Citizen / Refugee – Spring 2018

Citizenship indicates a legally constituted set of rights, privileges, and duties afforded to people born in or naturalized by a nation-state. To claim one’s citizenship is to express a sense of belonging within a polity; to seek citizen status is to aspire to such belonging. Refugees are historical subjects who, displaced by war, persecution, economic crisis, or natural disaster, are compelled to seek citizenship anew. The precariousness of their political status often calls into question definitions of citizenship and the professed ideals of nation-states.
This seminar will explore the categories of citizen and refugee from several disciplinary perspectives, examining how these categories have been constructed amid specific historical, political, economic, cultural, and environmental dynamics. How do the conditions of global capital bear on values and practices of citizenship? How have cultural producers, academics, policy-makers, and activists envisioned citizens, immigrants, and displaced persons—whether in contrast or complement to their legal definitions? What are our obligations, as “citizens” of an institution of higher learning, to contribute to critical understandings of the lived experiences of citizens and displaced communities? Questions of citizenship status are always pressing, yet this seminar could not be timelier, prompted as it is by current global crises, national debates about immigration, and local events.

Reece Jones

University of Hawaii at Manoa

Violent Borders: The State vs. the Right to Move

Monday, April 16, 2018
Stern Center, Great Room, 7 p.m.

Over 40,000 people died trying to cross a border in the past decade around the world. Jones argues these deaths are part of a long history of states using movement restrictions to protect privileges and to contain the poor. A book sale and signing will follow the presentation.

This program is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and co-sponsored by the Middle East Studies Program, the Departments of Sociology and International Studies and the Security Studies Certificate Program. It is also part of the Clarke Forum’s semester theme, Citizen/Refugee.

Biography (provided by the speaker)

Reece Jones is professor of geography at the University of Hawaii and the author two books: Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move (Verso 2016) and Border Walls: Security and the War on Terror in the United States, India, and Israel (Zed Books 2012), four edited books, and over two dozen journal articles. His work has been published in the Guardian, the New York Times, and dozens of other media outlets around the world. He is currently working Read more

Nicole Guidotti-Hernández

University of Texas at Austin

Latinx: The Future is Now

Thursday, April 12, 2018
Stern Center, Great Room, 7 p.m.

This lecture charts out the histories of how we went from using Mexican American and Puerto Rican to Chicano and Nuyorican and then to the latest iterations, Latina/o and now Latinx. While millennials are leading the charge with the Latinx conversation, Guidotti-Hernández argues their boomer intellectual forerunners are often outright resistant to the use of Latina/o let alone Latinx, indicating the futurist potential and political necessity of the term.

This program is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and co-sponsored by the Departments of English, American Studies, Latin American, Latino & Caribbean Studies, and the Women’s & Gender Resource Center. It is also part of the Clarke Forum’s semester theme, Citizen/Refugee.

Biography (provided by the speaker)

Nicole Guidotti-Hernández is associate professor of American Studies and Mexican American and Latina/o studies at UT Austin. She is an expert in Borderlands History after 1846, Transnational Feminist Methodologies, Latinx Studies, and Popular Culture and Immigration.

Her book titled Unspeakable Violence: Remapping U.S. and Mexican National Imaginaries, Duke University Press (2011) won the 2011-2012 MLA Prize in Chicana/o and Latina/o Read more

Yoko Tawada

Award-Winning Writer

An Evening with Yoko Tawada

Wednesday, March 28, 2018
Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.

Known internationally for her novels, poems and essays in German and Japanese, author Yoko Tawada creates worlds in which foreigners, outsiders and animals, always aware of their strangeness, navigate and read their surroundings with wonder and minuteness. Tawada will collaborate with Bettina Brandt (Pennsylvania State University) in a multilingual performance which includes German and Japanese as well as English translations. A book sale and signing will follow the presentation.

This program is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and co-sponsored by the Departments of German; East Asian Studies; English; the Max Kade Foundation; and the Flaherty Lecture Fund. It is also part of the Clarke Forum’s semester theme, Citizen/Refugee.

Biography (forthcoming)

Yoko Tawada was born in Tokyo in 1960, educated at Waseda University and has lived in Germany since 1982, where she received her Ph.D. in German literature. She received the prestigious Akutagawa Prize for The Bridegroom Was a Dog. She writes in both German and Japanese, and in 1996, she won the Adalbert-von-Chamisso Prize, a German award recognizing foreign writers for their contributions to German culture. She also received Read more

Ajuan Mance

Mills College

The 1001 Black Men Online Sketchbook and the Art of Social Justice

Wednesday, March 7, 2018
Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.

Mance created 1001 Black Men: An Online Sketchbook as a reaction against the controlling images that have limited and defined media representations of Black men. Mance will use a slideshow of images from her series as the basis of a wide ranging discussion of art, Black maleness and gender performance, and representation.

This program is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and co-sponsored by the Women’s & Gender Resource Center; the Popel Shaw Center for Race & Ethnicity; and the Departments of Africana Studies; American Studies; English; French; and Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies.

Biography (provided by the speaker)

Ajuan Mance is a professor of English at Mills College in Oakland, California. She holds degrees from Brown University and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. A lifelong artist, she works in acrylic on paper and canvas, ink on paper and, for the 1001 Black Men project, ink on paper and digital collage. Ajuan has participated in solo and group exhibitions throughout the San Francisco Bay Area as well as at the University of Read more

Margot Canaday

Princeton University

Pink Precariat: LGBT Workers in the Shadow of Civil Rights

Wednesday, February 21, 2018
Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.

This talk – part of a larger book project that centers the workplace in queer history – offers a preliminary ethnography of LGBTs working in mainstream occupations during the American economy’s “golden age” of the 1950s and 1960s.

This program is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and co-sponsored by the Departments of English; American Studies; and Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies. It also part of the Clarke Forum’s semester theme, Citizen/Refugee.

Biography (provided by the speaker)

Margot Canaday is a legal and political historian who studies gender and sexuality in modern America. She holds a B.A. from the University of Iowa and a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. Her first book, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth Century America (Princeton, 2009), won the Organization of American Historians’ Ellis Hawley Prize, the American Political Science Association’s Gladys M. Kammerer Award (co-winner), the American Studies Association’s Lora Romero Prize, the American Society for Legal History’s Cromwell Book Prize, the Committee on LGBT History’s John Boswell Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for LGBT Studies, Read more