Description

Following the 2016 termination of China’s One Child Policy, families now frequently receive financial incentives to birth to more children to absorb the male gender surplus resulting from patriarchal reactions to the policy. This project investigates Chinese women’s compromised consent to biological reproduction. Nationally, women who are now encouraged to give birth survived, rather than having agreed to, the One Child Policy, and that the decision to birth more children is contingent on the economic condition of the family as well as the state’s future-oriented desire to produce a more robust workforce. Transpacifically, Chinese women’s reproductive consent is further complicated by the United Nation’s post-WWII eugenics project, which provided financial, technological, and research support via the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) to assist so-called third-world countries birth and population control policies. This project aims to demonstrate how the Chinese maternal body is tethered to and articulated through a transpacific biopolitics of reproductive control, where the consent to life is rendered irrelevant both by the discipline of the maternal body and by the pre-natal selection of birth.

Ran Deng is a Ph.D. candidate at the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. Affiliated with the Women & Gender Studies Institute and the Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, Ran’s research intersects transpacific critique, media studies, and queer aesthetic theory. (Her dissertation, titled “Beyond a Biopolitics of Consent: A Transpacific Aesthetics of Reproductive Futurity,” explores the potential of aesthetics to redress injustice toward birth, natality, and reproductive autonomy across the Pacific.)

Description

In 1933, Diego Rivera began painting Man at the Crossroads, a mural at Rockefeller Center in New York City. After Rivera included a portrait of Bolshevik Revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, and refused Nelson Rockefeller’s demand to remove this, the mural was first covered up, and then in February 1934, destroyed. That same year, Rivera painted a refashioned mural, Hombre, el controlador del universo, at the Palacio de Belles Artes in Mexico City. This talk examines this controversy through the lens of Rivera’s relationship with the Communist left, in particular the pro-Moscow Communist Party, the Trotskyist Communist League of America, and the Lovestoneite Communist Party (Opposition), and argues that this provides a fuller understanding of Rivera’s evolving political commitments and the changing politics of his paintings in this period. The talk will also use the controversy as an example of researching the interwar political left and labour movement from a transnational perspective and demonstrates how such a transnational perspective offers advantages over a strictly nationally based vision.

Jacob A. Zumoff is associate professor and chair of the history department and co-chair of the Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies at New Jersey City University (formerly Jersey City State College). After earning his PhD in history at University College London, he has taught in different capacities at universities such as the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, University Massachusetts Boston, and the City University of New York before his present position. His is the author of The Communist International and US Communism, 1919-1929 (Brill, 2014); The Red Thread: The Passaic Textile Strike (Rutgers, 2021) and an editor of the collected volume, Transnational Communism across the Americas (Illinois, 2023), and has published in journals such as Labour/Le Travail, American Studies, The Journal of Social History, The Journal of Caribbean History, and the Journal for the Study of Radicalism.  

Commentator: Alejandra González Jiménez, Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies, University of Toronto

Alejandra González Jiménez is a sociocultural anthropologist. Her research focuses on labour, social reproduction, and current reconfigurations of capitalism. She is working on her first book manuscript in which she examines transnational car production in Mexico in the era of free trade.

Moderator: Sean Purdy, Visiting Professor, Centre for the Study of the United States, Munk School, University of Toronto – Professor Doutor II, Departamento de História, Universidade de São Paulo

Sean Purdy is professor of the History of the Americas at the University of São Paulo since 2006. His research focuses on workers’ and social movements in the United Status, Canada and Brazil in the post-Second World War era. He has published widely in English and Portuguese in historical and social science journals as well as in the popular press. He has translated four books from Portuguese to English as well as dozens of specialist journal articles.  

Organized by the Centre for the Study of the United States, the Munk School of Global Affairs and co-sponsored by the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies, University of Toronto.

Description

This Graduate Student Workshop presentation by Yi Wang is based on doctoral research investigating socio-spatial divisions of labour and working class formation within the retail logistics operations of Walmart, the biggest private sector employer and retail company in the United States and in the world. The research explores key contradictions in Walmart’s retail logistics operations, in workers’ discourse, and in labor movement strategies with a focus on the Western US. The research examines different forms of worker power in the context of centrally coordinated supply chains, fragmented workforces, and geographically uneven development at the regional scale. The research highlights the significance of logistical chokepoints positioned in peripheral hinterland zones in terms of labour organizing prospects as well as national politics. The presentation shares findings from ethnographic fieldwork conducted at multiple sites within Walmart’s retail distribution network, including participant observation as an hourly Walmart Associate and interviews with workers and labour organizers.

Yi Wang is a PhD candidate in Human Geography at the University of Toronto and currently resides in Northern California. His research interests include the political economy of retail and logistics, spatial and racial divisions of labour, social movements, and class struggle. He has contributed to various action-research projects in connection with food sovereignty and labour movement organizations.

Description

Culinary Workshop & Seminar with Prof. Rafia Zafar

Please join us in welcoming Prof. Rafia Zafar to the Culinaria Kitchen Lab on Thursday, March 14 (12-2pm) for a session that weaves together histories, recipes, and delectable improvisation. Working with and between the stories and dishes crafted by Verta Mae Smart Grosvenor and Zafar’s Grandmother in her Harlem restaurant kitchen, Prof. Zafar explores the languages of food, resilience, and memory composed in the literary genre of Black and African American food writing and cookbooks. Guests will be invited to sample the dishes demonstrated by Prof. Zafar as a part of this kitchen session.

This event is followed by a seminar With Prof. Zafar on Friday, March 15th at 12:00pm, titled "Kitchenette Unbuilding: Two Black women writers on ‘the heart of the home’" at Room 108N, North House, 1 Devonshire Place, Toronto, ON, M5S 3K7.

About the Speaker:

Rafia Zafar is Professor of English and African & African American Studies and the Program in American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. She holds degrees from the City College of New York (BA, English), Columbia University (MA, English & Comparative Literature) and Harvard University (PhD, History of American Civilization). In April 2024 she will return to the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Italy, where she will lecture in its master’s program in Gastronomy: World Food Cultures and Mobility. At her home institution she teaches popular courses on Food & Literature and Black Foodways.

Zafar’s major publications include Recipes for Respect: African American Meals and Meaning; the two-volume Harlem Renaissance Novels: The Library of America Collection (editor); We Wear the Mask: African Americans Write American Literature, 1760-1870; Harriet Jacobs and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (co-editor); and God Made Man, Man Made the Slave (co-editor). In addition to her book publications, she co-edited a special issue of African American Review on the bibliophile and historian Arturo Schomburg. Her awards and fellowships include the Walt Whitman Distinguished Fulbright Chair at Utrecht University, a Ford Foundation Post-doctoral fellowship, election to the American Antiquarian Society and a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (New York Public Library). She began her career in foodways during university, slinging cheese at a little gourmet store in New York City that morphed into Dean & DeLuca, now gone, but at its height a veritable temple for professional chefs, gourmets, and food tourists alike.

Organized by the Centre for the Study of the United States, the Munk School of Global Affairs and Pubic Policy and the Culinaria Research Centre, University of Toronto Scarborough.

Description

How do institutions classify collaborators and resisters of fascistic regimes? How do they do so especially during unsettled and turbulent times? Drawing on more than 100 biographies collected in the American Occupied Zone after World War II as part of the Office of Military Government, United States (OMGUS’) efforts to de-nazify the German communication sector, the study illustrates the considerations that were made in differentiating between Germans. The effort to create a classification system was led by an American psychiatrist at Columbia university, who, through a series of interviews, created the category of ‘Anti-Nazis’ – meaning non-Jewish Germans who could have affiliated with the Nazi regime and nevertheless stood against it – to stand in contrast with that of the Nazi. Ori shows the factors that had the most impact in the classification process included not only political affiliations and actions during the war, but Freudian personality assessments and upbringing. The findings shed light on the complexities of classifying responses to fascistic regimes in post-war contexts.

Ori Gilboa is a Ph.D. Student at the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto, with a collaborative specialization in Jewish Studies. She is interested in the social processes of political violence and atrocities, with a particular focus on their aftermath. Her current research concerns institutional categorizations of political threats during unsettled times.

Description

Terrell will talk about what it is like to cover Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine as an independent reporter, how being Black correspondent informs his work and what Ukraine means for the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election.

Terrell Jermaine Starr is an independent journalist widely known for his coverage of the current Russian invasion of Ukraine. He’s the founder of the newly-formed Black Diplomats Media Group that includes Black Diplomats newsletter on Substack, Black Diplomats Official YouTube channel and Black Diplomats podcast that will resume broadcasting mid-February and is available on Apple iTunes and all major podcast platforms.

Terrell’s work centers the Black perspective in foreign policy news and doesn’t shy away from inserting his personal views into his reporting when he talks about Ukraine, Gaza or any other part of the world. He is also looking for financial supporters to back his media group, so if you want to back his vision, please reach out to him via the contact information on the screen.

A former Fulbright grantee, Terrell also is a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer, having served in Georgia in 2003 to 2005. He has masters degrees in Journalism and Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies from the University of Illinois and a bachelor’s degree from Philander Smith College, a historically Black College in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Terrell is a non-resident senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and divides his time between New York City and Ukraine.

Description

This presentation argues that a transnational approach to explore what Professor Purdy call “pariah spaces” offers a fresh and exciting perspective to understand several key aspects of the shared histories of urban social inequality and territorial stigmatization in the Americas. Dealing specifically with two examples – North American public housing projects and Brazilian favelas – Purdy offer ample evidence that external representations of such spaces share wider cultural and social meanings in state, media and public discourse throughout the Americas: the “marginal” spaces of North and South American cities are not solely seen as areas of poverty; they are regarded as sites of socially and culturally disorganized populations characterized by dangerous social pathologies. Marginality is thus simultaneously a representation/identity and a structure/place. However, there are limits to the ability of transnational perspectives to adequately analyze all aspects of the history and experiences of favelas and public housing developments, especially concerning political economy and larger questions of state organization and practices. Purdy thus concludes that we still need more local, regional, national and comparative research on such phenomena as well as transnational approaches.  

About the Speakers:

Sean Purdy

Sean Purdy is professor of the History of the Americas at the University of São Paulo since 2006. His research focuses on workers’ and social movements in the United Status, Canada and Brazil in the post-Second World War era. He has published widely in English and Portuguese in historical and social science journals as well as in the popular press. He has translated four books from Portuguese to English as well as dozens of specialist journal articles.

Carolina Sa Carvalho Pereira

Carolina Sá Carvalho writes about modern Latin American arts, photography, film, and literature, with a focus on Brazil, coloniality, extractivism, and infrastructure. She is currently working on a book-length project on mosquitoes and the aesthetics and politics of contagion in 20th and 21st-century Brazil.

She is the author of Traces of the Unseen: Photography, Violence, and Modernization in Early Twentieth-Century Latin America (Northwestern UP, 2023). The book examines the role of photography as visual evidence of the destructive processes of infrastructure development and extractive capitalist expansion in the Amazon and outside the Brazilian metropole. Combining formal analysis of individual photographs with their inclusion in larger multi-media assemblages, Traces of the Unseen explores how photographs of violence were framed, captioned, cropped, and circulated to develop singular pedagogies of the gaze and teach increasingly interconnected urban publics how to interpret them within the larger context of capitalist modernization. Traces of the Unseen draws on works by Flavio de Barros, Euclides da Cunha, Roger Casement, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Mario de Andrade to situate an unruly photographic body at the center of modernity, in all its disputed meanings. Carolina Sá Carvalho teaches courses on Luso-Afro-Brazilian arts, film, literature, and cultures. At the graduate level she teaches a variety of seminars such as the Politics and Aesthetics of Multispecies Contagion, Latin American Visual Culture, and Home and Dwelling in Latin America. Before joining the University of Toronto, she was a faculty member at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Zoe Wool

Zoë Wool is assistant professor in the department of anthropology at the university of toronto, where she is also an affiliate of Center for the Study of the United States and the Women and Gender Studies Institute and core faculty at the Center for Global Disability Studies. Her work spans anthropology, disability studies, queer theory, and feminist science and technology studies, with a focus on the materialities of post-9/11 war making and military harm, and the tyrannies of normativity in the contemporary United States. Wool is director of the TWIG Research Kitchen, a feminist space for tinkering with collaborative and convivial modes of scholarship about toxicity, waste, and infrastructure. She is the author of After War: The weight of life at Walter Reed (Duke UP, 2015), as well as many articles in journals such as Social Text, Catalyst, Cultural Anthropology, American Ethnologist, and Medical Anthropology Quarterly, where she is currently associate editor.

Description

The presentation will summarize the arguments of The Shifting Ground of Globalization: Labor and Mineral Extraction at Vale S.A. (Haymarket, 2024). It describes the transformation of the Brazilian mining company Vale, global leader in iron ore and nickel production and formerly state-owned, into a Transnational Corporation (TNC). It analyzes the effects of this process on the company’s workers and unions, in Brazil and abroad, through ethnographic research in two of the countries where Vale has mining operations (Brazil and Canada), in places as different as Carajás, in the heart of the Amazon forest, and Sudbury, in northern Ontario.

The book also describes the company’s union and labor relations strategy, which seeks the weakening and isolation of its unions in Brazil, and especially the restructuring of Vale’s operations in Canada after the acquisition of Inco in 2006, which led to the longest strike in the North American country’s private sector in 30 years (between 2009 and 2010) against the powerful and multinational union United Steelworkers (USW). Former USW international president Leo Gerard engaged personally in the strike against Vale, since he has deep roots in Sudbury and in Inco mines, where he got his first job and his father was a union leader in the past.

It also delves into recent changes in the ownership structure and "corporate governance" of Vale. After years of international expansion of the mining company, financed by state and parastatal funds in the governments of Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff (Workers’ Party, 2003-2016), these recent changes led to the increased presence of large transnational investment funds in its shares. In dialogue with the theories of global capitalism, the book takes the case of Vale, the largest Latin American company in market value, as a telling example of the integration of Brazilian economy into capitalist globalization and its consequences for workers, communities, and the environment in the first decades of the twenty-first century – when many celebrated the BRICS and its companies as an alternative to neoliberal globalization.

Thiago Aguiar holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of São Paulo (USP-Brazil), and was visiting researcher at the University of California, Berkeley (2016-2017). He is currently a visiting research fellow at the King’s College London, postdoctoral researcher at the University of Campinas (Brazil) and an associate researcher at the Centre for the Study of Citizenship Rights (USP).

Judith Marshall holds a PhD in Education from the University of Toronto with a thesis – and later book –  on workplace literacy based on her 7 years in the Ministry of Education in post-independence Mozambique.  After Mozambique, she worked for more than two decades in the Steelworkers Humanity Fund, developing labour education programmes on global issues for USW members.   These programmes included a week-long course called "Thinking North South" and many north-south worker exchanges in the mining sector.  The exchanges created working links between Canadian mine workers and their counterparts in countries like Chile, Peru and Mozambique. Often they shared a common transnational employer like Teck, Placer Dome or Vale.  Since her retirement in 2014, Dr. Marshall has been a research associate at the Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean (CERLAC) at York University.  Her most  recent publication is entitled  Vale in Mozambique: Creator and destroyer of jobs, livelihoods and communities, available in a special issue of EXIS (The Extractive Industries and Society).

Organized by the Centre for the Study of the United States and the Undergraduate Society of American Studies.