AADS 2012-2013 Works-in-Progress Lecture Series

ALL PRESENTATIONS ARE SCHEDULED FOR WEDNESDAYS, 12:00PM, LYONS HALL 301 CONFERENCE ROOM (UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED)

Upcoming Events

Spring 2013

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

"American Exceptionalism in Constitutional Amendment"

Professor Richard Albert

This presentation will illustrate how and explain why the United States Constitution's formal constitutional amendment rules are exceptional among the world's modern constitutions.

Wednesday, April 10, 2013

"Lapsed Africans: Unhappy Hybrids and Discontent Cosmopolitans in Zimbabwe's Diaspora"

Siphiwe Ndlovu, AADS Dissertation Fellow

This presentation explores issus of identity and belonging in the Zimbabwean diaspora. Ndlovu discusses Brian Chikwaba's novel Harare North, which defines "Lapsed Africans" as individuals in the African Diaspora that have forgotten how to be African. This presentation will challenge, strengthen and unravel the ties that bind Africa to her Diaspora.

Wednesday, April 17, 2013

"Acting Your Color: The Power and Paradox of Acting for Black Americans"

Professor Monica White Ndounou, Tufts University

How does the complex history of Black representation in theatre and film influence audience reception and performance? This presentation discusses the implications of cultivating craft in contested and celebrated roles in films such as "The Help" (2011) and " Beasts of the Southern Wild" (2012) along wuth key findings from the work-in-progress.

Wednesday, April 24, 2013

"It Just Makes Beauty: The Cross-Racial Friendship of W. E. B. Du Bois and Joel E. Spingarn"

Lori Harrison-Kahan, Boston College

Harrison-Kahan discusses Zora Neale Hurston's essay "The 'Pet Negro' System," a scathing critique of cross-racial relations tainted by white paternalism.This presentation examines the friendship between W. E. B. Du Bois and Joel Spingarn as an exception to Hurston's claim that supposed friendships between blacks and whites maintained, rather than disrupted, white privilege.

Thursday, April 25, 2013

"Creolizing The Metropole: Migrant Caribbean Subjects and the Representation of Identity"

H. Adlai Murdoch, Tufts University

McGuiin Hall 121 @6:00pm

In "Creolizing the Metropole," Prof. Murdoch conducts close readings of selected literary works and films to explore how postcolonial Caribbean immigrants and their descendants represent their metropolitan identities.

Fall 2012

Wednesday, September 26, 2012

"How Mad Men is Haunted by Race"

Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, Boston College

 In this presentation, Kowaleski-Wallace explores some of the ways in which Mad Men evokes the spectral presence of race, and discusses how it both engages and doesn’t engage with that powerful presence. As it turns out, from the very first episode, the characters, the actors, and the script of Mad Men are haunted by race. First, the white characters are called into being by the black figures who haunt the edges of their consciousness. Second,  the performances of the white actors are ghosted by a history of racialized representation. Third, the characters of Mad Men are haunted by political events that manifest as psychic disturbance.  This last form of haunting mirrors the audience’s own experiences with a history of race in America, and, in the end, it evokes a painful knowledge of a history of racial violence.

Wednesday, October24, 2012

“Looking at the Page: Race, Pleasure, and Femininity in Early Twentieth-Century Periodicals”

Hanna Musiol, Northeastern University

This lecture will deal specifically with the visual performance of race and bodily pleasures in early twentieth-century mainstream publications and ethnic press such asCrisis, Messenger, Chicago Defender, and Pittsburgh Courier. This project derives from Musiol's work on the visual language of American modernist and mainstream periodicals during the period 1900-1940.  The recent availability of digital databases and search engines has made the texts of magazine culture of the previous century more accessible than ever to contemporary researchers and students. However, the text-based, keyword search methods as well as stringent copyright rules that regulate how much text is visible limit the access to the early twentieth-century vibrant discourse about black women and bodily pleasures which was often carried out within the periodicals’ pages but not within the articles’ text. Even in the most progressive periodicals of the period, the discourse about sexuality, pleasure, blackness, and femininity was not written but visualized; coded in the visual language of the page, and often articulated by the visual and conflict-ridden interaction of the texts of articles and images of ads and photos. Thus, archival research on sex, pleasure, and women of color in ethnic periodicals that involves looking at entire pages—their visual juxtapositions of articles, texts, announcements, and ads together— can help us find the literally overlooked and “unsayable discourse” of pleasure, femininity, and race that early twentieth-century readers were certainly aware of. This presentation, Musiol will offer a sampling of an archive of ads and texts that in the first half of the twentieth century suppressed or made visible the pleasures of black female bodies. The talk should be of interest to interdisciplinary audiences invested in research on print and visual cultures, race and gender, and critical theory.

November 14, 2012

"Coping With Class:  How Women and Men Sexual Assault Survivors Account for Rape in Ghana and South Africa"

Shawn McGuffey, Boston College

Relying on ethnographic data and interviews with women and men sexual assault survivors from Ghana and South Africa, McGuffey integrates social interactionist and social psychological approaches to understand how survivors “make sense” of their rape.  McGuffey also identifies the ways in which these accounting practices are mediated by gender, sexuality and social class. Specifically, McGuffey argues that the accounting practices of the Ghanaian and South African rape survivors in this study were used to manage their identities as respectable women and masculine men, and to develop mobility-based strategies to cope with the chronic threat of rape for women and the threat of being identified as a rape victim for men.