Transacting Sex in the Caribbean: Migration, Work and Human Trafficking

Monday, February 6, 2006 at 6:30pm, 206 Bowen Thompson Student Union (Theatre)
Reception to follow in lounge outside (200D)

How has US foreign policy on human trafficking impacted Caribbean countries?

What are the consequences of conceiving sex work as violence against women?

Professor Kempadoo illustrates how migration into the sex trade in the Caribbean region is shaped by constructions of race and ethnicity, and historically gendered strategies for economic survival. The talk goes on to explore ways in which trafficking has been conflated with prostitution and how this history continues to affect policies and laws. Recent policy developments in Brazil around the issue of sex work could be instructive for the Caribbean.

Kamala Kempadoo is Associate Professor of Latin American and Caribbean Studies at York University, Ontario, Canada. Her books include Sexing the Caribbean: Gender, Race, and Sexual Labor (2004), Trafficking and Prostitution Reconsidered: New Perspectives on Migration, Sex Work, and Human Rights (2005), Sun, Sex, and Gold: Tourism and Sex Work in the Caribbean (1999), and Global Sex Workers: Rights, Resistance, and Redefinition (1998). She is recipient of a Rockefeller Research Fellowship and research grants from the United Nations Development Fund for Women, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Netherlands, and the Interpares Feminist Foundation, Canada.

Reading for the People

Monday, February 27, 2006 at 6:30pm, 206 Bowen Thompson Student Union (Theatre)
Reception to follow in lounge outside (200D)

How do we read politically and with ethical commitment (especially as we read the South from the North)?

What is at stake in the production of "the people," and how does this production enable our intellectual work?

This talk will cross many boundaries ­of geography, class, and culture­ in an effort to think about how we position ourselves as we read. Professor Masiello will explore the recent celebration of the "people" in Argentina - the garbage pickers, the homeless, and the newly unemployed - and the radically new literature it bore. She considers the ways in which this popular presence reaches the reader, inciting ethical thinking followed by action.

Francine Masiello is the Sidney and Margaret Ancker Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at UC Berkeley and teaches in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese and that of Comparative Literature. She is twice winner of the Kovacs Prize, Modern Language Association, for Best Book on Latin American Culture for The Art of Transition: Latin American Culture and Neoliberal Crisis (2001) and for Between Civilization and Barbarism: Women, Nation, and Literary Culture in Modern Argentina (1992). Her edited volumes include Dreams and Realities: Selected Fiction of Juana Manuela Gorriti (2003), Sarmiento, Author of a Nation (1994), and Women, Culture, and Politics in Latin America (1990).

Strolling the Herrengasse: Street Photographs in Archival and Personal Memory

Thursday, March 23, 2006 at 7 pm, 206 Bowen Thompson Student Union (Theatre)
Reception to follow in Mylander room (207)

How do photographs contribute to how we see family, history, and public memory?

When historians, writers and artists turn to Eastern European photos in family albums or collections - photos from the decades preceding the Holocaust and the early years of World War II - they seek more than visual evidence of past events. As powerful "points of memory," photographs signal a visceral connection to the past, carry its traces forward, and embody the very fractured process of its transmission. And yet photographs may also be limited and flawed historical documents, promising more than they can actually reveal. Professors Hirsch and Spitzer explore photos of Jews taken by street photographers on the main avenues of Cernauti, Romania, and consider them and others in the construction of public, archival, memory and in second-generation cultural recall.

Marianne Hirsch, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia, and Leo Spitzer, Kathe Tappe Vernon Professor of History at Dartmouth and a visiting Professor at Columbia are currently co-writing a book entitled  Ghosts of Home: Czernowitz and the Holocaust .

Professor Hirsch's books include Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (1997), The Mother / Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (1989), and Beyond the Single Vision: Henry James, Michel Butor, Uwe Johnson (1981). Amongst her edited or co-edited volumes are  Teaching the Representation of the Holocaust (2004), Gender and Cultural Memory ( Signs 2002), Time and the Literary (2002), The Familial Gaze (1999), and Conflicts in Feminism (1990). She has served as the Editor of PMLA , and been awarded fellowships by the Guggenheim, ACLS, National Humanities Center, Rockefeller Foundation, and Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute.

Professor Spitzer's books include Hotel Bolivia: The Culture of Memory in a Refuge from Nazism (1998), Lives In Between: The Experience of Marginality in a Century of Emancipation (1999), and The Creoles of Sierra Leone: Responses to Colonialism (1974). He is a co-editor of  Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present (1999). He has served as National Humanities Center Distinguished Lecturer and been awarded fellowships by the Guggenheim, Ford, Social Science Research Council, Whiting, N.E.H., and Rockefeller Foundations.

Race, Faith, and Sexuality: Or a Snapshot Genealogy of the Grateful Negro

Tuesday, April 4, 2006 at 6 pm, 101A Olscamp Hall
Reception to Follow

What is the relationship between African American political discourse and racial respectability?

What roles does the black community play in the national debate about marriage equality?

Professor McBride discusses some of the contemporary national politics being played out around the question of marriage equality, and how the black community has entered that debate. He considers a brief history of the idea of racial respectability in African American political discourse, and the inherent problems that history poses both to this current debate and for the inclusion of black LGBTs in dominant constructions of black community.

Dwight A. McBride is Chair and Leon Forrest Professor of African American Studies and Professor of English and Communication Studies at Northwestern University. He is the author of Why I Hate Abercrombie and Fitch: Essays on Race and Sexuality in America (2005) and Impossible Witnesses: Truth, Abolitionism, and Slave Testimony (2001). His edited volumes include A Melvin Dixon Critical Reader (2006), 100 Years Of The Souls of Black Folk: A Celebration of W.E.B. DuBois (2005), Black Like Us: A Century of Lesbian, Gay, and Bi-Sexual African American Fiction (2002), and James Baldwin Now (1999). Recent awards include the Lambda Literary Award and the Monette-Horwitz Achievement Award.