides a historian’s view of the country’s long road to Juneteenth, recounting both its origins in Texas and the enormous hardships that African-Americans have endured in the century since, from Reconstruction through Jim Crow and beyond.

Register by Friday, May 13th for your chance to win a free copy of the book!

Join the Yale African American Affinity Group, Working Women’s Network, and Yale Latino Networking Group for a conversation with Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa about her new book A Woman of Endurance.

A Woman of Endurance illuminates a little discussed aspect of history—the Puerto Rican Atlantic Slave Trade—witnessed through the experiences of Pola, an African captive used as a breeder to bear more slaves. It is ultimately, a novel of the triumph of the human spirit even under the most brutal of conditions.

Register by Friday, April 15th for your chance to win a free copy of the book!

Join Jennifer Tucker, Associate Professor of History, Environmental Studies, Science in Society, and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Wesleyan University, in conversation with Matthew Jacobson, co-director of the Public Humanities Program and the Sterling Professor of American Studies, History & African American Studies at Yale.
This program is presented as part of the ongoing “Democracy in America” series, a collaboration between the New Haven Free Public Library and Public Humanities at Yale.

Celebrate International Women’s Day with Women United, Hopkins School, and Yale University Office of Diversity and Inclusion; featuring Pulitzer Prize-Winning New York Times Investigative Reporter, Andrea Elliott.

Her new book “Invisible Child” chronicles the life of Dasani Coates: an 11-year-old girl navigating the challenges of life on the streets of Brooklyn. Elliot offers a bracing look at how structural racism has affected generations of a single family—and the hope, love, and resilience that has gotten them through. Elliot will share the process of investigating such an important story and how we can apply these crucial lessons in our efforts towards building a more kind and equitable world.

Closed captioning will be provided. Spanish translation can be made available. Please indicate your language preference by Thursday, March 3, to ensure access.

Join Laura Barraclough, the Sarai K. Ribicoff Associate Professor of American Studies at Yale University, in conversation with Matthew Jacobson, co-director of the Public Humanities Program and the Sterling Professor of American Studies, History & African American Studies at Yale.
This program is presented as part of the ongoing “Democracy in America” series, a collaboration between the New Haven Free Public Library and Public Humanities at Yale.

Join Laura Briggs, Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in conversation with Matthew Jacobson, co-director of the Public Humanities Program and the Sterling Professor of American Studies, History & African American Studies at Yale.
This program is presented as part of the ongoing “Democracy in America” series, a collaboration between the New Haven Free Public Library and Public Humanities at Yale.

With a record number of refugees moving across the globe, there is much debate among policymakers and academics on how best to provide for refugees’ humanitarian needs while also ensuring the stability of host countries’ political and economic institutions and preventing radicalization among affected groups. As a result, many non-profits and intergovernmental organizations have come together to implement programs that support both refugees and host communities. The Syrian Refugee Life Study (S-RLS) uses a randomized control trial to evaluate the effectiveness of one such specific, scalable program — the Norwegian Refugee Council Jordan’s Urban Shelter Program. This evaluation estimates the direct and spillover effects of shelter assistance on beneficiaries, their children, and their host communities. The study will pair this novel RCT with long-term longitudinal data collection in one of the first systematic efforts to survey a large, representative refugee sample and follow that sample over time. The talk will present initial findings from this ongoing study.
Edward Miguel is the Oxfam Professor of Environmental and Resource Economics at the Department of Economics and Faculty Director of the Center for Effective Global Action at the University of California, Berkeley. Professor Miguel is a Faculty Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, is on the Board of Reviewing Editors for Science and has served as Associate Editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, He is the recipient of the 2005 Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship and the 2005 Kenneth J. Arrow Prize. He was also the 2002 Berkeley Hellman Fellow and received membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020.
Professor Miguel’s main research focus is African economic development, including work on the economic causes and consequences of violence; the impact of ethnic divisions on local collective action; interactions between health, education, environment, and productivity for the poor; and methods for transparency in social science research. He has conducted field work in Kenya, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, and India. Professor Miguel has published extensively articles and chapters in leading academic journals and collected volumes. He is the author of three books: Transparent and Reproducible Social Science Research, Economic Gangsters: Corruption, Violence and the Poverty of Nations, and Africa’s Turn? Professor Miguel has received numerous awards for teaching at U.C. Berkeley and has served on numerous doctoral dissertation committees.

Khalil Johnson in Conversation with Matt Jacobson.
Part of the ongoing “Democracy in America” @ the NHFPL series.
Zoom Webinar Link: https://yale.zoom.us/j/93711399355

Christopher Newfield in Conversation with Matt Jacobson.
Part of the ongoing “Democracy in America” @ the NHFPL series.
Zoom Webinar Link: https://yale.zoom.us/j/97114054393

Chitra Ramalingam in Conversation with Matt Jacobson.
Part of the ongoing “Democracy in America” @ the NHFPL series.
Zoom Webinar Link: https://yale.zoom.us/j/99411956635

Joan Cavanagh and Elihu Rubin in Conversation with Matt Jacobson.
Part of the ongoing “Democracy in America” @ the NHFPL series.
Zoom Webinar Link: https://yale.zoom.us/j/93240762128

Phillip Atiba Goff in Conversation with Matt Jacobson.
Part of the ongoing “Democracy in America” @ the NHFPL series.
Zoom Webinar Link: https://yale.zoom.us/j/98241359676

A Teach-In featuring faculty from Yale’s African American Studies department and the program in Ethnicity Race and Migration.
Speakers will contextualize these events and the erosions of democracy in the US by examining the revitalization of democratic ideals by the excluded, marginalized, and oppressed.
Mass mobilization in response to government malfeasance is a core component of democratic politics. In the 2020 election, Black organizers registered, educated, and mobilized voters in response to policies intended to disenfranchise Black voters (such as curtailing early voting, requiring ID at polling places and ending same-day voter registration), and “swung” Georgia on January 5th.
The democratic practice of protest can also be captured and subverted for antidemocratic ends as we saw with the mobilization of Trump supporters who stormed the US Capitol on January 6th. The disturbing images of an angry, violent mob roving through the inner chambers of the Capitol sent shockwaves around the world. In this teach-in, faculty contextualize these events and the erosions of democracy in the US by examining the revitalization of democratic ideals by the excluded, marginalized, and oppressed.

Daphne A. Brooks in Conversation with Matt Jacobson.
Part of the ongoing “Democracy in America” @ the NHFPL series.
Zoom Webinar Link: https://yale.zoom.us/j/96709040404

Join the Yale African American Affinity Group, Working Women’s Network, and Yale Latino Networking Group for a book club discussion on Daughters of the Stone by Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa. Daughters of the Stone is a lyrical powerful novel about a family of Afro-Puerto Rican women spanning five generations, detailing their physical and spiritual journey from the Old World to the New. Register by Friday, January 29 for a chance to win a free copy of the book!

Laura Barraclough, Sarai K. Ribicoff Associate Professor of American Studies
https://americanstudies.yale.edu/people/laura-barraclough

Join webinar on “The Intersectional Vulnerabilities that COVID Lays Bare” w/Kimberlé Crenshaw and Professor Dan Martínez HoSang
April 8, 8pm EST
Hosted by Kimberlé Crenshaw and the African American Policy Forum. This is the third in a series of wide-ranging conversations that have featured scholars including Dorothy Roberts, Naomi Klein, and other organizers, artists and writers.

Tonight’s session will feature speakers describing Covid’s impact in Puerto Rico, Hawaii, in Navajo country and other indigenous communities, and New Orleans, among other places. I will be talking about anti-Asian racism amidst the pandemic, and its connection to widespread and long-standing forms of white supremacy.

All of the webinars and an associated series of podcasts are archived here.
REGISTER HERE: bit.ly/aapf-covid3

Description: The past several weeks have prompted unprecedented levels of turmoil and unpredictability due to rising alarm over COVID-19. While American society has taken precautionary measures to counter the spread of the virus, those most vulnerable to societal neglect remain most impacted. Coronavirus did not create the stark social, financial, and political inequalities that define life for so many Americans, but it has made them more strikingly visible than any moment in recent history. Unfortunately, some of the intersectional dimensions of these structural disparities remain undetected and unreported.
As we witness this unprecedented moment, some of us from home and some of us from the front lines, we want to take the opportunity to gather together and share a piece of what we’re each seeing and experiencing. Join us on April 8th at 8:00 p.m. EST (5:00 p.m. PST) as thought leaders around the country discuss the current crisis, explore how we can move forward together to protect and uplift the most vulnerable among us, and imagine the world we hope to see emerge on the other side.
Hosted by Kimberlé Crenshaw.

THIS EVENT IS POSTPONED TO A LATER DATE. MORE INFORMATION TO COME.
Rod Ferguson is a Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and of American Studies. Ferguson’s talk is based on a manuscript-in-progress that analyzes how contemporary Black art and writings from the Black radical tradition converse with one another in their assessments of the ravages of racial capitalism, colonialism, and heteropatriarchy.

Kandice Chuh is a professor of English, American studies, and Critical Social Psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she is also a member of the M.A. in Liberal Studies faculty, and affiliate faculty to the Africana studies program. The author of “The Difference Aesthetics Makes: on the humanities ‘after Man’ “(2019) and “Imagine Otherwise: on Asian Americanist Critique” (2003), which won the American Studies Association’s Lora Romero Book Award, Chuh is the co editor, with Karen Shimakawa, of Orientations: Mapping Studies in the Asian Diaspora (2001). She teaches courses on aesthetic theory, queer theory and queer of color critique, decolonial studies, and Asian and Asian American racialization.
FACILITATOR: Lisa Lowe, Samuel Knight Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, Race, and Migration

4:30pm Advance book sales
5:00—6:30pm Panel discussion, audience Q&A
6:30—7:00pm Book sales and signing

Location: Robert L. Mcneil, Jr. Lecture Hall, the Yale University Art Gallery, 1111 Chapel Street, New Haven, CT, 06510
Co-sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition and the Yale University Art Gallery
Organized by the YUAG, the exhibition draws together nearly all of the known preparatory sketches and painted studies made by John Wilson for a powerful mural of a racial-terror lynching. Born in Massachusetts to immigrants from British Guiana, Wilson graduated in 1945 from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, earned a B.S. from Tufts University in 1947, and studied in Paris with the sculptor and painter Fernand Léger. Awarded the John Hay Whitney Fellowship, Wilson studied in Mexico from 1950 through 1956. Inspired by the social activism of Mexican muralists, Wilson painted “The Incident” in 1952, during a course at La Esmerelda, the national school of art in Mexico City.
This panel discussion uses John Wilson’s mural and the Yale University Art Gallery exhibition as a springboard for discussing representations of lynching and other racial violence, past and present. Lynching was and remains a public spectacle meant to challenge social and economic progress among black people and other people of color and reinforce white supremacist hierarchies. While many artists have opposed these grotesque acts of brutality using a variety of media, Wilson’s mural stands out for its size, the ephemerality of its form, and its representation of African American resistance and physical defense of their families. The panelists will discuss the role of the humanities and public art in grappling with this horrible aspect of U.S. history. Aesthetically, historically, and legally, how can we understand and confront legacies of racial terror in American life?
Moderator: David W. Blight (Director, Gilder Lehrman Center; Sterling Professor of American History, Yale University)
Panelists:
· Fitzhugh Brundage (William Umstead Distinguished Professor, Department of History, University of North Carolina- Chapel Hill)
· Crystal Feimster (Associate Professor of African American Studies, History, and American Studies, Yale University)
· Ken Gonzales-Day (Fletcher Jones Chair in Art at Scripps College, Claremont, California)
· Jennifer Taylor (Senior Attorney, Equal Justice Initiative)

Maryam Ivette Parhizkar is a joint Ph.D. candidate in American Studies and African American Studies.  Her dissertation tells the performance histories of several diasporic figures whose lives and public personas engage with U.S. narratives of modernity and racial primitivism. Spanning a number of knowledge-producing institutions as their backdrop (including world’s fairs, the museum, and the university), these performances together offer a counternarrative to racialized accounts of modernity and the modern subject––challenging prevailing U.S.-American conceptions of possession, innovation, and futurity while pursuing alternative imaginings of social collectivity and history.
CRITICAL ENCOUNTERS highlights new scholarship in the field of American Studies, bringing together Yale faculty and graduate students as well as other scholars and artists to present work in progress and promote interdisciplinary conversations around the diverse aspects of the American experience locally, nationally, and globally.

John Wargo is the Tweedy-Ordway Professor of Environmental Health and Political Science at Yale University and the Chair of the Yale College Environmental Studies Major and Program. https://environment.yale.edu/profile/wargo/

Join us for an afternoon talk and Q&A with Elizabeth Hoover, professor of American Studies at Brown University, where she serves as the faculty director for the Native American and Indigenous Studies initiative. Her presentation will focus on themes from her upcoming book, From “Garden Warriors” to “Good Seeds:” Indigenizing the Local Food Movement, which examines the definitions and practices of Native American food sovereignty as indigenous people across the country understand them. Through extensive interviews and research, she brings together the visions and work of seed-keepers, gardeners, farmers, and activists to compose a more complete portrait of the food sovereignty landscape.
Elizabeth Hoover is the Manning Professor of American Studies at Brown University. She studies environmental justice and health in Native American communities, and is the author of journal articles and the book The River is in Us; Fighting Toxins in a Mohawk Community. She served as an editor for the volume Indigenous Food Sovereignty in the United States: Restoring Cultural Knowledge, Protecting Environments, and Regaining Health. She is also a published photographer, with work appearing in cookbooks like The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen and news outlets like Democracy Now.
Chewing the Fat is the Yale Sustainable Food Program’s long-standing speaker series. All events are free and open to the public. This event is hosted in collaboration with the Native American Cultural Center at Yale, and the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration.

Jodi Melamed is associate professor of English and Africana Studies at Marquette University. She is the author of Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) and has published many articles and chapters in a wide array of journals and editions. She is a co-editor (with Jodi Byrd, Alyosha Goldstein, and Chandan Reddy) of a recent special volume of Social Text, “Economies of Dispossession: Indigeneity, Race, Capitalism” (Spring 2018). Melamed is the recipient of numerous awards, fellowships, and grants, including a Fulbright, a Woodrow Wilson Postdoctoral Fellowship, and grants from the American Studies Association, the Social Science Research Council, the Mellon Foundation and the Wisconsin Humanities Council. She is currently at work on a new book project titled Dispossession by Administration: The Open Secret of Racial Capitalist Violence.

From chop suey to spam, curry to sushi, the connections between food and the histories of Asian America run deep, weaving together themes of identity, labor, immigration, and geopolitics. As part of the Asian American Cultural Center’s “Life After Yale” series, a panel of recent Yale alumni will speak on these issues for their own food careers. We invite you to join us, and our four distinguished panelists (Rupa Bhattacharya SY ’03, Lucas Sin DC ’15. Jaime Sunwoo SY ’14, and Latha Swamy FES ’16) for an evening conversation. Dinner will be provided.
Latha Swamy FES ‘16 is Director of Food System Policy for the City of New Haven. She also serves as Senior Adviser in Planetary Health to the Former President of Mexico, Ernesto Zedillo, at the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization. Through her policy work, Swamy focuses on socio-economic, health, and environmental justice and equity in the food system, from the local to the global scale.
Jaime Sunwoo SY ‘14 is a Korean-American artist from Brooklyn. Currently, she is working on Specially Processed American Me, a multidisciplinary performance project exploring the history of SPAM, the canned meat, in the Asia-Pacific and its place in the Asian American experience.
Lucas Sin, DC ‘15 opened Junzi Kitchen the year he graduated. Earlier this year, he was one of twelve chefs to become a Young Gun, an award bestowed by Eater to promising chefs in their twenties.
Rupa Bhattacharya, SY ‘03 is the Editor-in-Chief of Munchies, VICE’s food journalism outlet. She has written extensively about food & culture over the years, in addition to being a cookbook author and recipe developer.
Chewing the Fat is the Yale Sustainable Food Program’s long-standing speaker series. All events are free and open to the public. This event is hosted in collaboration with the Asian American Cultural Center at Yale, the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration, and the Traphaegen Alumni Speaker Series.

Asian Network at Yale (ANY) and Yale’s Working Women’s Network (WWN) jointly sponsor the 2019 Women’s Leadership Series. The focus of the Women’s Leadership Series is to bring together a diverse mix of Yale’s own successful women leaders who, through the discussion of topics relevant to today’s issues, will inspire and encourage women to reflect on their own goals and status as they strive to advance in their careers and lives. The format for the Leadership Series will consist of a moderated discussion with the speaker that will delve into topics of interest in which the speaker will share her personal and professional perspectives on questions. The themes of the series are Leadership, Identity, Career, Well-being, and Service.
Professor Mary Ting Yi Lui, Head of College of Timothy Dwight College, is a member of the faculty of the American Studies program and the History department. She is also affiliated with the programs Ethnicity, Race, and Migration and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her research and teaching focuses on Asian American history, urban history, women and gender studies, and public history. Her first book, The Chinatown Trunk Mystery: Murder, Miscegenation, and Other Dangerous Encounters in Turn-of-the-Century New York City, was awarded a 2007 best book prize for history from the Association of Asian American Studies. She recently appeared in a documentary film on the history of Chinese Exclusion Act directed by acclaimed filmmakers Ric Burns and Li-Shin Yu that aired on PBS’s American Experience in May 2018.
RSVP: http://bit.ly/womensleadershipseries

In what world do we imagine the past to be settled? What are the conditions that make for this imagining, this fantasy or rather, demand of a new start point? In this piece I consider the world of settler colonialism, which demands this newness, and a world in which Native people and their claims to territory are whittled to the status of claimant or subject in time with the fantasy of their disappearance and containment away from a modern and critical present. This fantasy of a world without Indigenous people extends to a mode of governance that is beyond institutional and ideological but is in this study, deeply affective. In this piece I examine how the Canadian practice of settler governance has adjusted itself in line with global trends and rights paradigms away from overt violence to what are seen as softer and kinder, caring modes of governing but governing, violently still and yet, with a language of care, upon still stolen land. This piece asks not only in what world we imagine time to stop, but takes up the ways in which those that survived the time stoppage stand in critical relationship to dispossession and settler governance apprehend, analyze and act upon this project of affective governance. Here an oral and textual history of the notion of “reconciliation” is constructed and analyzed with recourse to Indigenous criticism of this affective project of repair.
Audra Simpson is Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. She researches and writes about Indigenous and settler society, politics and history. She is the author of Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States (Duke University Press, 2014), winner of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association’s Best First Book in Native American and Indigenous Studies Prize, the Laura Romero Prize from the American Studies Association as well as the Sharon Stephens Prize from the American Ethnological Society (2015). She is co-editor of Theorizing Native Studies (Duke University Press, 2014). She has articles in Postcolonial Studies, Theory & Event, Cultural Anthropology, American Quarterly, Junctures, Law and Contemporary Problems and Wicazo Sa Review. In 2010 she won Columbia University’s School for General Studies “Excellence in Teaching Award.” She is a Kahnawake Mohawk.

Presentation and lunch time dialogue with Mark Palmer (Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma) from the University of Missouri, Laura Smith from Macalaster College, and Annita Hetoevëhotohke’e Lucchesi (Southern Cheyenne) from the Sovereign Bodies Institute at the University of Lethbridge.

Join us for a panel discussion with experts on how to create an inclusive classroom that is welcoming to a diverse group of students. The panelists include:
* Amanda Bayer (Ph.D. ‘95), Professor of Economics, Swarthmore College
* Michelle Nearon, Senior Associate Dean for Graduate Student Development and Diversity; Director, OGSDD, Yale Graduate School
* Ebonya Washington, Samuel C. Park Jr. Professor of Economics; Director of Undergraduate Studies, Yale University
* Suzanne Young, Director, Graduate and Postdoctoral Teaching Development, Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning
Light refreshments will be served. To help us plan for the event, please register if you are interested in attending.
Sponsors
* Department of Economics
* Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration
* Belonging at Yale
* Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
* Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning

MartínezErnesto Javier Martínez, associate professor in the Department of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies (IRES) at the University of Oregon, will present his recent work with the Femeniños Project, a multi-genre storytelling initiative that brings together a team of award-winning filmmakers, writers, illustrators, and musicians to help mitigate the severe underrepresentation of Latino/x youth in contemporary cultural production and to proactively challenge the harm inflicted upon queer youth of color when their humanity is distorted in the mainstream imagination.
Prof. Martínez will screen his award-winning short film, La Serenata (Directed by Adelina Anthony), as well as read from his ground-breaking new children’s book, When We Love Someone We Sing to Them/ Cuando Amamos Cantamos, which is the first bilingual children’s book published in the United States about a boy who loves a boy.

Daniel Blight, Writer and Lecturer, University of Brighton

A conversation with Claudia Rankine, Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry and moderated by Leah Mirakhor.
The invention and continuance of the “white race” is not just a political, social and legal phenomenon – it is also visual. From the advent of early colonial photography in the 19th century to contemporary social media and photographic art, photography has always played and continues to play an integral role in the maintenance of the political and social hegemony of “whiteness”. The technology of the camera is not innocent, nor are the images it produces or the people who make them.
This presentation and discussion engages the oppressive nature of whiteness, and highlights some of the crucial work contemporary photographic artists are doing to subvert and critique its image and its continuing power.
Photo Credit: Buck Ellison, The Prince Children, Holland, Michigan, 2019. Courtesy of the artist and The Sunday Painter.

Poster

Khaled A. Beydoun is a leading scholar on Islamophobia, the ‘War on Terror,’ and Civil Rights. He serves as a Professor at the University of Arkansas (Fayetteville) School of Law, and Senior Affiliated Faculty at the University of California- Berkeley Islamophobia Research & Documentation Project.

Professor Beydoun’s research examines the legal construction of Arab and Muslim American identity,
Islamophobia, and the intersection of national security policy, civil liberties and citizenship. His scholarship has been featured in top law journals, including: the Columbia
Law Review, the California Law Review, the UCLA Law Review, the Harvard Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Law Review, and the Northwestern University Law Review. His critically acclaimed book, American Islamophobia: Understanding the Roots and Rise of Fear, was published in 2018, by the University
of California Press, and his co-edited volume, Islamophobia and the Law, will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2019.

Complimenting his academic work and books, Professor Beydoun is an active public intellectual. In addition to his regular commentary in The Guardian and Al-Jazeera English, Professor Beydoun’s work has been featured in the The New York Times, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, Time, Salon, and ESPN; and television and radio news programming including CNN, PBS, BBC, Fox, NBC and ABC News. In addition, Professor Beydoun has served as a consultant for the U.S. Census Bureau, the African American Policy Forum, and the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding. He is a regular lecturer at colleges and universities in the US, and beyond.

Professor Beydoun also serves on the U.S. Commission for Civil Rights, appointed to serve on the Michigan State Committee in 2017, and received a 2018 Equality Fellowship from the Open Society Foundation. He earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan; a Master’s in Law from the University of Toronto; and his Juris Doctor from the UCLA School of Law. Before academia, Professor Beydoun practiced in the areas of racial justice, criminal defense, and international rule of law. He is a native of Detroit.

Claire Jean Kim is Professor of Political Science and Asian American Studies. Her first book, Bitter Fruit: The Politics of Black-Korean Conflict in New York City (Yale University Press, 2000) is the recipient of the American Political Science Association’s Ralph Bunche Award for the Best Book on Ethnic and Cultural Pluralism and a Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association Organized Section on Race, Ethnicity, and Politics. Her second book, Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age (Cambridge University Press, 2015), is the also the recipient of a Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association Organized Section on Race, Ethnicity, and Politics. Dr. Kim has written numerous journal articles, book chapters, and essays, and she is co-editor of a special issue of American Quarterly entitled Species/Race/Sex (2013). She is the recipient of a grant from the University of California Center for New Racial Studies, and she has been a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey and the University of California Humanities Research Institute. She is currently writing a book entitled “Asian Americans in an Anti-Black World.”

Event Description
Professor Kim’s lecture will shed light on the pending affirmative action lawsuit filed by Asian American plaintiffs against Harvard University by providing a brief history of how Asian Americans have been figured (and have figured themselves) in U.S. Supreme Court jurisprudence on race-conscious admissions in higher education. It shows that the figuration of Asian Americans has played a critical role in the legal-ideological project of despecifying black subjection and disavowing racial positionality in the U.S. social order, from Bakke to the present, and argues that a new ‘sociometry’ of race is necessary to help us understand and challenge persistent structures of racial power.

This event is part of the RITM Asian American Studies Speaker Series.

In 1914 the S.S. Komagata Maru left Hong Kong for Vancouver carrying 376 Punjabi migrants. Chartered by railway contractor Gurdit Singh, the ship and its passengers were denied entry into Canada and eventually deported to Calcutta. In this talk, Renisa Mawani retells the well-known story of the Komagata Maru. Drawing on what she terms “oceans as method”—a mode of thinking and writing that repositions land and sea—Mawani places the Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic Oceans into conversation to track the circulating legalities that connected the Dominions, colonies, and territories; the shifting intensities of racial and colonial violence that joined indigenous dispossession, transatlantic slavery, and Indian indenture to so-called “free” migration; and the transoceanic repertoires of anticolonial critique that challenged the empire’s underlying racial, spatial, and temporal divides. By following the movements of a single ship and bringing these three oceans into sharper view, Mawani offers a novel method of writing colonial legal history.

Renisa Mawani is Professor of Sociology and recurring Chair of the Law and Society Program at the University of British Columbia. She works in the fields of critical theory and colonial legal history and has published widely on law, colonialism, and legal geography. Her first book, Colonial Proximities (2009) details a set of legal encounters between indigenous peoples, Chinese migrants, “mixed-race” populations, and Europeans in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century British Columbia. Her second book, Across Oceans of Law (Duke University Press, 2018), is a global and maritime legal history of the S.S. Komagata Maru, a British-built and Japanese-owned steamship. She is co-editor of “The Travels of Law: Indian Ocean Itineraries” published in Law and History Review (2014); and co-editor of Unmooring the Komagata Maru (2019); with Antoinette Burton, she is co-editor of Animalia: An Anti-Imperial Bestiary of Our Times. An award-winning scholar and instructor, she has just been elected to the Law and Society Association’s Board of Trustees (2019-2022).

EVENT POSTER

The Yale Film Society is excited to invite award‐winning video
artist Sky Hopinka to campus to present a program of his short works. Mr. Hopinka is a tribal member of the Ho‐Chunk Nation and a descendent of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians. His
elusive, “ethno‐poetic” videos journey through Indigenous lands across the U.S., engaging dense layers of testimony, folklore, and song in their unsettled exploration of homeland and
language.

Mr. Hopinka’s work has played at festivals including Sundance, Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, and ImagineNATIVE Media + Arts Festival. His work was also part of the 2017 Whitney Biennial. He was a recipient of the Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker at the 54th Ann Arbor Film Festival and the 2018 Sundance Art of Nonfiction Fellowship.

Find more details about the event at this link: https://www.facebook.com/events/760048247713740/

Fatima El-Tayeb is Professor of Literature and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego. Her work deconstructs structural racism in “colorblind” Europe and centers strategies of resistance among racialized communities, especially those that politicize culture through an intersectional, queer practice. She is the author of three books - Schwarze Deutsche. ‘Rasse’ und nationale Identität 1890 – 1933 (Black Germans. Race and national Identity 1890-1933, 2001), European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe (2011) and Undeutsch. Die Konstruktion des Anderen in der postmigrantischen Gesellschaft (Ungerman. The Construction of Otherness in postmigrant societies, 2016) - and numerous articles on the interactions of race, gender, sexuality, religion and nation. She is active in black feminist, migrant, and queer of color organizations in Europe and the US. She co-founded the Black European Studies Project (BEST) in 2004 and is co-author of the feature film Alles wird gut/Everything will be fine (1997).

EVENT POSTER
 

Miriam Ticktin is Associate Professor Anthropology at the New School for Social Research. She was Chair of Anthropology from 2016-2018, Co-Director of the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility between 2013-2016 and Director of Gender Studies from 2012-2013. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology at Stanford University and from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, France (as a co-tutelle), and an MA in English Literature from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar.
Ticktin’s research has focused in the broadest sense on “the political”: what it is, how it is called into being, how inequalities are produced and challenged and how new political formations are imagined. Her earlier research asks what it means to make political claims in the name of a universal humanity, with a focus on human rights and humanitarianism; her current research is more interested in imagining and opening the way to new political formations. She uses a decolonial, feminist methodology, and the central lenses onto these questions are gender, race and migration. She is the author of Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France (University of California Press, 2011) and In the Name of Humanity: the Government of Threat and Care (co-editor with Ilana Feldman, Duke University Press, 2010), along with many other articles and book chapters.
Ticktin is currently at work on two related book projects: 1) a short book on innocence as a political concept, and how it produces an unending search for purity; 2) a book on the way border wall technologies travel, both transnationally and cross-species.

Event poster

Nicole R. Fleetwood is a writer, curator, and professor of American Studies at Rutgers University, New
Brunswick.
Her books are Marking Time: Art in the Era of Mass Incarceration (forthcoming), On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination (2015), and Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (2011).
She is co-editor of Aperture magazine’s “Prison Nation,” a special issue focusing on photography’s role in documenting mass incarceration.
Fleetwood has co/curated exhibitions on art and mass incarceration at the Andrew Freedman Home, Aperture, Cleveland Public Library, Zimmerli Museum, New Brunswick Free Public Library, and the Corrections Accountability Project of the Urban Justice Center.

Svati Shah is an anthropologist and Associate Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She holds degrees in public health and has worked internationally with non-profit and advocacy organizations in the U.S. and India, in the areas of climate justice, land rights, labor, and sexuality politics.
She is the author of Street Corner Secrets: Sex, Work, and Migration in the City of Mumbai (2014), and has published widely on LGBTQ politics, sexuality, and mobility in South Asia.
Her talk draws from a forthcoming book about the contemporary landscape for LGBTQ activism in India.

M. Bianet Castellanos is an anthropologist and Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Minnesota.
She is the author of “A Return to Servitude: Maya Migration and the Tourist Trade in Cancún” (2010)
and numerous journal articles devoted to indigeneity, gender, and settler colonialism in the
Americas. She co-edited Comparative Indigeneities of the Américas: Toward a Hemispheric Approach
(2012).
Her talk draws from a forthcoming book, which analyzes contemporary Maya relations with the Mexican state through the lens of home-ownership and debt. In other research, she examines indigenous lives
across national boundaries, between Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula and Los
Angeles, California.

Co-sponsored by Ezra Stiles College, The Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration (RITM), and the Native American Cultural Center.

Ricardo Caté of Santo Domingo Pueblo is the most prominent Native American cartoonist working today. His immensely popular cartoon “Without Reservations” is published daily in the Santa Fe New Mexican and Taos News, and explores the irony and poignant humor found in the Native American experience of living in dominant culture. Caté is the only Native American cartoonist whose work is carried by a daily mainstream newspaper. Many of his comics are included in his book, “Without Reservations: The Cartoons of Ricardo Caté.” He has three children and lives in Santo Domingo Pueblo, where he participates in feast day dances and traditional cultural events.

Join a book reading and book talk with author Amitava Kumar, Professor of English on the Helen D. Lockwood Chair at Vassar College.

Amitava Kumar is the author, most recently, of a novel Immigrant, Montana (2018, Knopf). An earlier version of the novel was recently published in India under the title The Lovers.

Kumar has written several works of literary non-fiction, including the prize-winning book A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb, described by the New York Times as a “perceptive and soulful” meditation on “the cultural and human repercussions” of the global war on terror. His other titles include Passport Photos, Bombay-London-New York, Husband of a Fanatic, A Matter of Rats: A Short Biography of Patna, and Lunch with a Bigot: The Writer in the World. Kumar’s first novel, Home Products, was short-listed for India’s premier literary award and republished in the US under the title Nobody Does the Right Thing. His writings have appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The Nation, The New York Times, The New Yorker.com, Bookforum, Kenyon Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Critical Inquiry, Boston Review, Caravan, The Indian Express, The New Statesman, American Prospect, and numerous other venues. “Pyre,” an essay first published in Granta, was chosen by Jonathan Franzen for The Best American Essays 2016. Kumar serves on the editorial board of several publications and is the script-writer and narrator of two documentary films: “Pure Chutney” (1997) and “Dirty Laundry” (2005). Professor Kumar teaches classes that mainly deal with: reportage; the essay-form, both in prose and film; cities; literatures describing the global movement of goods and people; war; memory-work.

Monica Muñoz Martinez ‘06 is the Stanley J. Bernstein Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies at Brown University and an Andrew Carnegie Fellow. She is cofounder of the nonprofit organization Refusing to Forget, which calls for a public reckoning with racial violence in Texas. Martinez helped develop an award-winning exhibit on racial terror in the early twentieth century for the Bullock Texas State History Museum and worked to secure four state historical markers along the U.S.–Mexico border. She is also the primary investigator for Mapping Violence, a digital research project that documents histories of racial violence in Texas.

Event Abstract:
Monica’s book, The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas, delves into the killing of Mexican residents committed between 1910 and 1920 by vigilantes and law enforcement―including the renowned Texas Rangers. Mexican residents were killed with impunity. The full extent of the violence was known only to the relatives of the victims. Monica turns to the keepers of this history to tell this riveting and disturbing untold story.

This event is part of the Ethnicity, Race, and Migration 20th anniversary, Latinx Speaker Series.

Dr. Allan Downey (Dakelh, Nak’azdli Whut’en) will give a demonstration and an overview of the cultural and historical importance of lacrosse to Native American communities.
The event will be followed by a community dinner, co-sponsored by the Native American Cultural Center (NACC).

Dr. Downey (Dakelh, Nak’azdli Whut’en) is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at McMaster University.

Ana Raquel Minian ‘12, is an assistant professor in the Department of History and the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE) at Stanford University. Her current book is Undocumented Lives: The Untold History of Mexican Migration. Her work has also been published in American Quarterly and the Journal of American History. Ana received her Ph.D. from Yale University with distinction.

Event Abstract:
Ana’s first book, Undocumented Lives: The Untold Story of Mexican Migration(Harvard University Press, 2018) explores the late-twentieth-century history of Mexican undocumented migration to the United States, the growth of migrant communities, and bi-national efforts to regulate the border. It uses over two hundred oral history interviews, government archives, migrant correspondence, privately held organizational records and personal collections, pamphlets, and unpublished ephemera, and newspapers and magazines collected in Washington D.C., Chicago, the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Michoacán, Zacatecas, and Mexico City.

Minian’s second book will explore the history of immigrant detention.

This event is part of the Ethnicity, Race, and Migration 20th anniversary, Latinx Speaker Series

Dr. Nolan L. Cabrera is an associate professor in the Center for the Study of Higher Education where he studies the racial dynamics on college campuses with a focus on Whiteness. He was also one of three expert witnesses on behalf of the plaintiffs in the Tucson Unified ethnic studies federal trial.

Event Abstract:
White Guys on Campus is a critical examination of race in higher education, centering Whiteness, in an effort to unveil the frequently unconscious habits of racism among White male undergraduates. Nolan L. Cabrera moves beyond the “few bad apples” frame of contemporary racism, and explores the structures, policies, ideologies, and experiences that allow racism to flourish. This book details many of the contours of contemporary, systemic racism, while engaging the possibility of White students to participate in anti-racism. Ultimately, White Guys on Campus calls upon institutions of higher education to be sites of social transformation instead of reinforcing systemic racism, while creating a platform to engage and challenge the public discourse of “post- racialism.”

Matthew Frye Jacobson, Ph.D., Brown University, 1992, is professor of African American Studies, History, and American Studies.

He is the author of What Have They Built You to Do?: The Manchurian Candidate and Cold War America, (with Gaspar Gonzalez, 2006), Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post–Civil Rights America (2005), Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (2000), Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (1998), and Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish, and Jewish Immigrants in the United States (1995). He is currently at work on Odetta’s Voice and Other Weapons: The Civil Rights Era as Cultural History.

His teaching interests are clustered under the general category of race in U.S. political culture 1790–present, including U.S. imperialism, immigration and migration, popular culture, and the juridical structures of U.S. citizenship.

This event is part of the “Democracy in Crisis: Conversations with New Haven Scholars” series that will take place at the Ives Location (133 Elm Street) of the New Haven Free Public Library (nhfpl.org).

Leticia Alvarado is an Assistant Professor in the Department of American Studies at Brown University.

Her interdisciplinary research is situated at the nexus of Latina/o/x, visual culture, and gender and sexuality studies.

Leticia Alvarado’s research has been funded by the Ford Foundation, the Smithsonian, and Brown University’s Wriston Fellowship for “excellence in teaching and scholarship.” Her scholarly publications appear in Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, and the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies as well as the award-winning museum catalogue, Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A..

Her first book, Abject Performances: Aesthetic Strategies in Latino Cultural Production is now available from Duke University Press.

Albert Sergio Laguna is Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, Race, and Migration, and Director of Undergraduate Studies in American Studies. Join a candid conversation with Professor Laguna as he discusses his new book Diversion: Play and Popular Culture in Cuban America.

Event Description:
In an era of warming relations between the US and Cuba, this book updates the conversation about Cuban America by showing how this community has changed over the past 25 years. No longer a conservative Republican voting bloc, the majority of Cubans today want more engagement with the island instead of less. Laguna investigates the generational shifts and tensions in a Cuban America where the majority is now made up of immigrants who arrived since the 1990s and those born in the US.

To probe these changes, Laguna examines the aesthetic and social logics of a wide range of popular culture forms originating in Miami and Cuba from the 1970s through the 2010s. They include the stand-up comedy of performers like Alvarez Guedes and Robertico, a festival called Cuba Nostalgia, Miami morning radio shows, a form of media distribution on the island known as el paquete, and the viral social media content of Los Pichy Boys. This study illustrates the centrality of play in a community that has been described historically as angry, reactionary, and melancholic. Diversión contends that our understanding of the Cuban diaspora is lacking not in seriousness, but in play.

By unpacking this archive, Laguna explores our complex, often fraught attachments to popular culture and the way it can challenge and reproduce typical cultural ideologies—especially in relation to politics and race. In the wake of the largest migration wave to the US in Cuban history, Diversión and its focus on play is crucial reading for those who seek to understand not only the Cuban American diaspora, but cultural and economic life on the island.

Lunch will be served.

This May 3-5th, 2018, the Yale Indigenous Performing Arts Program (YIPAP) will host its 3rd annual Young Native Storyteller Festival. The Festival features the work of this year’s national contest winners, including playwright Everett George (Fallon Paiute Shoshone Tribe), musician Vonica LaPlante (MHA Nation); dancer Charlize Arcoren (Sicangu Lakota); as well as spoken word artists Teanna Hart (Sicangu Lakota) and Zoey White (Oglala Lakota).

This year’s Festival will be supplemented by additional workshops and public readings of two established Native writers, playwright Reed Adair Bobroff (Navajo Nation)—whose play won the 1st Annual YIPAP Young Native Storytellers Contest two years ago—and screenwriter Ryan Redcorn (Osage Nation).

A staged reading of Bobroff’s play, “A Fraction of Love,” will be presented on May 3 at 7:00pm, a reading of Ryan Redcorn’s new screenplay, “I Hate You Jimmie Bacon Iron,” will be presented on May 4 at 7:00pm, and the public performance featuring this year’s winners will take place on May 5 at 7:00 pm.

The Ethnicity, Race and Migration Program at Yale is proud to host the first Yale/CT undergraduate Ethnic Studies Symposium at the Yale Afro-American Cultural Center.  Please see the symposium website, including paper and panel titles, here: http://ctethnicstudies.strikingly.com/

The symposium showcases innovative research and creative projects done by undergraduates from Connecticut College, Quinnipiac, Wesleyan, Central Connecticut State, Eastern Connecticut State, Fairfield University, University of Connecticut, and Yale. Professor Gary Okihiro will give the keynote address.

The symposium coincides with the 50th Anniversary of the Third World Liberation Front strike for Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State and the 20th Anniversary of the Ethnicity, Race and Migration major at Yale.

 Made possible with the generous support of the Yale Center for Race, Indigeneity and Transnational Migration (RITM).

This talk examines place-making in the LA neighborhood of Echo Park through a Mexican restaurant that became an “urban anchor” for its owner, employees, and customers. Unlike residents of other LA ethnic enclaves, Echo Park residents occupied a geographic and cultural crossroads. The community’s complex economic, racial, and ethnic history transcends the conventional narrative of white flight, disinvestment, and segregation.

Natalia Molina is Professor of History at UCSD and author of How Race Is Made in America.

SPECIAL YALE SCREENING WITH FILMMAKERS IN-ATTENDANCE

CO-PRESENTED BY

The Yale French North American Studies working group and the Yale Program in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration are pleased to welcome Leyla McCalla, a Haitian-American musician based in New Orleans, Louisiana, for a series of events including a free concert this Wednesday the 24!

Leyla McCalla finds inspiration from a variety of sources, whether it is her Haitian heritage, living in New Orleans, or dancing at Cajun Mardi Gras. Both of McCalla’s parents were born in Haiti. Her father, Jocelyn McCalla, was the Executive Director of the New York-based National Coalition for Haitian Rights. Her mother, Régine Dupuy, is the daughter of Ben Dupuy, who ran Haïti Progrès, a New York-based Haitian socialist newspaper published in Florida, Haiti, New York, and Quebec. 

As a teenager, Leyla relocated to Accra, Ghana for two years. Upon her return, she attended Smith College for a year before transferring to New York University, where she studied cello performance and chamber music. It was the move to New Orleans that signaled a journey of musical and cultural discovery for Leyla. “New Orleans always felt like home to me,” she recalls. “The more I learned about the history of Louisiana, its ties to Haiti, and French speaking culture, the more sense of belonging I felt and continue to feel.” Her critically acclaimed 2013 album Vari-Colored Songs is a tribute to Langston Hughes. Her most recent album, A Day For The Hunter, A Day For The Prey, features other Francophone artists, including Louis Michot of the Lost Bayou Ramblers.

Leyla will perform in-concert on January 24, 2018 in the Davenport Common Room at 248 York Street, New Haven. Doors open at 7:30 PM. Concert is free and open to the public! Please also join Leyla and a host of panelists for “French South of the Border,” a colloquium on Friday the 26 of January at 4 PM in HGS room 211 (Hall of Graduate Studies, 320 York Street, New Haven). More information to follow. 

What do professional sports have to do with being or feeling American? Join us and Matthew Jacobson, William Robertson Coe Professor of American Studies and History and Chair of Ethnicity, Race & Migration at Yale, for a screening of the powerful documentary A LONG WAY FROM HOME in conjunction with Long Wharf Theatre’s upcoming production of THE CHOSEN.

Find out more on the movie here

Find out more on the play here

Presented by Long Wharf Theatre, the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration (RITM), and the New Haven Free Public Library.

JEFF CHANG has written extensively on culture, politics, the arts, and music. He is the author of “Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip Hop Generation,” “Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip Hop,” “Who We Be: The Colorization of America, and We Gon’ Be Alright: Notes On Race and Resegregation.” He is currently working on a biography of Bruce Lee. Jeff has been a USA Ford Fellow in Literature and a winner of the North Star News Prize. He was named by The Utne Reader as one of “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World,” by KQED as an Asian Pacific American Local Hero, and by the Yerba Buena Center for The Arts as one of its 2016 YBCA 100 list of those “shaping the future of American culture.” With H. Samy Alim, he was the 2014 winner of the St. Clair Drake award.

Jeff co-founded CultureStr/ke and ColorLines. He has written for The Guardian, Slate, The Nation, the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Believer, Foreign Policy, N+1, Mother Jones, Salon, and Buzzfeed, among many others.

 Sponsored by the Department of African American Studies, the Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration, and the Program in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration. 

Talk with writer Matt Jacobson, William Robertson Coe Professor of American Studies & History and ER&M Chair

William LeoGrande is Professor of Government and a specialist in Latin American politics at American University. Professor LeoGrande has been a frequent advisor to government and private sector agencies. He has written five books, including Our Own Backyard: The United States in Central America, 1977-1992. Most recently, he is coauthor of Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations Between Washington and Havana. 

WilliamLeoGrande.pdf

In the years during and following the Cambodian genocide, hundreds of thousands of Cambodian refugees were resettled in the US. In the 1980s and 1990s, ten thousand of these refugees arrived in the Bronx, New York. Chronicling their unfinished odyssey, Unsettled tells the story of a refugee community’s survival and resistance amid the concentrated poverty of the Bronx. Scholar and organizer Eric Tang (University of Texas, Austin) locates the Bronx Cambodians and their “unclosed sojourn” within a longer history of war and displacement. In so doing he explores the relationship between refugee communities and African Americans as they experience common and distinct forms of state violence taking shape in America’s inner cities. Tang’s research sits at the intersection of two issues that define the current moment: the international refugee crisis and the resurgent movement against police violence in the urban United States.

Eric Tang is an Associate Professor in the African and African Diaspora Studies Department and faculty member in the Center for Asian American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He also holds a courtesy appointment in the Department of Sociology. He is CUNY’s 2016-2017 Thomas Tam Visiting Professor in Asian American Studies (Asian American/Asian Research Institute). Unsettled is his first book.

Featuring a keynote address by Janelle Wong

Professor of American Studies and Director of the Asian American Studies Program, University of Maryland

November 3: 7:30 pm

(Yale Law School, Room 127)

Panels featuring Yale faculty, alumni, and affiliates in Ethnic Studies fields, and reflections on Don Nakanishi ’71

November 4: 9 am - 4:15 pm

(Loria 351, Loria Center, 190 York St.)

Please see the attached posters and RITM website (here) for more information.

_{Co-sponsored by the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration (RITM), the Asian American Cultural Center (AACC), La Casa Cultural, the Native American Cultural Center (NACC), the Afro-American Cultural Center, the Department of African American Studies, the Department of American Studies, and Timothy Dwight College}

Featuring a keynote address by Janelle Wong

Professor of American Studies and Director of the Asian American Studies Program, University of Maryland

November 3: 7:30 pm

(Yale Law School, Room 127)

Panels featuring Yale faculty, alumni, and affiliates in Ethnic Studies fields, and reflections on Don Nakanishi ’71

November 4: 9 am - 4:15 pm

(Loria 351, Loria Center, 190 York St.)

Please see the attached posters and RITM website (here) for more information.

_{Co-sponsored by the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration (RITM), the Asian American Cultural Center (AACC), La Casa Cultural, the Native American Cultural Center (NACC), the Afro-American Cultural Center, the Department of African American Studies, the Department of American Studies, and Timothy Dwight College}

A writer and photographer of Nigerian and Ghanaian descent, born in London and raised in Boston, now living in Rome and Berlin, who has studied Latin and music, Taiye Selasi is herself a study in the modern meaning of identity. Her first novel Ghana Must Go (2013) is a tale of family drama and reconciliation, following six characters and spanning generations, continents, genders, and classes. Ghana Must Go is at once a portrait of a modern family, and an exploration of the importance of where we come from to who we are. In a sweeping narrative that takes us from Accra to Lagos to London to New York, the work teaches that the truths we speak can heal the wounds we hid.

Co-Sponsored by the Public Humanities Program, Creative Writing, and ER&M at Yale

Sonia Nazario is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and the author of Enrique’s Journey. She covers social issues like immigration, drug addiction, and hunger.

In recent years, we have witnessed a flourishing of cultural, scholarly, and activist work concerned with the entanglement of state-sanctioned violence in the United States and Israeli violence in the Palestinian territories. The history of this entanglement warrants careful elaboration. Drawing from his recent book, A Shadow over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America, Keith P. Feldman examines the moment when U.S. civil rights and antiwar struggles, Israeli military and administrative occupation, and Palestinian narratives of dispossession, dispersion, and resistance were forged, felt, and thought together. As became increasingly evident, the dialectic of occupation (June ’67) and liberation (Global ’68) animated a slew of incisive cultural production, from novels and poetry, pamphlets to posters.

Keith P. Feldman is Assistant Professor of Comparative Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also Core Faculty in the Program in Critical Theory and Affiliated Faculty for the Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality, and the Center for Middle East Studies. Feldman is the author of A Shadow over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America (University of Minnesota Press, 2015). Feldman’s scholarly essays have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Comparative Literature, Comparative Literature Studies, Comparative American Studies, Cultural Studies, Studies in American Jewish Literature, CR: New Centennial Review, MELUS, Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, Theory and Event, PMLA, and several edited volumes. His writing has also appeared in Jadaliyya, Al Jazeera English, and Palestine Square.

Rachel Buff

Professor of History

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

This talk follows the trajectory of the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born (ACPFB), a multiracial immigrant rights organization active in multiple locations during much of the twentieth century. During this same time span, deportation was increasingly deployed as a counterinsurgency strategy targeting migrant communities. Although the ACPFB failed in its quest to change the deportability of the foreign-born, activists continued to repurpose discourses and strategies across space, time and migrant cohorts.  Drawing on this rich history, the talk considers the ethics proposed by the ACPFB and what use they might be to contemporary struggles.

James D. Fernandez is Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at NYU.  His publications include Invisible Immigrants: Spaniards in the US (1868-1945); Brevísima relación de la construcción de España y otros ensayos transatlánticos; and Apology to Apostrophe: Autobiography and the Rhetoric of Self-Representation in Spain.  His areas of expertise include Spanish immigration to the United States; Cultural-literary relations between Spain, Latin America and the US; Representations of New York and the US in Spanish literature; Spanish Civil War and historical memory; and US participation in the Spanish Civil War.

Donald Trump doesn’t like Azhar Usman. Or, more specifically, Rand Paul and the Republicans don’t like the fact that the U.S. Department of State once paid Azhar to tour India as a cultural ambassador. Despite being born and raised in the United States––and playing the role of cultural diplomat as an American artist––Usman has been called “suspicious,” “dangerous,” and “Un-American.” He was visited at his home by the FBI last year. 

Muhammad Ali. Albert Einstein. Malcolm X. Noam Chomsky. Lucille Ball. (Yes, from “I Love Lucy”). What do these legendary Americans all have in common? They were all–at one time or another–denounced as “Un-American” by the proverbial powers that be. And yet, over time, they all became celebrated cultural icons and champions of truth, justice, and freedom. In short, they define what it means to be ULTRA-AMERICAN.

“ULTRA-AMERICAN: A Patriot Act” is Usman’s newest creative project. The Chicago-based standup comedian’s one-man show is an exploration of the tensions and paradoxes surrounding national, cultural, and religious identity in an ever-polarizing world. The show is certainly funny, but also packs a serious intellectual firepower. It is NOT INTENDED for audiences who are easily offended, nor those uninterested in having their beliefs and biases questioned.

CNN called Usman “America’s Funniest Muslim,” and Georgetown University identified him as “one of the 500 Most Influential Muslims in the World.” In 2010, standup icon Dave Chappelle–for whom Usman has opened over 50 times–commented “Azhar Usman is untouchable.” As the co-founder of the international comedy showcase “Allah Made Me Funny,” he has toured over 20 countries on five continents. His comedy has been profiled/reviewed by over 100 major world media outlets including The New York Times, The Economist, BBC, The Guardian, NPR, TIME Magazine, Al-Jazeera, USA Today, and Fox News. Most recently, he served as creative consultant on Hannibal Buress’ new Netflix comedy special, “Comedy Camisado,” and also appeared in Robert Smigel and Conan O’Brien’s “Triumph’s Election Special 2016” for Hulu. 

Delgadillo will discuss her recently published book Latina Lives in Milwaukee (University of Illinois Press, 2015), which examines women’s everyday leadership experiences in religion, education, business, politics, and family, including women’s struggles with exclusion based on ethnicity, race, gender, and sexual orientation. This new research examines Latina/o life in one Midwestern city over the past 100 years through the life stories of Latinas from three different generations, multiple occupations, and varied ethnic backgrounds including Mexican, Mexican-American, Puerto Rican, and Salvadoran American women. 

Theresa Delgadillo earned her Ph.D. from UCLA in 2000. She is the author of Spiritual Mestizaje: Religion, Gender, Race, and Nation in Contemporary Chicana Narrative (Duke 2011). She has also published research that examines questions of gender, race/ethnicity, religion, spirituality, immigration, and sexuality in literature, film, and photography in numerous journals and anthologies. 

Min Jin Lee was born in Seoul and immigrated to New York in 1976 when she was seven years old. She grew up in Elmhurst, New York and is a graduate of the Bronx High School of Science and Yale College where she majored in history. She is a graduate of Georgetown University Law Center, and prior to writing, she practiced law in New York.Her fiction has appeared in The Missouri Review, Narrative Magazine and NPR’s Selected Shorts, and her essays have been anthologized in To Be Real, Breeder, Sugar in My Bowl, The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Works, and The Global and the Intimate. She is the recipient of a NYFA Fellowship and the Narrative Prize. Her personal essays have appeared in Conde Nast Traveler, The Times of London, Vogue, Travel+Leisure, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times Magazine, and Food and Wine. She served as a columnist for the Chosun Ilbo, the leading paper of South Korea. Her debut novel Free Food for Millionaires was a Top Ten Books of the Year in The Times of London, USA Today, and NPR’s Fresh Air. “Motherland,” the short story on which Pachinko is based won the Peden Prize in The Missouri Review in 2002. From 2007-2011, she lived in Tokyo where she researched and wrote Pachinko. She lives in New York with her family. Her novel Pachinko (Hachette) will be forthcoming in 2017.

This talk will attempt to explore the structural forces that have produced the Black Lives Matter struggle. It will delve into the political economy of the United States, as the core of the world system, to show how its solutions to grave crises emerge through the axes of defunding the social good and funding the security apparatus. Black Lives Matter, then, is not a choice, but a necessary outcome of the dynamic of contemporary policy making.

Vijay Prashad is Professor of International Studies at Trinity College. He is the author of eighteen books, including The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (2007) and The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (2013). His most recent book is an edited collection, Letters to Palestine: Writers Respond to War and Occupation (2015), which collects the work of Junot Diaz, Teju Cole, Naomi Shihab Nye, Randa Jarrar and others. He writes regularly for al-Araby al-Jadeed, Frontline, BirGün, The Hindu and AlterNet. He is the Chief Editor at LeftWord Books (Delhi).

• Seyla Banhabib, Yale University
• David Cameron, Yale University
• Georg Fischer, Yale University and European Commission Fellow at the MacMillan Center
• Chris George, Integrated Refugee and immigrant Services, New Haven

Sponsored by the European Studies Council, the European Union Studies Program, the Hellenic Studies Program, the Middle East Studies Council, the Global Justice Program at the MacMillan Center; and the Ethnicity, Race and Migration Program at Yale.

The gap in opportunities for different races in America remains extreme. Nowhere is this more evident than our nation’s top public schools. In New York City, where blacks and Hispanics make up 70% of the city’s school-aged population, they represent less than 5% at the city’s most elite public high schools. Meanwhile Asian Americans make up as much as 73%. This documentary follows a dozen racially and socio-economically diverse 8^th graders as they fight for a seat at one of these schools. Their only way in: to ace a single standardized test. Tested includes the voices of such education experts as Pedro Noguera and Diane Ravitch as it explores such issues as access to a high-quality public education, affirmative action, and the model-minority myth.

See more 

A panel discussion and open forum on the scope, the role, and the fate of the Humanities in the twenty-first century

Mary Lou Aleskie

        Executive Director, International Festival of Arts & Ideas

Ryan Brasseaux

        Lecturer, Yale Public Humanities

Jacqueline Goldsby

          Professor of African American Studies, “Mapping the Stacks”

Cyra Levenson

          Curator of Education, Yale Center for British Art

Laura Wexler

          Professor of American Studies, “The Photogrammar Project”

Matthew Jacobson (moderator)

          Professor of American Studies, “The Historian’s Eye”

WINE & CHEESE RECEPTION TO FOLLOW

The first documentary to explore the role of photography in shaping the identity, aspirations, and social emergence of African Americans from slavery to the present, Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People probes the recesses of American history through images that have been suppressed, forgotten, and lost. Thomas Allen Harris’s film visits the past through the lens of the present by visiting the works of current and historical African American photographers as well as archival images dating back to the Civil War era.

Come celebrate the start of the year and get to know the program! Meet our new Director Matthew Jacobson and our new DUS, Albert Laguna. Get to know our faculty and your fabulous fellow students!

Food and beverages will be provided!

Surrounding One’s Self with the Beauty of Life: Historicizing Nineteenth-Century Latina/o Writing

RAÚL CORONADO

Associate Professor, UC Berkley

Thursday, March 26 at 4:30 PM

WLH 116

Caged Birds: The Birth of Mexican Imprisonment in the United States

KELLY LYTLE HERNÁNDEZ

Associate Professor, UCLA

Tuesday, March 31 at 12 PM

HGS 117

Classroom Wars: Language, Sex, and the Making of Modern Political Culture

NATALIA MEHLMAN PETRZELA

Assistant Professor, The New School

Wednesday, April 8 at 4 PM

WLH 116

Mobilizing Racial Formation in Metropolitan Space: Examining the Mobilities Turn through 20th Century Los Angeles

GENEVIEVE TANIA CARPIO

Postdoctoral Associate, Yale University

Wednesday, April 22 at 4 PM

HGS 211

Sponsoring departments: American Studies; Educational Studies; Ethnicity, Race, & Migration; History; Office of the Secretary’s Trumbull Lectureship; and Public Humanities

Classroom Wars: Language, Sex, and the Making of Modern Political Culture is forthcoming in March 2015, from Oxford University Press.

From Cultural Appreciation Days to Gay-Straight Alliances to cafeteria menus featuring “ethnic options,” twenty-first century American public schools bear the unmistakable mark of the diversity that has come to define the nation in the last fifty years. At the same time, it is also in public schools where citizens continue to organize most passionately to limit the influence of this heterogeneity on our curricula and classroom culture.

Classroom Wars explores how we got here. Focusing on California’s schools during the 1960s and 1970s, historian Natalia Mehlman Petrzela charts how a state and a citizenry deeply committed to public education as an engine of civic and moral education navigated the massive changes brought about by the 1960s, including the sexual revolution, school desegregation, and a dramatic increase in Latino immigration.

In California, where a volatile political culture nurtured both Orange County mega-churches and Berkeley coffeehouses, these changes reverberated especially powerfully. Analyzing two of the era’s most innovative, nationally impactful, and never-before juxtaposed programs – Spanish-bilingual and sex education – Classroom Wars charts how during a time of extraordinary social change, grass-roots citizens politicized the schoolhouse and family. Many came to link such progressive educational programs not only with threats to the family and nation but also with rising taxes, which they feared were being squandered on morally lax educators teaching ethically questionable curricula.

Using sources ranging from policy documents to personal letters to student newspapers to course evaluations to oral histories, Petrzela reveals how in 1960s and 70s California – and the nation at large – a growing number of Americans fused values about family, personal, and civic morality, blurring the distinction between public and private and inspiring some of the fiercest classroom wars in American history, controversies that help explain the bitterness of the battles we continue to wage today.

Read more here

Juana María Rodríguez

Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies,

University of California, Berkeley

Using the biography, Vanessa del Rio: Fifty Years of Slightly Slutty Behavior, this paper considers how images and text function as complicated triggers for the attachments, identifications, desires, and traumas of our own corporeal embodiments and sexual histories. It reflects on those moments, when as readers and viewers, we encounter the limits of our own understandings of pleasure in our attempt to make meaning out of the experiences of another.

Juana María Rodríguez is Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University ofCalifornia, Berkeley, where she is also affiliated faculty in the Graduate Group in Theater,Dance and Performance Studies. She is the author of Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, andOther Latina Longings (2014) and Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces(2003).

This presentation is part of a larger book project that considers the quandaries ofrepresenting racially gendered violence, pleasure, and trauma in visual culture.

Sponsored by Yale Programs in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration;Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; and Departments of African American Studies, and Anthropology

The Yale Asian American Studies Conference 2015 will feature some of the most prominent and innovative voices in the field of Asian American Studies. Asian American Studies is a rich field that spans many disciplines and our panel discussions will feature a variety of scholars from institutions across the country. Panels will discuss intersections between Asian American Studies and fields such as art and visual culture, music, literature and aesthetics, disability studies, migration studies, urban studies, and religious studies. Our keynote speaker will be Yale alum and groundbreaking scholar in the field, Don Nakinishi.

Read more here

The Yale Asian American Studies Conference 2015 will feature some of the most prominent and innovative voices in the field of Asian American Studies. Asian American Studies is a rich field that spans many disciplines and our panel discussions will feature a variety of scholars from institutions across the country. Panels will discuss intersections between Asian American Studies and fields such as art and visual culture, music, literature and aesthetics, disability studies, migration studies, urban studies, and religious studies. Our keynote speaker will be Yale alum and groundbreaking scholar in the field, Don Nakinishi.

Read more here

Provenance: Dominican republic

Director: Leticia Tonos

Dinner and conversation with director at La Casa to follow

Sponsorship: Film Studies; La Casa Cultural; Ethnicity, Race & Migration Program; American Studies Program; Public Humanities; CLAIS

Open to the Public

For the past fifteen years Todd Miller has researched, written about, and worked on immigration and border issues from both sides of the U.S. Mexico divide for organizations such as BorderLinks, Witness for Peace, and NACLA. He did the brunt of this work in Tucson, Arizona and Oaxaca, Mexico, with stints in New York City sprinkled in. Between Tucson and the Buffalo/Niagara Falls region of New York state where he grew up, he has spent the majority of his life close to the U.S. international boundary, south and north. His writings about the border have appeared in the New York Times, TomDispatch, Mother Jones, The Nation, Al Jazeera English, and Salon among other places.

“Identifying Nelson” Film Q&A with Filmmaker Nelson De Witt

Join ASY for a captivating Q&A session with filmmaker Nelson De Witt about his upcoming documentary as one of El Salvador’s Disappeared Children, and his family’s journey to heal the wounds of war. Segments of the film will be shown, with a discussion of the filmmaking process. Pupusas (a traditional Salvadoran dish) will be served.

In 1997, De Witt, a 16-year-old Salvadoran adoptee from Boston, MA, discovered that he had been identified as one Roberto Coto, an infant who disappeared in 1982 in El Salvador after a deadly government raid on three guerrilla safe houses in Tegucigalpa, Honduras.

The raid rescued a kidnapped businessman and also resulted in the disappearance of a dozen Salvadoran revolutionaries, including Roberto’s biological mother, Ana Milagro Escobar. Today, a generation after one of the bloodiest conflicts of the Cold War, the wounds of the Civil War in El Salvador are still open and the truth about them has been obscured.

Nelson/Roberto has determined that sharing his search for the truth about his story is his way of making a difference. At the heart of Nelson/Roberto’s search is the simple belief that finding what makes us all alike—or connected—can change the world. More info on film: http://www.identifyingnelson.com/the-film/

New York University will hold on September 22 a teach-in on “Genocide Denial in North American Popular Culture.” Organized as an off-site event of the UN’s World Conference on Indigenous Peoples (UNWCIP), this event invites UNWCIP participants, Indigenous and environmental activists, students, and scholars, and concerned community members to discuss the contemporary legacies of Indigenous genocide in North American history and culture.

Jointly coordinated by NYU, Columbia, and YGSNA, the teach-in will link previous UN conventions, resolutions, and definitions of ‘genocide’ with North American cultural and historiographical practices, with the Canadian government’s inability to investigate the disappearances and murders of Indigenous women, and with the destructive practices of carbon extraction within Southwestern Native homelands. Teach-in participants are also invited to voice their concerns during an extended open mic session that will conclude the evening.

A catered buffet reception will begin the event at 6pm with formal introductions and welcomes to follow at 645. 

Introduction Tiffany Hale (Yale Group for the Study of Native America)

Panel Moderator Aura Bogado (News Editor, Colorlines)

Ned Blackhawk (Yale University) “Genocide Denial in North America: Extending the UN Convention on the Prevention of Genocide to U.S. History and Popular Culture”

Audra Simpson (Columbia University) “The Disappeared Corporealities of Native Women: Femicide in Canadian Law and Policy”

Ellen Gabriel (Kanehsatà:ke Mohawk activist and former President of Québec Native Women’s Association) “The Crown is Against Us: the so-called ‘Phenomenon’ of Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls in Canada”

Andrew Needham (NYU) “The Hidden History of American Carbon and Indigenous Environmental Degradation”

OPEN MIC Moderated by Jorge Cuéllar (News Editor, SalvaCultura.com)                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      

With Generous Support from the Columbia Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, Columbia MA Program in Climate and Society, Barnard College Department of Anthropology, NYU Department of History, NYU Native People’s Forum, Yale Group for the Study of Native America, the Yale Program in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration, and the Yale Native American Cultural Center.

Come hear presentations about exciting research from across the disciplines.

Subjects include New Haven Public School student support programs, Kashmiri national culture in diaspora, Nepalese and U.S. protest movements, Roma palmistry in Sevilla, Dominican women migrants in Puerto Rico, Mexico-U.S. Border communities, and anticolonialism in Indian cinema – and much more.

Come and commune with seniors Katie Aragón, Lucia Arthur-Paratley, Kendra Dawsey, Marios Falaris, Heidi Guzmán, Sophie Nethercut, and E.B. Saldaña – along with the wider ER&M community.  Stop in and find out more about this program!

Contact erm@yale.edu for information.

In 1990 the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) became law, legislating the return of American Indian and Native Hawaiian human remains and items of cultural patrimony by U.S. federal agencies and museums receiving federal funding.

In anticipation of the 25-year anniversary of the law, the Yale Public Humanities Working Group & the Yale Study Group for Native America are honored to host a discussion about U.S. repatriation laws, reburials, museum stewardship of Native collections, and the changing relationships between Native tribes and museums.

Panelists include:

• Ashley Dalton, Yale College
• Dr. Rae Gould (Nipmuc), University of Massachusetts Amherst
• Jackie Swift (Fort Sill Apache/Comanche), Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian

Food and refreshments will be served.

David Manuel Hernández is Assistant Professor of Latina/o Studies at Mount Holyoke College and was previously an assistant professor of Chicana/o Studies at UCLA. He received his doctorate in Comparative Ethnic Studies from U.C. Berkeley. His research focuses on immigration enforcement, in particular, the U.S. detention regime. He is completing a book manuscript on this institution, tentatively entitled “Undue Process: Immigrant Detention and Lesser Citizenship.” The book examines the racial genealogy of immigrant detention in the United States, traces the long-term consolidation of detention and deportation powers, and situates this mostly obscured institution at the crossroads of migration and prison scholarship. His article “Pursuant to Deportation: Latinos and Immigrant Detention” was recently reprinted for the second time in Governing Immigration Through Crime: A Reader (Stanford University Press). Hernández also authored “Detained inbObscurity: The U.S. Immigrant Detention Regime” in the Fall 2013 issue of NACLA: Report on the Americas and is co-editor of The Critical Ethnic Studies Reader, under review with Duke University Press.

KELLY TSAI

Award- winning Spoken Word Poet, Playwright, and Filmmaker

KELLY ZEN-YIE TSAI is a Brooklyn-based Chinese Taiwanese American spoken word poet, playwright, and filmmaker who has performed at over 500 venues worldwide including the White House and three seasons on Russell Simmons Presents HBO Def Poetry. A recent recipient of commissions and grants from New York Live Arts, Asian American Arts Alliance, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and Asian Women’s Giving Circle, Tsai has been profiled on Idealist.org in NYC’s Top 40 New Yorkers Who Make Positive Social Change, AngryAsianMan.com’s 30 Most Influential Asian Americans Under 30, and HBO’s East of Main Street: Asians Aloud. Her work has been widely published in journals and anthologies like The Spoken Word Revolution Redux and We Don’t Need Another Wave: Dispatches from the Next Wave of Feminists. Tsai has rocked stages at the House of Blues, Apollo Theater in Harlem, Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Brooklyn Academy of Music. Past projects include her award-winning spoken word video (“By-Standing..”) and her viral spoken word video (“Black, White, Whatever” which was a Youtube.com Featured Video. Current projects include her spoken word theater ensemble show, “Say You Heard My Echo” and her spoken word dance solo show,
“Formosa.”

Website

The assassination of Carlos Muniz Varela in Puerto Rico marks the turning point in the Cuban civil wars of the 1970s, but is also part of a broader context, one that crystallizes how undercover politics and ideology still define the Caribbean in the decades that follow the triumph of the Cuban Revolution.

Professor José Quiroga was born in Havana, Cuba, and grew up in San Juan, Puerto Rico. He received a B.A. in English and Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures from Boston University, and a Ph.D. from Yale University in Spanish American Literature. Before joining the Emory faculty in 2002, he taught at The George Washington University and held visiting appointments at Columbia, Berkeley, Johns Hopkins and the University of Maryland. His research interests are contemporary Latin American and Latinoliteratures and cultures, gender and queer studies, contemporary Cuba and the Caribbean, and Latin American poetry. His published books include Mapa Callejero (Buenos Aires: Eterna Cadencia, 2010), Law of Desire: A Queer Film Classic (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp, 2009), Cuban Palimpsests (University of Minnesota Press, 2005) and, in collaboration with Daniel Balderston, Sexualidades en Disputa (Buenos Aires: Ricardo Rojas, 2005). In addition he has also published Tropics of Desire: Interventions from Queer Latino America (New York University Press, 2001) and Understanding Octavio Paz (University of South Carolina Press, 2000). He is co-editor at Palgrave Macmillan of the book series New Directions in Latino American Cultures and has been a member of the Board at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS) in New York. He is presently completing an edited collection for Duke University Press titled The Havana Reader, and a book on dissident practices in Cuba and Argentina, for which he has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for the year 2010-2011. 

Yannis Papadopoulos

Adjunct Professor, Panteion University Athens, and Postdoctoral Fellow,

University of Peloponnese

MIMI THI NGUYEN

Associate Professor of Gender and Women Studies and American Studies

University of Illinoi

Leslie Bow is the Mark and Elisabeth Eccles Professor of English and Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She is the author of the award-winning, ‘Partly Colored’: Asian Americans and Racial Anomaly in the Segregated South (New York University Press, 2010); Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion: Feminism, Sexual Politics, Asian American Women’s Literature (Princeton University Press, 2001); and editor of Asian American Feminisms (Routledge, 2012).  Her work has appeared in literary reviews as well as in numerous academic journals and anthologies. Leslie is a contributor to the Progressive Media Project through which her op-ed columns appear in newspapers across the United States.  She is currently researching the intersection between race and fantasy, the metaphorical portrayal of social difference.

Asian American Literature Lecture Series

You are invited  to attend and/or participate in a special panel discussion, Homenaje a Patricia Pessar, that will reflect on the personal and intellectual legacy of the anthropologist Patricia Pessar, who died one year ago at the age of 63.  Panelists will discuss Pessar’s many professional roles: her scholarship in the areas of both Latin American migration and popular religion; her mentorship of young academics; and the Ethnicity, Race, and Migration undergraduate major she helped launch at Yale. There will then be time for interested audience members to share their own personal and/or intellectual reflections about Patricia.

The panel will be held as part of the Latin American Studies Association conference at the Washington Marriott Wardman Park on Friday, May 31, from 5:00pm - 6:45pm in the room “Wilson C.”

Katharine Donato, a senior scholar of sociology and migration, will begin by tracing Pessar’s efforts to bring gendered analysis into the field of migration studies. Pessar’s academic advisees (Denise Brennan, Julie Weise, Erika Helgen) – will then discuss their mentor’s influence on their scholarship. Next, graduates of Yale’s Ethnicity, Race, and Migration undergraduate major (journalist Sarah Stillman, social worker Alan Montes)  will demonstrate how Pessar and the ER&M program grounded their abstract desires for social justice in a useful framework, critical approach, and body of knowledge. Renowned transnational migration scholar Nina Glick-Schiller and Pessar’s husband, Mexicanist historian Gil Joseph, will share concluding observations and audience members will be invited to share their own thoughts and reflections if they are so inclined.

While all will be welcome to speak, if will help us prepare if those intending to do so could email julie.weise@csulb.edu to give her a heads-up in advance.

Remixing the Classroom: Community Archives, Wikis, and Revisionist History

Howard Zinn, author of the best selling People’s History of the United States, stood before 800 teachers at the National Council for Social Studies Conference in the winter of 2008. In his keynote address, Zinn talked about the intersection between teaching and activism in K-12 education. In “Remixing the Classroom: Community Archives, Wikis, and Revisionist History,” Carpio examines what an undergraduate classroom built on these principle might look like. Drawing from her recent collaborative article in the Journal of American History, Carpio details the Building People’s Histories project, its efforts to reaffirm history as a process in which the past must be narrativized, and its lessons for engaging students in this process. Semester long-engagement with off-campus organizations, complemented by digital media, offers a model for what a classroom based on a broadly conceived people’s history might mean for visions of liberatory praxis both within and beyond the classroom.

Genevieve Carpio, USC

Genevieve Carpio is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at USC. Her work examines place and mobility as generative forces in the construction of racial categories in the Inland Empire from the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries. She is interested in the ways culture drives technology, methods for collaboration in a networked world, and the implications of emergent technologies for historians.

The Yale Undergraduate Association for African Peace and Development cordially invites you to the second annual Sankofa54: African Youth Empowerment Conference.

The theme for this year’s conference is Re-imagining Africa: a closer look at Autonomy, Identity and Perspective.

We will ask what it means to be African or part of its diaspora, and how the re-imagination of Africa from an authentic, autonomous, and intellectual perspective can inform efforts to address issues of hunger, political and military unrest, and economic underdevelopment.

Recognizing that solidarity and communal efforts of students on the continent and abroad is a necessary step for the future success of development and peace, Sankofa54 offers students the opportunity to partake in a holistic approach to learning about conflict resolution, peace, and development efforts within Africa and to acquire the necessary tools, network, and mentorship to effect change.

The conference will include five discussion panels concerning economic development, global health, and peace and conflict resolution, as well as a series of breakout sessions regarding education, the status of women, and art and activism in Africa. Attendees will also have the chance to connect with important African businesses and NGOs at our networking fair.

Read morehttp://www.yaapd.org/sankofa54-2013/

What? A Screening of the documentary Sa-I-Gu and Q&A with the director and the academy award nominated filmmaker Professor Christine Choy, Professor at the Kanbar Institute of Film and Television of New York University

The Los Angeles Riots of 1992 were the largest civil uprising in U.S. history and the first to truly involve multiple minorities. The story of Korean-American shop owners, many of whom were devastated by the violence and looting, is often forgotten. We will screen the documentary Sa-I-Gu, produced and directed by Christine Choy, a film professor at NYU and academy award nominated documentary filmmaker, which shares the unique perspective of Korean-American women affected by the riots. A short question and answer session will follow. Korean snacks will be served.

For more info, please check out https://www.facebook.com/events/288422517957256/.

A Conference of Scholars and Authors at Yale University
Organizers: Edwige Tamalet Talbayev and Christopher L. Miller

March 29-30, 2013

In recent years, Africans from former French colonies in both the Maghreb and Sub-Saharan regions have been settling in countries other than France and writing in languages other than French. This break with the colonial and postcolonial habits of la Françafrique—the familiar bind of metropole and colony—has been going on for years and is now ripe for analysis.Writing in German, Italian, Dutch, Catalan, Spanish, English, and other languages, these authors suggest new patterns of diasporic belonging and raise new questions about the postcolonial world. Issues of immigration, language choice, cosmopolitanism, global citizenship, and world literature will be addressed.

Friday, March 29, 2013 

Whitney Humanities Center
53 Wall Street, Room 208

1:30 Welcome and Opening Remarks: Christopher L. Miller and Edwige Tamalet Talbayev

2:00-3:30 Panel 1: Diaspora and Transnational Affiliations
Chair: Moulay Youness Elbousty, Yale University

• Sabrina Brancato (University of Bayreuth) :
  “Polyglotism, Intercultural Memory and Nomadic Identity: Afrosporic Literature in the Spanish Context”

• Allison Van Deventer (Harvard University):
   “Tourist Trajectories in Nassera Chohra’s Volevo diventare bianca and Jadelin Gangbo’s Verso la notte bakonga”

• Ieme Van der Poel (University of Amsterdam):
  “Homing the Patriarchs: Second Generation Narratives about First Generation Immigrants”

3:30-4:00: Coffee Break

       
4:00-5:30 Plenary Address

Dominic Thomas (University of California, Los Angeles):
“Afropeans: A Family of Nations?”
Introduced by Christopher L. Miller

5:30-6:00 Reception

Saturday, March 30, 2013 

82-90 Wall Street, 3rd floor
Romance Languages Lounge

10:00-12:30 Featured Session
Screening: Io, L’altro. Dir. Mohsen Melliti (2007) followed by a Q&A.

Speaker:
Hakim Abderrezak (University of Minnesota):
“Fishy Fishing: The Big Catch in Mohsen Melliti’s Io, L’altro (2007)”
Introduced and moderated by: Mary Anne Lewis, Yale University

Whitney Humanities Center
53 Wall Street, Room 208

2:00-3:30 Panel 2: Rewriting Postcoloniality
Chair: Christopher L. Miller

• Cristina Lombardi-Diop (Loyola University Chicago):
  “African Italian Poiesis:Blackness and Indirect Postcolonialism”

• Graziella Parati (Dartmouth College) :
   ”Making a Language Transitive: Amara Lakhous’s Clash of Civilizations for an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio”

• Cristián Ricci (University of California, Merced):
  “Ahmed Ararou: the Reversed Side of Orientalism”

3:30-4:00: Coffee Break

4:00-5:30 A Conversation with Authors
Chair: Edwige Tamalet Talbayev
Interpreter: Mary Anne Lewis

Pap  Khouma
Originally from Senegal, lives in Italy; writes in Italian. Director of online review of migration literature El Ghibli. Author of Io, venditore di elefanti (I Was an Elephant Salesman) and Noi Italiani Neri- Storie di Ordinario Razzismo (We Black Italians- Stories of Ordinary Racism).

Rachida Lamrabet
Originally from Morocco, lives in Belgium; writes in Dutch. Lawyer for the Brussels Centre for Equal Opportunities and Opposition to Racism. Author of Vrouwland (Woman Country) and De man die niet begraven wilde worden (The Man Who Didn’t Want to be Buried).

Anouar Majid
Originally from Morocco, lives in the US; writes in English. Founding director of the Center for Global Humanities and Associate Provost for Global Initiatives at the University of New England; editor of Moroccan-American magazine Tingis. Author of Si Yussef and We Are All Moors: Ending Centuries of Crusades Against Muslims and Other Minorities.

Contacts: edwige.tamalet@yale.edu and christopher.miller@yale.edu

Conference supported by Yale University:

Department of French, The Edward J and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Fund, Council on African Studies, Council on Middle East Studies, The Program in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration, Departments of Comparative Literature, Italian, and Germanic Languages and Literatures

A Conference of Scholars and Authors at Yale University
Organizers: Edwige Tamalet Talbayev and Christopher L. Miller

March 29-30, 2013

In recent years, Africans from former French colonies in both the Maghreb and Sub-Saharan regions have been settling in countries other than France and writing in languages other than French. This break with the colonial and postcolonial habits of la Françafrique—the familiar bind of metropole and colony—has been going on for years and is now ripe for analysis.Writing in German, Italian, Dutch, Catalan, Spanish, English, and other languages, these authors suggest new patterns of diasporic belonging and raise new questions about the postcolonial world. Issues of immigration, language choice, cosmopolitanism, global citizenship, and world literature will be addressed.

Friday, March 29, 2013 

Whitney Humanities Center
53 Wall Street, Room 208

1:30 Welcome and Opening Remarks: Christopher L. Miller and Edwige Tamalet Talbayev

2:00-3:30 Panel 1: Diaspora and Transnational Affiliations
Chair: Moulay Youness Elbousty, Yale University

• Sabrina Brancato (University of Bayreuth) :
  “Polyglotism, Intercultural Memory and Nomadic Identity: Afrosporic Literature in the Spanish Context”

• Allison Van Deventer (Harvard University):
   “Tourist Trajectories in Nassera Chohra’s Volevo diventare bianca and Jadelin Gangbo’s Verso la notte bakonga”

• Ieme Van der Poel (University of Amsterdam):
  “Homing the Patriarchs: Second Generation Narratives about First Generation Immigrants”

3:30-4:00: Coffee Break

       
4:00-5:30 Plenary Address

Dominic Thomas (University of California, Los Angeles):
“Afropeans: A Family of Nations?”
Introduced by Christopher L. Miller

5:30-6:00 Reception

Saturday, March 30, 2013 

82-90 Wall Street, 3rd floor
Romance Languages Lounge

10:00-12:30 Featured Session
Screening: Io, L’altro. Dir. Mohsen Melliti (2007) followed by a Q&A.

Speaker:
Hakim Abderrezak (University of Minnesota):
“Fishy Fishing: The Big Catch in Mohsen Melliti’s Io, L’altro (2007)”
Introduced and moderated by: Mary Anne Lewis, Yale University

Whitney Humanities Center
53 Wall Street, Room 208

2:00-3:30 Panel 2: Rewriting Postcoloniality
Chair: Christopher L. Miller

• Cristina Lombardi-Diop (Loyola University Chicago):
  “African Italian Poiesis:Blackness and Indirect Postcolonialism”

• Graziella Parati (Dartmouth College) :
   ”Making a Language Transitive: Amara Lakhous’s Clash of Civilizations for an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio”

• Cristián Ricci (University of California, Merced):
  “Ahmed Ararou: the Reversed Side of Orientalism”

3:30-4:00: Coffee Break

4:00-5:30 A Conversation with Authors
Chair: Edwige Tamalet Talbayev
Interpreter: Mary Anne Lewis

Pap  Khouma
Originally from Senegal, lives in Italy; writes in Italian. Director of online review of migration literature El Ghibli. Author of Io, venditore di elefanti (I Was an Elephant Salesman) and Noi Italiani Neri- Storie di Ordinario Razzismo (We Black Italians- Stories of Ordinary Racism).

Rachida Lamrabet
Originally from Morocco, lives in Belgium; writes in Dutch. Lawyer for the Brussels Centre for Equal Opportunities and Opposition to Racism. Author of Vrouwland (Woman Country) and De man die niet begraven wilde worden (The Man Who Didn’t Want to be Buried).

Anouar Majid
Originally from Morocco, lives in the US; writes in English. Founding director of the Center for Global Humanities and Associate Provost for Global Initiatives at the University of New England; editor of Moroccan-American magazine Tingis. Author of Si Yussef and We Are All Moors: Ending Centuries of Crusades Against Muslims and Other Minorities.

Contacts: edwige.tamalet@yale.edu and christopher.miller@yale.edu

Conference supported by Yale University:

Department of French, The Edward J and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Fund, Council on African Studies, Council on Middle East Studies, The Program in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration, Departments of Comparative Literature, Italian, and Germanic Languages and Literatures

Poet  Laurie Ann Guerrero (A Tongue in the Mouth of the Dying), Winner of the 2012 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize
Editor at Dos Gatos Press publishers of The Texas Poetry Calendar,

Published in
Huizache, Texas Monthly, Acentos Review, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Palo Alto Review, Global City Review, Texas Observer, Feminist Studies, and Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism

Sponsored by La Casa Cultural; the Ethnicity, Race, and Migration Program; and Ezra Stiles College.

Zaire Dinzey-Flores
Rutgers University

Gates and fences have become ubiquitous throughout the world. Their
use in residential communities fits within global historical trends to seek
ways to protect and award power to some, while controlling others.
Comparing gated private and public housing communities in Puerto
Rico, this talk considers how gates, through their physical qualities and
public images, create a safe and beautiful botanical sanctuary for the
elite, while they lock the poor behind regulatory urban structures. By
physically and symbolically marking communities, gates shape and
sustain race and class distinctions while becoming perverted symbols of
beauty and order—“green veneers”—allegorical creations of a vision of
harmony and “safety” in which streets are empty, the “home” is the
locus of the social self, and people live inside secluded urban worlds.

Presented by The Urban History Working Group
Co-sponsored by the Ethnicity, Race and Migration Program at Yale

Dominican Students Association-QuisqueYalies In Celebration of Dominican Independence Day Present
Dixa Ramirez, Ph.D.
“Non-Traditional Approaches to the Dominican Independence”
Readings and Discussion
B.A. Brown University Ph.D. University of California, San Diego Her work explores the intersections between gender, construction of nationalist identity, and geographic displacements in Caribbean literature and culture. She has been appointed as Assistant Professor of Latin@ Literature in the American Studies Program and the Ethnicity, Race, and Migration Program.