| WHAT'S HAPPENING @ SCA - UPCOMING EVENTS WEEK OF MAR. 19 - 23, 2012
M. Hilaire
All events are located at SCA 20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor, unless otherwise noted.
For more information on our upcoming events, please visit the SCA Events Calendar at http://sca.as.nyu.edu/object/sca.calendar
MONDAY, MARCH 19
6:00 pm
CHANDAN REDDY, "Precarity After Rights: On Queer of Color Critique"
Associate Professor of English, Univ. of Washington
In this talk, Chandan Reddy argues for viewing U.S. gay and lesbian politics, such as the movement for gay marriage, as expressing a key tension within contemporary neoliberalism, namely the dual movements to develop more elaborate forms of social recognition through the expansion of rights while restructuring and restricting the role of the political state. This has led to what Reddy terms "precarity after rights,” in which social democracy is submitted to legal protocols that simultaneously expand rights while diminishing the sources of state power that enable its redistributive functions. Reddy argues that queer of color social practices constitute alternatives to the diminishing horizon of democracy created by this historical moment, not as appeals to the political sphere but as examples of new understandings of violence and publicity. Chandan Reddy is Associate Professor of English at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is the author of the recently published book, Freedom With Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the US State (Duke UP, 2011). Reddy has also written a number of influential essays and articles on race, sexuality and late capitalism, including “Asian Diasporas, Neoliberalism, and Family” (Social Text 2005) and “Time for Rights?” (Fordham Law Review 2008).
7:00 pm - IRIS & B. GERALD CANTOR FILM CENTER - 36 East 8th St, NY, NY
FILM SCREENING OF GARIFUNA NATION
and Q&A with Director Carlos DeJesus
(USA, 2012, 82 min)
A feature-length video documentary, Garifuna Nation, presents a cultural encounter between two distinct Afro-Caribbean experiences: Afro-Puerto Rican and Garinagu (also called Garifuna). Through these two parallel perspectives, the video looks into how the slave experience has historically played itself out in different ways and how circumstances determine who we are today. Having escaped the ravages of slavery in the Americas, a group of West Africans joined with Carib Indians to form the Garifuna culture that has survived for over 212 years -- on self-reliance, sacred spirit-possession practices and dance moves. Now, the Garinagu people must face the challenge of interfacing western lifestyles and modern technology with the long-held values regarding their community. Carlos de Jesus is an award-winning producer-director of documentaries and drama in film and video whose film and video work has been exhibited in New York City at the Whitney Museum, Museum of Modern Art, International Center of Photography, and the Bronx Museum of the Arts, and in California and Washington, D.C. De Jesus directed and co-produced The Performed Word, a National Endowment for the Humanities docudrama on the African-American preacher; New Voice (PBS), WGBH, Boston; Watch Your Mouth!, a PBS/NBC series for WNET/Thirteen, New York. He direted Sonrisas (PBS), KLRN, Austin and executive produced and directed Imágenes, for NJN, Trenton. He is a key participant in the First World Order Project, a long-term telecommunications project that will focus on traditional as well as contemporary expressions of African cultural practice throughout the Americas, the Caribbean, Europe, India, and the Pacific Islands. De Jesus is currently an Associate Professor of Film and Television at New York University. Q&A with Director Carlos DeJesus to follow the screening. Go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2GuYWBJ0iU to view the trailer.
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 21 and THURSDAY MARCH 22
1:30 - 5:00 PM
WINNING THE CRISIS: ALTERNATIVES, POSSIBILITIES and ORGANIZING FOR THE FUTURE
a Two-Day Conference of Academics, Activists, Artists and Organizers
Panels from 1 to 5:30 p.m. each day
Visit http://www.winningthecrisis.com/ for more information, speakers, and to RSVP.
In the midst of a rare confluence of political, economic and social crises, graduate students in the Department of Social & Cultural Analysis will stage a two-day discussion among academics, activists, artists and organizers (by no means mutually exclusive categories) with the aim of imagining what "Winning The Crisis" might look like for workers, students, debtors — in short, for the 99 percent. A panel on narrative and social imagination and a roundtable on counter-archives will seek to imagine winning, while panels on organizing workers and debtors will discuss how to bring the imaginary to fruition.
THURSDAY, MARCH 22
6:00 pm
LISA LOWE, "A Fetishism of Colonial Commodities and the Intimacies of Four Continents"
Comparative Literature, UC San Diego
This lecture revisits Marx’s fetishism of commodities and nineteenth-century liberal policies of “free trade” in relation to products (like tea, sugar, cottons, and opium) that expressed the colonial and imperial relations between Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas.
Lisa Lowe studied European intellectual history at Stanford, and French literature and critical theory at UC Santa Cruz. Her research and teaching interests are French, British, and U.S. literatures, and the topic of Asian migration within European and American modernities. She has published books on orientalism, immigration, and culture within globalization. In 2011-2012, she will be a UC President's Faculty Research Fellow; in the fall, she will be at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University, and in the winter and spring, at the School of Advanced Study, University of London.
FRIDAY, MARCH 23
10:30 AM - 5:00 PM
STRUCTURAL COMPETENCY: NEW MEDICINE FOR THE INSTITUTIONAL INEQUALITIES THAT MAKE US SICK
Visit http://structuralcompetency.org/ for more information, speakers, and to RSVP.
This one-day working conference explores a new politics for
understanding the relationships among race, class, and symptom
expression. In clinical settings, such relationships often fall under the rubric
of “cultural competency,” an approach that emphasizes recognition of the
divergent sociocultural backgrounds of patients and doctors, and the
cultural aspects of patients’ illnesses. Increasingly, however, scholars and activists recognize that
oft-invisible structural level determinates, biases, inequities, and
blind spots shape definitions of health and illness long before doctors
or patients enter examination rooms. This evolving literature suggests
that conditions that appear from a biomedical framework to result from
actions or attitudes of culturally distinct groups need also be
understood as resulting from the pathologies of social systems. And,
that locating race-based symptoms on the bodies of marginalized persons
risks turning a blind eye to the racialized economies in which
marginalized and mainstreamed bodies live, work, and attempt to survive. he interdisciplinary scholars assembled for this working conference
will debate how biomedicine might more directly engage with structural
forces even as it works to better understand and treat particular
persons. Its central argument is that a host of issues defined in the
clinical arena as “symptoms” (depression, hypertension, obesity,
smoking, medication “non-compliance,” trauma, psychosis) need to be more
fully addressed as the downstream implications of a number of upstream
decisions (food delivery systems, zoning laws, urban
infrastructure/infrastructure failure, medicalization, diagnostic codes)
if they are to be effectively addressed in clinical and cultural
domains. And, that increasing scientific awareness of the ways in which
structural pressures produce symptoms in individual patients—through
cortisol levels or epigenetic mechanisms, for instance—needs to be
better coupled with medical models for structural change. Structural competency converses with past models, from structuralism
to structural racism, to demonstrate how institutional, political, and
economic forces generating stigma are invisible to actors on the
ground. But it does so with the ultimate aim of developing new
platforms, practices, and agendas that address health issues in the
present day; a time when structural-level disparities become more unjust
at the same time that the agents producing them become more evanescent.