lsbrown

The 9^th Annual Shasha Seminar for Human Concerns

Keynote Address by Nell Irvin Painter

“What the History of White People Can Tell Us about Race in America”

Saturday, April 9, 2011    8:00 p.m.

Memorial Chapel

 Americans are likely to think first and only of black people when the topic of race arises.  But in the past Americans considered as white were assigned to a hierarchical spectrum of different white races.  This fascinating history suggests some ideas about the functions of racial categorization in science and in everyday life.   

Nell Irvin Painter is Edwards Professor of American History, Emerita, at Princeton University. The former president of the Organization of American Historians  and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she is the author of seven books, including Standing at Armageddon (1987), Sojourner Truth (1996), and The History of White People (2010). In addition to her scholarly life, Nell Painter currently is pursuing an MFA in painting at the Rhode Island School of Design.

English Department Lecture Series
Daniel Kim
Associate Professor of English, Brown University

“Black Korea, 1950-53: African Americans and the Conflict in Korea”

Wednesday, April 6, 6pm
Downey House, 113

The talk is taken from Professor Kim’s current book project, The Korean War in Color.  In it, Kim examines U.S. cultural representations of the Korean War in an interracial and transnational framework, focusing on depictions of Asians, Asian Americans and African Americans.  Working against the historical erasure of this event, the book returns us to novels, films, and journalistic accounts from the 1950s to bring into focus the watershed role that the war played in the framing of dominant liberal narratives of race and empire.  

Daniel Kim is the author of Writing Manhood in Black and Yellow: Ralph Ellison, Frank Chin, and the Literary Politics of Identity (Stanford University Press, 2005). Generated at the intersections of feminist, gender, gay/lesbian and ethnic studies, this book examines literary representations of racialized masculinity, and it is the first study to do so in a comparative – African American and Asian American – context. He has published essays in American Literary History, Criticism, Journal of Asian American Studies, and Novel: A Forum on Fiction.

Students and faculty from across the university are warmly welcome for what we hope will be a convivial and exciting event.

For more information, please contact Amy Tang (x3595 or atang@wesleyan.edu).

The 24th Annual Diane Weiss ’80 Memorial Lecture: 

“The Queer Art of Failure ”

J. Jack Halberstam, Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Gender Studies, USC

Thursday, April 7, 2011  —  8:00 p.m.  —  PAC 001

ALL ARE WELCOME! 

J. Jack Halberstam is Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California. Halberstam works in the areas of popular, visual and queer culture with an emphasis on subcultures.  Her work on female masculinity refutes the notion that butch lesbians are just imitations of “real men” and instead locates gender variance within a lively and dramatic staging of hybrid and minority genders. Her ground-breaking 1998 book, Female Masculinity, tracks the impact of female masculinity upon hegemonic genders. Halberstam’s last book, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (2005), described and theorized queer reconfigurations of time and space in relation to subcultural scenes and the emergence of transgender visibility. The book explores queer uses of time and space that have developed in opposition to the institutions of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction. She also blogs at bullybloggers.com and has just finished a book, the title of which is also the title of her Weiss lecture. The Queer Art of Failure will be published by Duke University Press.

Ambassador Marwan Mu’asher:  “Redefining Arab Moderation”

 Thursday, March 31, 5:00 p.m.   Russell House 

Marian Mu’asher is vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment, where he oversees the Endowment’s research in Washington and Beirut on the Middle East. Mu’asher served as foreign minister (2002-04) and deputy prime minister (2004­-05) of Jordan, and his career has spanned the areas of diplomacy, development, civil society, and communications. He is also a senior fellow at Yale University.

Mu’asher began his career as a journalist for the Jordan Times. He then served at the Ministry of Planning, at the prime minister’s office as press adviser, and as director of the Jordan Information Bureau in Washington. In 1995, Mu’asher opened Jordan’s first embassy in Israel, and in 1996 became minister of information and the government spokesperson. From 1997 to 2002, he served in Washington again as ambassador, negotiating the first free trade agreement between the United States and an Arab nation. He then returned to Jordan to serve as foreign minister, where he played a central role in developing the Arab Peace Initiative and the Middle East Road Map.

In 2004 he became deputy prime minister responsible for reform and government performance, and led the effort to produce a ten-year plan for political, economic, and social reform. From 2006 to 2007, he was a member of the Jordanian Senate.  Most recently, he was senior vice president of external affairs at the World Bank from 2007 to 2010.

He is the author of The Arab Center: The Promise of Moderation (Yale University Press, 2008).