The Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud Center for American Studies and Research will be sponsoring the following lectures and events during the Spring Semester 2012:
Diasporan Geographies: Poems and Comments on Arab American Literature
Lecturer: Dr. Lisa Suheir Majaj
Affiliation: Poet
Date: 16 February 2012
Time: 6pm
Place: West Hall, Auditorium C
Lisa Suhair Majaj is the author of the poetry volume Geographies of Light (2009), which won the 2008 Del Sol Press Poetry Prize. She is also co-editor of Intersections: Gender, Nation and Community in Arab Women's Novels (Syracuse University Press, 2002), Etel Adnan: Critical Essays on the Arab-American Writer and Artist (McFarland Publishing, 2002) and Going Global: The Transnational Reception of Third World Women Writers (Garland/Routledge, 2000), and author of many articles on Arab American literature. Her poetry, essays, and creative non-fiction have been published in over 50 journals and anthologies. She graduated from AUB in 1982, and completed two masters degrees and a PhD from the University of Michigan. She currently lives in Nicosia, Cyprus.
Plato's Digital Cave? The Arab Uprisings as Battles of Represenation?
Lecturer: Dr. Marwan Kraidy
Affiliation: Edward Said Chair of American Studies, CASAR
Date: 28 February 2012
Time: 6pm
Place: West Hall, Auditorium A
Marwan M. Kraidy is Professor of Global Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and the Edward Said Chair of American Studies at the American University of Beirut (2011-2012). He is a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. His publications include Reality Television and Arab Politics: Contention in Public Life (Cambridge University Press, 2010), which won the 2010 Best Book Award in Global Communication and Social Change, from the International Communication Association, and the 2011 Diamond Anniversary Best Book Award from the National Communication Association; Arab Television Industries (BFI/Palgrave, 2009, with J. Khalil), Hybridity, or, The Cultural Logic of Globalization (Temple University Press, 2005), and the co-edited volumes Global Media Studies: Ethnographic Perspectives (Routledge, 2003), and The Politics of Reality Television: Global Perspectives (Routledge, 2010).
TBA
Lecturer: Dr. Michael Delli Carpini
Affiliation: TBA
Date: 6 March 2012
Time: 6pm
Place: West Hall, Auditorium A
Homonationalism Gone Viral: Discipline, Control, and the Affective Politics of Sensation
Lecturer: Dr. Jasbir Puar
Affiliation: Rutgers University
Date: 13 March 2012
Time: 6pm
Place: West Hall, Auditorium A
Abstract: Homonationalism as a concept and an organizing platform has emerged in relevance to numerous debates about sexual rights in various locations in North America, Europe, India, and the Israel-Palestine conflict. While homonationalism itself may well become reified as another identity formation, in this paper I connect the original intentions behind its theorization and trace its paths of transmission through various forms of technological innovation. With a focus on the discourse of “pinkwashing” and the work of Palestinian Queers for BDS, I argue that these paths belie and undermine any stable identity formation and rearticulate homonationalism not as an accusation, a problematic subject positioning, or something to oppose, but rather an assemblage of affect, bodily forces, and discourses. In the case of the Israel-Palestine conflict, homonationalism is a facet of modernity that is embedded in the spatial logics of discipline and control that articulate an emergent form of neoliberal governmentality.
Professor Puar is Associate Professor of Women's & Gender Studies at Rutgers University. Her research interests include gender, sexuality, globalization; postcolonial and diaspora studies; South Asian cultural studies; and theories of assemblage and affect. She is the author of Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Duke University Press 2007), which won the 2007 Cultural Studies Book Award from the Association for Asian American Studies. Professor Puar has also authored numerous articles that appear in Gender, Place, and Culture, Social Text, Radical History Review, Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, and Feminist Legal Studies. Her edited volumes include a special issue of GLQ titled, "Queer Tourism: Geographies of Globalization" and co-edited a volume of Society and Space titled "Sexuality and Space". Most recently she edited, with Julie Livingston, a special issue of Social Text on "Interspecies." (Spring 2011). She is currently working on a new book on queer disability studies and theories of affect and assemblage titled Affective Politics: States of Capacity and Debility. Her most recent publications from this project are "Prognosis Time: Towards a Geopolitics of Affect, Debility, and Capacity" in Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory (vol 19, no.2, July 2009) and “The Cost of Getting Better: Suicide, Sensation, Switchpoints,” in GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies (Winter 2011). Professor Puar is also a contributor to the Guardian and The Huffington Post, as well as Bully Bloggers (bullybloggers.com) and Oh! Industry (ohindustry.com). Her op-eds have focused on “pinkwashing” in gay and lesbian activism, queer Islamophobia, and the limits and possibilities of the It Gets Better campaign.
American Studies on Ice: Recycling Narratives and Hard Limits in Antarctica
Lecturer: Dr. Elena Glasberg
Affiliation: New York University
Date: 15 March 2012
Time: 6pm
Place: West Hall, Auditorium C
Elena Glasberg writes about visual art, climate, and neocolonialism. Her book, On Ice: Antarctica as Symbol and Material will be published in 2012 by Palgrave. She teaches in the Expository Writing Program at New York University.
Wearing Shades in the Bright Future of Digital Media: Limitations of US Narratives of Media Power in Egyptian Resistance
Lecturer: Dr. Karin Wilkins
Affiliation: TBA
Date: 29 March 2012
Time: 6pm
Place: West Hall, Auditorium C
Wilkins (PhD, University of Pennsylvania) serves as Professor in the Department of Radio-TV-Film, Director of Media Studies, Associate Director with the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and Chair, Global Studies Bridging Disciplines Program at the University of Texas at Austin. Wilkins has won numerous awards for her research, service and teaching, and chaired the Intercultural/Development Division of the International Communication Association. Her work addresses scholarship in the fields of development communication, global communication, and political engagement. Selected works include Questioning Numbers: How to Read and Critique Research (Oxford University Press, 2011), Home/Land/Security: What we learn about Arab Communities from Action Adventure Film (Lexington Books, 2008), Re-Developing Communication for Social Change (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000) as well as journal publications in Critical Studies in Media Communication; Communication Theory; Media, Culture & Society; Journal of Communication; Journal of Middle East Media; International Journal of Communication; Communication for Development and Social Change: A Global Journal; Global Media Journal; Gazette: The International Journal for Communication Studies; Development & Change; and Perspectives on Global Development and Technology.
Bricktop's Paris: African American Women Expatriates in Jazz Age Paris
Lecturer: Dr. Tracy Sharpley-Whiting
Affiliation: Vanderbilt University
Date: 5 April 2012
Time: 6pm
Place: West Hall, Auditorium A
T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting (Ph.D., Brown University, 1994) is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Distinguished Professor of African American and Diaspora Studies and French. She teaches comparative diasporic literary and cultural movements, 18th & 19th century French narratives, Black France, Black Europe, colonialism and empire, critical theory and race, feminist studies, Jazz Age Paris, film and black popular culture. She is the Director of African American and Diaspora Studies at Vanderbilt University where she is also Director of the W.T. Bandy Center for Baudelaire and Modern French Studies (http://www.library.vanderbilt.edu/bandy/). She is the author/editor or co-editor of eleven books. Her latest, Pimps Up, Ho's Down: Hip Hop's Hold on Young Black Women, received the 2007 Emily Toth Award from the American Culture Association/Popular Culture Association for the Best Single Work by One or More Authors in Women's Issues. She lectures widely in the United States and abroad, has offered commentary on a range of issues for Fox, MSNBC, NPR, C-SPAN2, and CBS News. She was the 2006 winner of the Horace Mann Medal for Distinguished Graduate School Alumni from Brown University. She has recently edited and translated, Beyond Negritude: Essays from Woman in the City (SUNY Press), a book on Paulette Nardal and the Martinican journal La Femme dans la Cité as well as a collection on Barack Obama's "A More Perfect Union" address entitled, THE SPEECH: Race and Barack Obama's "A More Perfect Union" for Bloomsbury USA (2009) . She is co-editor of Black France/France Noire (Duke UP), the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (2nd Edition) and series editor of "Blacks in the Diaspora" (Indiana University Press) and co-editor with Robert Bernasconi of "Philosophy and Race" (SUNY Press). She is senior co-editor of Palimpsest: A Journal of Women, Gender and the Black International, published by the State University Press of New York (SUNY).
TBA
Lecturer: Dr. Alexandra Shuelthis
Affiliation: TBA
Date: 9 May 2012
Time: 6pm
Place: West Hall, Auditorium C
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Lecturer: Dr. Josie Saldana
Affiliation: TBA
Date: 15 May 2012
Time: 6pm
Place: West Hall, Auditorium C
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Lecturer: Dr. Elizabeth Esch
Affiliation: TBA
Date: 22 May 2012
Time: 6pm
Place: West Hall, Auditorium A
TBA
Lecturer: Dr. David Roediger
Affiliation: TBA
Date: 24 May 2012
Time: 6pm
Place: West Hall, Auditorium A