FaultLines Newsletter Archive

Faultlines Spring 2012 Issue

Words from the Director

At the beginning of the fall semester, I was teaching one of the core undergraduate courses in the Department of Ethnic Studies, “The History of Race and Ethnicity in Western North America,” and one student asked, “Why is race such a big deal?”  Although we would engage the question throughout the semester, I responded with a brief overview of the historical significance of race in the United States.  Hierarchical categories of race helped to resolve a moral contradiction in the birth of the U.S.

Critical Discourses on Islamophobia: Symbols, Images and Representations

On April 19-20, 2012, the Islamophobia Research & Documentation Project, a CRG research initiative, co-organized its third annual international conference.  Critical Discourses was a transnational, multi-disciplinary, multi-media gathering where researchers, organizers, and cultural critics interrogated and challenged Islamophobia’s influence on political and cultural life.  

Week of Cultural Resistance
Prof. Jafari Allen, Yale
Prof. Maylei Blackwel, UCLA

CRG collaborated with the Multicultural Community Center on their annual Week of Cultural Resistance by co-organizing visits from Prof. Jafari Allen (Yale University) and Prof. Maylei Blackwell (UCLA) who highlighted work from their recent publications. In his talk, “The Ethnography of Black/Queer/Diaspora: Tracing Circuits of Desire,” Prof. Allen traced the geographies and genealogies of black queer life, ethics, and aesthetics, arguing for liberatory analytical models that not only help us understandcurrent life “on the ground,” but also facilitate visions for reclamation and futurity.

White Reconstruction and the Impasse of Racial Genocide
Prof. Dylan Rodríguez, Chair of Ethnic Studies at UC Riverside

Prof. Dylan Rodríguez, argued that the social logics and premises that drive on-going patterns of racial violence should be understood as a development of a half century period leading to the 1960s, which he identifies as a period of White Reconstruction. He defined these logics as "proto-genocidal," meaning that they rationalized policies, institutions, and nation building practices that affirmed the physical and social death of specific populations.

Chinese Miners, the "Coolie" Question, and the Propaganda of History
Mae Ngai, Columbia University, CRG Distinguished Guest Lecture

The CRG Spring 2012 Distinguished Guest Lecture was delivered by Prof. Mae Ngai, Columbia University. Referencing a book chapter in which W.E.B. Du Bois argued that scholarship about black people must be liberated from the racist historiography of slavery, Prof. Ngai believes that scholarship about 19th century Chinese workers must likewise be liberated from "propaganda of history."

Updates from the Undocumented Student Research Initiative

The AB540 Undocumented Student Research Initiative is a collaborative initiative to learn about and transform campus climate for undocumented students at UC Berkeley. One important achievement has been the completion of a research report about the experiences and lives of undocumented students at UC Berkeley.

Contemporary Dance as Subversive Pedagogies
Professor SanSan Kwan, Performance Studies
Naomi Elizabeth Bragin, Performance Studies

The CRG Thursday afternoon forum series resumed this Spring with a talk by Naomi Elizabeth Bragin, performance studies, entitled “Techniques for Black (Male) Re/Dress.”
With 15 years of immersion as both an observer and participant in street dance communities, Bragin explores the hypothesis that dance technique arises via the entwinement of sociopolitical tensions at the level of individuals and communities, which are embodied, experienced, and expressed at the sensory, kinesthetic and affective registers.

School And Home: Racialized And Gendered Connections
Jessica Cobb, Sociology
Freeden Oeur, Sociology

Jessica Cobb's research attempts to highlight and code teachers’ racialized and classed conceptions of appropriate families. In her talk, “Construction 'Appropriate' Families: Education, Inequality, and Teacher Subjectivities," she presented data from her comparative study based on 64 in-depth interviews with teachers at high schools in three independent, suburban Los Angeles-area schools. Two of the schools, Keith and Woodlawn, were comprised of student bodies that are low-income and Black and Latino. The third, Sunnyside, served a wealthy white and Asian population.

Feminism, Family, and Confucianism in Asian America
Professor Lisa Mar, University of Maryland
Professor Russell Jeung, San Francisco State University

Professor Lisa Mar, University of Maryland, opened the talk by describing the little known work of Chinese-American feminist scholar Yuk Kwei Kwong.

Kwong is reputed to have published the first book which argued that Confucius would have supported feminism. In contrast to Western portrayals of Confucionism as a sexist and patriarchal doctrine promoting a culture in which women were to be subservient to men, Kwong suggests that Confucius actually preached for gender equality, and would have been an advocate for modern women's rights.

Visual Constructions of Race and Stigma in Europe
Professor Paola Bacchetta, Gender & Women's Studies
Noémi Michel, University of Geneva; Switzerland

In 2007, worldwide attention was drawn to a poster created by the Swiss People's Party (SVP) in support of their ballot initiative for the automatic expulsion of “criminal foreigners.” The poster displayed three white sheep, and a fourth, black sheep. Visually, the three white sheep reside within a space represented by the Swiss flag. One of the white sheep is depicted as kicking the black sheep out of the space represented as Swiss territory. The slogan reads, "For More Security."

Political Encounters & Engagements: A Spotlight on Undergraduate Student Research
Sarah Leadem, Ethnic Studies
Sophia Wang, Sociology & Political Science
Son Chau, Ethnic Studies & American Studies
Maia Wolins, Middle Eastern Studies

Each semester, the Center for Race and Gender awards research grants to promising undergraduate scholars. This Spring, the CRG welcomed back four grant winners, Sarah Leadem, Ethnic Studies; Sophia Wang, Sociology & Political Science; Son Chau, Ethnic Studies & American Studies; and Maia Wolins, Middle Eastern Studies to present their work in a forum moderated by Prof. Keith Feldman, Ethnic Studies.

Interventions in Decolonial Thought & Whiteness Studies
Prof. Zeus Leonardo, Education
Samuel Bañales, Anthropology

Prof. Zeus Leonardo, Education opened the forum by focusing on the ways in which people of color and their lived experiences impact the sociological construction of "whiteness," what he describes in terms of the unconsicous embodiment of ideological privilege that comes with majority status.

Crossing Lines: Praxis in Mixed Race/Space Studies

Transnational Mixed Asians In-Between Spaces (TMABS), is a CRG research working group that began in 2009-10. The TMABS group was initiated by four Ethnic Studies graduate students interested in applying a mixed race/space analytic lens to traditional Ethnic Studies discourse. In the third year of the working group, we also sought to engage a larger subset of both the UC Berkeley and SF Bay Area community in discussions of race and mixed race.

Spring 2012 FaultLines

Back Issues
SP2011 Issue | FL2010 Issue | SP2010 Issue | FL2009 Issue | SP2009 Issue | FL2008 Issue | SP2008 Issue | FL2006 Issue | SP2007 Issue | FL2006 Issue | SP2006 Issue | FL2005 Issue | SP2005 Issue | FL2004 Issue | SP2004 Issue | FL2003 Issue | SP2003 Issue | FL2002 Issue