Event Date
Winter 2023 New Voices in American Studies
01.18.2023 | 02.15.2023 | 02.17.2023 | 03.01.2023
Featured Speakers
Cecilia Vasquez, Ph.D.
UC President's Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of Ethnic Studies, University of California, Riverside
Sanctuary of Belonging: The Sanctuary Movement in the Inland Empire
Wednesday, January 18th
12pm to 1:30pm via Zoom
Caroline Collins, Ph.D., M.F.A.
UC President's Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of History, University of California, Irvine
Black by Land and Sea: (Re)Storying Black Ontological Geographies in American Public Memory
This talk represents a body of work at the intersections of American Studies, Cultural Studies, and the Public Humanities. Paying special attention to how cultures make meaning through remembrance, particularly via national origin stories, this talk charts my explorations of public remembrances of the American West through archival methods, ethnographic study, media production, and public history exhibition. Serving as a narrative throughline of the talk is my focus upon Blackness and the West across my research agenda. From my manuscript which examines the evolving origin stories that structure popular retellings of California history, to a public history collaboration which highlights hidden histories of African Americans in rural California, to my next project on the Black Pacific which shifts my focus on the politics of memorialized space from the land to the ocean, this research portfolio examines the cultural work of public memory in making meaning, imagining a nation, and shaping adjacent notions of identity, power, and belonging in the process.
Wednesday, February 15th
12pm to 1:30pm via Zoom
Jose Manuel Santillana Blanco, Ph.D.
UC President's and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of American Studies, University of California, Davis
Mexican Motherhood Ecologies: Geographies of Disposability, Rurality and Resistance in Central California
Within the last decade, Mother Jones, CNN, ABC News, LA Times, and several other news media outlets have continued covering the rise of stillborn pregnancies and babies born with birth defects in the predominantly Mexican immigrant town of Kettleman City, California. Yet, amongst this geographical precariousness, residents have organized and vocalized their opposition. At the forefront of these efforts have Mexican immigrant women who have exposed cooperate giant Chemical Waste Management Facilities as well as other contributing factions in connection with these ecological violences. Whether recently arrived migrants or longer established Mexican American populations, both communities have worked together to confront and mobilize themselves against environmental injustice by inspiring and taking part in various movements across the United States. These women like those of countless other social and political movements against racial and multiple oppressions have not been fully recognized for their contributions in shifting the landscape of environmentalism. Utilizing oral histories, storytelling and discourse analysis, this talk centralizes Kettleman City as a point of departure that orients us to a more nuanced understanding of racialized socialites of life/death, environmentalism, and resistance in Central California. More specifically, this talk argues for a critical understanding of ecology that centers the intimate, spatial and cultural thinking and practices of mothers of color in historically disrupting, reconfiguring, and confronting environmental injustice and the politics of disposability.
Friday, February 17th
12pm to 1:30pm on Zoom and in Hart Hall 3116
Chris Lee, Ph.D.
UC President's Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of English: Literature and Languages, University of California, Merced
"H Mart Realism": On Trans Survival and Strip Mall Sentimentality
Ryka Aoki’s 2021 novel, Light from Uncommon Stars, can be described at once as a survival plot that traces the unthinkability of trans livelihood, and as a love letter to its strip-mall-dotted setting of the San Gabriel Valley. By extending the 1980s American fiction genre known as “Kmart realism” or “dirty realism,” which documented the anti-social encroachment of consumerism into rural communities, I explore how Aoki’s softer portrait of food courts and brand name staples marks a contrast from the sparse form that defined a period of American short fiction. The novel’s sentimental attachment to the banality of consumer culture suggests how the ever-developing retail centers that dominate suburban Chinatown foreclose the possibility of a public life unmediated by commercial influence while providing a provisional space for connection and friction. How can trans/queer aesthetic forms vitalize these artificial spaces while dreaming a future beyond development’s strip mall renderings?
Wednesday, March 1st
12pm to 1:30pm in Hart Hall 3116
Please contact Anna Juline at ajuline@ucdavis.edu for more information.