The Art of Whiteness: Giuliani, The Brooklyn Museum, and Racial Politics

Thursday, February 3, 2000 at 4:00pm, Room 101, Olscamp Hall. Reception to follow.

A recent exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum, entitled "Sensations" had Mayor Giuliani threatening to revoke the museum's funding. David Roediger examines the part race and racial politics played in the controversy around the work of an Afro-British, hip-hop influenced artist and his portrayal of "The Holy Virgin Mary."

David Roediger is Professor of History and Chair of American Studies at the University of Minnesota. His books include Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics, and Working Class History (1994), The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (1991), Our Own Time (1989), and Haymarket Scrapbook (1986). His seven edited books include the widely taught Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White (1998), The Meaning of Slavery in the North (1998), and Culture, Gender, Race, and U.S. Labor History (1993).

Women and Children Crossing the Border

Thursday, February 24, 2000 at 4:00pm, McFall Gallery. Reception to follow.

The current controversy over Elian Gonzalez, a young Cuban boy found floating off the shore of Miami, is part of a long history of women, children, and borders. Cuban, Mexican and Argentine women, among many others, have had to cross frontiers, often without legal permission, to protect their children. Donna Guy explores the legal and policy issues critical to understanding this history.

Donna Guy is Professor of History and Latin American Studies at the University of Arizona. Her published works include Contested Ground: Comparative Frontiers on the Northern and Southern Edges of the Spanish Empire (1998), Sex and Sexuality in Latin America (1997), Sex & Danger in Buenos Aires: Prostitution, Family, and Nation in Argentina (1991), and Argentine Sugar Politics: Tucuman and the Generation of Eighty (1980).

When Whiteness Feminizes: The Rise of "Woman" in the Age of Multiculturalism

Thursday, April 6, 2000 at 7:00pm, Room 117, Olscamp Hall. Reception to follow.

Rey Chow assesses the critical status of the terms "woman" and "femininity" in contemporary literary and cultural criticism, particularly in light of questions of race.

Rey Chow is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities in both the Modern Culture and Media and Comparative Literature Departments at Brown University. Her publications include Ethics After Idealism: Theory, Culture, Ethnicity, Reading (1998), Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema (1995) (winner of the James Russell Lowell Prize by the MLA), Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (1993), and Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading Between East and West (1991). She received her education in both Hong Kong and the United States.

Legislative Theatre: Using Performance to Make Politics

Keynote of the Latino Issues Conference

Thursday, April 13, 2000 at 10:30am, First Floor Offenhauer West

Co-sponsored with the Center for Innovative and Transformative Education, Multicultural and Academic Initiatives, Partnerships for Community Action, and the Theatre Department.

Augusto Boal is a Brazilian theatre director, dramatist, theorist, writer, and teacher. He is founder of the international movement "Theatre of the Oppressed" and has influenced theatre education all over the world. He was "Vereador" (Member of Parliament) for Rio de Janeiro from 1993 to 1996. His books include Legislative Theatre: Using Performance to Make Politics (1998), based on his experience as Vereador, The Rainbow of Desire (1995), Games for Actors and Non-Actors (1990), and the pioneering Theatre of the Oppressed (1979/1982). The many studies devoted to exploring his work include Jan Cohen-Cruz and Mady Schutzman's Playing Boal (1994) and the 1995 issue of Contemporary Theatre Review.

Citizenship, Democracy and Public Policy in the 21st Century

Friday, June 2, 2000 at 8:00pm, Room 101, Olscamp Hall

In conjunction with The National Conference on Policy History

George Lipsitz is Professor of Ethnic Studies at University of California, San Diego. He is the author of The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (1998), Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism and the Poetics of Place (1997), A Life in the Struggle: Ivory Perry and the Culture of Opposition (1995), Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s (1994), Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (1990).