Turn your new year wish into beautiful Chinese characters by making bookmarks. The event will be held from 9 a.m.-noon at the 2nd floor entrance to the Gatton Student Center.
As the 2020 presidential election nears, we are facing strident and sometimes hate-filled campaign verbiage, even in the most mainstream of publications. As was true in 2016, many observers express surprise at the coarseness of the language of the campaign. It is worthwhile to compare the rhetoric of the recent campaigns with those in 2008 and 2012 when Barack Obama and his family were also subject to outrageous accusations, although in these elections, the attacks rarely surfaced in the respectable press outlets. As a result, many political watchers assumed that they represented fringe points of view that would never enjoy respectability. This paper will make the case that such observers were wrong.
Patricia A. Turner is the Vice Provost of Undergraduate Education and a Professor in the Department of African American Studies and World Arts and Culture at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research focuses on racial dynamics as they surface in folklore and popular culture. Her fourth book, Crafted Lives: Stories and Studies of African-American Quilters was published by University of Mississippi Press in 2009. She is also the author of Whispers on the Color Line: Rumor and Race in America (with Gary Alan Fine) (2004), Ceramic Uncles and Celluloid Mammies: Black Images and Their Influence on Culture (2002), I Heard It Through the Grapevine: Rumor in African-American Culture (1994). She is currently writing a monograph on legends and beliefs about Barack and Michelle Obama.
On Monday, December 9th at 5pm the Russian Singing Concert will take place in the Niles Gallery in the Fine Arts Library. This event is free and open to the public. Russian Tea and Russian delicious food will be provided.
Arai Takako is the author of previous poetry collections, including Tamashii dansu [Soul Dance] which won the 2008 Oguma Hideo Prize. Since 1998, she has been an editor for the poetry journal Mi’Te; she has also edited a volume of poems about, and is producing a film connected to, the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in northern Japan. Arai teaches Japanese and poetry at Saitama University. She is currently participating in the 2019 University of Iowa International Writing Program.
Professor Linkhoeva will present her research on colonial policies by the Soviet and Japanese regimes on the Mongolian territories (Buriatia, Outer and Inner Mongolia). The historiographical division between the communist bloc (Russia/Buriatia/Outer Mongolia/communist China) and the anticommunist bloc (Japan/Inner Mongolia/Manchuria/Republican China) has precluded identifying strategies and policies that great powers, regardless of their ideological preferences, deploy in dealing with “small people” caught in the regional power struggles. The talk shifts away from these national/ist perspectives and places compartmentalized experiences of the borderland people, the Buriat-Mongols, in the center of a history.
Dr. Tatiana Linkhoeva is Assistant Professor of Japanese History at New York University. Her forthcoming book, Revolution Goes East. Imperial Japan and Soviet Communism will be published by Cornell University Press in March 2020.
Native of the republic of Buriatia (Russia), Dr. Linkhoeva graduated from Moscow State University, received her MA from the University of Tokyo, and PhD in History from UC Berkeley. She has been awarded fellowships from Japan’s Ministry of Education, the Japan Foundation, UC Berkeley, and the German Excellence Initiative.
The purpose of this event is to have graduate students from the various languages present on a text (literature, film, art, poetry, etc.) which they consider important. The goal of the presentations is to familiarize the audience with these texts and show why they are important.
Each presentation will be approximately 10 minutes in length and use a visual aid, such as a Powerpoint presentation.
MCLLC hosts a resume workshop for graduate students.
In this talk Dr. Rucker-Chang explores the uses and meanings of "Blackness" in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (1945-1992) and its successor states of Serbia and Montenegro. To reflect on the mechanisms of cultural and social incorporation of “Blacks” in Yugoslavia, she highlights how, in defiance to Yugoslav narratives of ethnic and racial inclusion, post-Yugoslav identity has adopted a normative ethnic value of "whiteness" as an inalienable, exclusive feature of belonging.
Sunnie Rucker-Chang is an Assistant Professor of Slavic and East European Studies and Director of European Studies at University of Cincinnati. Her primary interests lie in cultural and racial formation(s) in the Balkans. She is a co-editor of and contributor to the book Chinese Migrants in Russia, Central Asia and Eastern Europe (Routledge, 2011). Her work has appeared in the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, Critical Romani Studies, Journal of Transatlantic Studies, and Interventions: The International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. Her co-authored book, Roma Rights and US Civil Rights: A Transatlantic Approach, is currently in press with Cambridge University Press, and her co-edited volume Balkan Migrants: to, from, and in the Balkans: Identity, Alterity, and Culture is under contract with Liverpool University Press. For the 2019-2020 academic year Sunnie will work on her monograph focusing on racial formations and Blackness in Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav space for which she has been awarded an American Association of University Women Postdoctoral Research Leave Fellowship.
Sponsored by the Department of Modern and Classical Languages, Department of African American and Africana Studies, Department of History, International Studies, Department of Anthropology and the College of Arts and Sciences.
