Race-ing Through Intersections
Co-convened by Sean Metzger and Anne Allison, this seminar investigates the rise of the modern US by looking at the nexus of Asian/ American studies and other disciplinary formations that might be seen collectively to contribute to the larger project of US Critical Studies. The seminar is loosely divided to pursue the relevance of Asian/ American studies in the contexts of three modes of independent but overlapping inquiry: 1) The indigenous and the post-colonial Pacific, 2) The Reorientation of the Black Atlantic and 3) Asian/ American Borderlands. These topics are designed geographically and thematically to complicate examination of the US and its territories by reframing crucial questions that have often been asked without the particular nuance of an Asian/ American critique. For example, we will ask how Chinese Cubans or South Asians in Tanzania alter current thinking about the Atlantic. What foci and forms of post-colonial theory would better enable an understanding of the US as an imperialist power? How are the Americas constituted through Asia and its diasporic communities?
Our format will include meetings to discuss articles as well as a few invited Asian Americanist speakers with respondents taken from the ranks of Duke's faculty who are interested in Critical US Studies.
Schedule of Events and Meetings
Tuesday, April 11, 5-6:30pm, 133 Social Sciences : "Critical Mediations"
Reading: "Keeping Them in Their Place," from Rey Chow, The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of
Capitalism
missing pages: (46-47)
Guests: Mark Anthony Neal and Antonio Viego
Events Archive
Tuesday, March 7, 6:00-8:00pm in 130 John Hope Franklin Center:
"Asian Outbreaks, Race and Contagion"
Guest: Priscilla Wald
Every day brings news of the impending bird flu (originally called
the Asian bird flu), and we certainly have cause for concern. But it is not
just the flu that is spreading. Images and stories of its emergence have
also been proliferating, as they circulate through scientific and journalistic
accounts, becoming conventions of representation. Those conventions are
shaped by cultural assumptions and biases, and they have social consequences that, in turn, affect medical outcomes. Racism and other cultural biases have long found expression in anxieties about communicable disease. What has not been explored is how they in turn impact the scientific understanding and medical outcomes of communicable disease.
Readings: Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 from Nayan Shah's Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown (Berkeley: UC Press, 2001)
Please RSVP to clight@duke.edu if you plan to attend.
Friday, February 24, 240 John Hope Franklin Center; "Race-ing Through Intersections" Symposium, featuring public lectures by Kandice Chuh (English, University of Maryland), David Eng (English and Comparative Literature, Rutgers University), and Susan Koshy (Asian American Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) (See below for brief bios)
Schedule of events (all events take place in 240 John Hope Franklin Center)
9:00-9:15: Meet and greet
Welcome and Introductory Remarks by Anne Allison and Sean Metzger
915:-10:30: Kandice Chuh, "Reading Incomparable Beauty Across Incommensurate Subjects"
10:30-11:45: David Eng, "Freedom and the Racialization of Intimacy: Lawrence v. Texas and the Emergence of Queer Liberalism"
11:45 -12:15: break for lunch (on site)
12:15-1:30: Susan Koshy, "The Cosmopolitan Domestic: Relocation Costs in Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies"
Readings:
(1) Bruce Robbins, "Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism," Bruce Robbins and Pheng Cheah, ed. Cosmopolitanism: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (U Minnesota, 1998)
(2) Jhumpa Lahiri, "Mrs. Sen's," The Interpreter of Maladies (Boston: Houghton, 1999)
(3) Jhumpa Lahiri, "The Third and Final Continent," The Interpreter of Maladies (Boston: Houghton, 1999)
1:30-2:00: final discussion
Kandice Chuh is Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she is affiliated with the American Studies Department and the Asian American Studies Program. She received her Ph.D (1996) and M.A. (1993) in English Literature from the University of Washington and her B.A. (1989) in English and Women's Studies from Colgate University. Dr. Chuh is co-editor, with Karen Shimakawa, of Orientations: Mapping Studies in the Asian Diaspora (2001) and author of Imagine Otherwise: on Asian Americanist Critique (2003), winner of the American Studies Association 2004 Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize, awarded every year for the best-published first book in American Studies that highlights the intersections of race with gender, class, sexuality and/or nation. With particular interest in Asian American literatures and cultural studies, she works with and teaches a wide range of courses including Asian American literatures, 20th-century American literature, feminist theories, critical race theories, and law and literature.
David L. Eng is an Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Rutgers University. A specialist in Asian American literature and culture, Dr. Eng is also interested in American and Chinese literatures, cinema, and visual culture. His publications focus on the intersection of racial and sexual difference in psychoanalytic, feminist/queer, and critical race theory, and have appeared in a number of well-known journals. He is author of Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Duke UP, 2001), and co-editor with Alice Y. Hom of Q and A: Queer in Asian America (Temple UP, 1998), winner of a 1998 Lamda Literary Award and the 1998 Cultural Studies Book Award of the Association of Asian American Studies. Dr. Eng is also co-editor with David Kazanjian of Loss: The Politics of Mourning ( University of California Press, 2002)
Susan Koshy is Associate Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work draws on the insights of literature, anthropology, legal studies, and history. She received her B.A. and M.A. from Delhi University and her Ph.D. in English from UCLA. Her work on race, ethnicity and diaspora is part of a larger theoretical interest in modernity, neocolonialism, and the processes of globalization. Her research is situated at the conjuncture of globalization theory, postcolonial studies, and ethnic studies and interrogates the boundaries of these disciplinary formations. Her book, Sexual Naturalization (Stanford University Press, 2004) locates narratives of white-Asian miscegenation in the context of anti-miscegenation laws, Asian immigration to the US, and US expansionism in Asia. Her articles have appeared in the Yale Journal of Criticism , Boundary 2 , Differences , Diaspora , and Social Text , and in several anthologies.
Monday November 14th, 6-8, room 130 John Hope Franklin Center: Meeting to discuss David Palumbo-Liu excerpts from Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier.
Intro/Chapter 1 and Chapter 2
October 26th, 6-8, room 130 John Hope Franklin Center. In anticipation of
the US Critical Studies seminar we will be running in the spring (the
abstract appears below)under the theme "Race-ing through Intersections"--and
to which you are all invited to participate in-- we will be reading and
discussing the work of three prominent scholars working at the
intersections of Asian/American ethnicity, race, gender, and politics.
These are: Kandice Chuh's "Introduction" to Imagine Otherwise: On Asian
Americanist Critique, David Eng's "Introduction" to Racial Castration:
Managing Masculinity in Asian America and Susan Koshy's "Introduction" to Sexual Naturalization: Asian Americans and Miscegenation.
Please R.S.V.P. to Anne Allison.