Description

Throughout the 20th century, New York was a hub of Black politics. From Garveyites to Black Communists, Civil Rights activists to Black Panthers, almost every conceivable political movement among African Americans was present in NYC. This lecture focuses on none of these movements or their notable figures. Instead, it discusses dishonored communities of Black subjects who operated in the fringes, slums, and undergrounds of post-WWII New York City. Whether they were drug-dealing grandmothers, "junkies" plaguing neighborhoods, juvenile delinquents, or outright thieves, these figures were engaged in a practice of Black deviance that has seldom been considered "political" or related to traditions of Black protest or radicalism. Drawing on a selection of primary sources, Grant will explore the complexity of Black deviant subjectivity, deviant and dishonored communal living, and the potential of unearthing a Black Deviant Tradition.  

Speaker Bio:

Khaleel Grant is a Ph.D. candidate in history with a collaborative specialization in women and gender studies (CWGS) at the Women and Gender Studies Institute. Their areas of study include gender, slavery, and racial capitalism in North America and the Caribbean and the 20th-century history of the Black radical tradition in the U.S. and African Diaspora. Their doctoral research seeks to understand how various Black social movements’ notions of class, respectability, and revolutionary potential excluded specific segments of their respective communities. Khaleel’s work examines deviant practices among Black urban poor communities as an alternative to conventional politics to understand how they escaped, contested, survived, or exploited the precarity and circumscribed freedom of liberal democracy and racial capitalism. Their work suggests that Black deviance perhaps constitutes a political or anti-political tradition on its own terms.

Description

In February 2022, the city of Toronto approved a new bylaw allowing backyard garden suites as part of an effort to address the current housing crisis. While the legalization of laneway buildings and rooming houses is today hailed as a positive measure to combat the housing shortage, these types of habitations were once widely condemned as hotbeds of crime and disease. The relationship between housing quality, housing supply, and the quality of life of residents has been a point of contention in North America since the rapid urbanization of the 1830s. Shen situates her paper at a point in history where the first minimum housing standards in the United States were enforced on a rapidly growing Manhattan, a city in which 70% of residents lived in overcrowded tenement houses.

The Tenement House Act of 1901 outlawed windowless rooms, mandated fire-proof construction materials, and required the house to provide at least one bathroom for each apartment. While such measures could be expected to improve health outcomes, they also have the potential to price low-income households out of the most transit-accessible neighborhoods. Shen’s paper evaluated the impacts of the 1901 Tenement House Act on the health and well-being of tenement residents. Results show that although tenement regulation increased life expectancy for some resident children, it disproportionately displaced foreign-born and low-income individuals. She contended that the 1901 Act had an overall negative impact on the survival rates and upward mobility of that segment of the population it was meant to protect.

Speaker Bio:

Rallye (Qingyang) Shen is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Economics at the University of Toronto. Her dissertation leverages historical sources of variation to answer questions related to transportation and housing infrastructure. She is particularly interested understanding migration, displacement, and the impact on disadvantaged populations. Her research is funded by a SSHRC-Doctoral Scholarship and an Ontario Graduate Scholarship.

Description

Event series: Race & Anti-Racism across the Asia-Pacific

In recent years, many commentators have bemoaned the dissolution of the liberal capitalist world order that has been called “Pax Americana.” In this logic, the occupations of Germany and Japan have been declared triumphs that inaugurated a rules-based global order that lasted for more than seventy years. The United States has been figured as the “global good cop” that insured peace, security, and prosperity throughout the planet, so that its recent decline on the world stage and a supposed isolationist mood is now being countered by new visions calling forth another world order dependent upon the massive militarization of minor and major powers throughout the world. This panel begins with the acknowledgement that the period of Pax Americana was far from peaceful and non-violent for most of the formerly colonized, indigenous, and racialized peoples of the world. Despite national and state/provincial celebrations of inclusion, multiculturalism, and reconciliation, our three panelists with expertise across the Asia-Pacific–including on Okinawa, Hawaiʻi, and postcolonial Koreans in Japan–reflect on the limits of this discourse on Pax Americana.

Description

BOOK TALK

Minor Transpacific: Triangulating American, Japanese, and Korean Fictions (Standford University Press)

There is a tendency to think of Korean American literature—and Asian American literature writ large—as a field of study involving only two spaces, the United States and Korea, with the same being true in Asian studies of Korean Japanese (Zainichi) literature involving only Japan and Korea. This book posits that both fields have to account for three spaces: Korean American literature has to grapple with the legacy of Japanese imperialism in the United States, and Zainichi literature must account for American interventions in Japan. Comparing Korean American authors such as Younghill Kang, Chang-rae Lee, Ronyoung Kim, and Min Jin Lee with Zainichi authors such as Kaneshiro Kazuki, Yi Yang-ji, and Kim Masumi, Minor Transpacific uncovers their hidden dialogue and imperial concordances, revealing the trajectory and impact of both bodies of work. Minor Transpacific bridges the fields of Asian studies and Asian American studies to unveil new connections between Zainichi and Korean American literatures. Working in Japanese and English, David S. Roh builds a theoretical framework for articulating those moments of contact between minority literatures in a third national space and proposes a new way of conceptualizing Asian American literature.

David S. Roh is Professor of English at the University of Utah, where he specializes in Asian American literature and Digital Humanities.  He is the author of Minor Transpacific (Stanford University Press, 2021), Illegal Literature (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), and coeditor of Techno-Orientalism (Rutgers University Press, 2015). His work has appeared in Law & Literature, Journal of Narrative Theory, MELUS, Verge, and Digital Humanities Quarterly.  He is currently at work on Techno-Orientalism, Vol. II.

Organized by the Centre for the Study of Korea and co-sponsored by the Department of English, Dr. David Chu Program in Asia-Pacific Studies, Department of East Asian Studies, the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies, the Centre for the Study of the United States, University of Toronto.

Description

In recent years, the local opposition against the construction of a new U.S. military base in Okinawa, the southernmost prefecture of Japan, has generated new attention in the field of Asian studies, Asian American studies, and American studies. Scholars and activists have sought to situate the struggles surrounding Okinawa’s base problems within comparative and relational frameworks, revealing the violent entanglements between American and Japanese settler colonial formations, militarism, and capitalism, while illuminating the ways by which decolonizing nations and peoples could have come into solidarity with each other.

This presentation aims to contribute to this scholarship by bringing in the perspective of critical infrastructure studies to examine the beginning phase of military construction in U.S.-occupied Okinawa, spanning from 1945 to 1952. Existing historiographical accounts on this phase of military construction have centered on how a shift in American policymakers’ perception of Okinawa’s strategic importance during heightened military tensions in Asia in the late 1940s and early 1950s had contributed to the construction of permanent military facilities in Okinawa. Drawing on sources from the views of military engineers surrounding the 1950 “Okinawa construction program” to survey reports on typhoon damages of U.S. military installations on Okinawa, this presentation challenges historical accounts that see Okinawa’s incorporation into the U.S. military network of bases as geopolitically inevitable.

Sabrina Teng-io Chung argue for an infrastructural reading of the U.S. militarization of Okinawa that exposes the colonial anxiety, insecurity, and instability surrounding the building of permanent military facilities. This infrastructural reading aims to demonstrate that what is considered “permanent” in the U.S. military construction programs is always already characterized by a sense of abandonment and decay, contingency and precarity. Ultimately, this reading practice calls for new ways of imagining otherwise the temporalities and relationalities made possible by American and Japanese imperial formations across the Pacific.  

Sabrina Teng-io Chung is a Ph.D. candidate in East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto. Her dissertation examines the U.S. militarization of post-reversion Okinawa through the lens of infrastructure and urban redevelopment. Her research interests include transpacific studies, inter-Asia cultural studies, critical infrastructure studies, and Cold War historiography. Her publication has appeared on the online edition of Society and Space. She has also translated investigative reporting articles on the pandemic and public space, social movements, and international student migration from independent Chinese-language news outlets including The Reporter and Initium Media.  

Sponsored by the Centre for the Study of the United States.

Description

Join acclaimed scholars and cultural critics Professor Florence Dore (English Department, University of North Carolina) and Professor Eric Lott (American Studies, City University of New York) for a discussion of music, text and method. What constitutes a vernacular archive and how does one approach it as a historian, as a critic, and as a researcher? What is the relationship between theory, method and object and how does each inform the other in the practices of critical engagement? Please bring your projects, your questions, and your provocations to this graduate workshops. We look forward to the conversation!

You can find samples of recent work by professors Lott and Dore here:   • Read Dore’s article titled "Good for Nothing: Lorrie Moore’s Maternal Aesthetic and the Return to Form" here: https://post45.org/2020/12/dore-good-for-nothing/  • Read Lott’s article titled "Back Door Man: Howlin’ Wolf and the Sound of Jim Crow" here: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/450012

  *This workshop is open to University of Toronto graduate students.

Check out Dore’s performance on Thursday, March 23 at The Dakota Tavern, tickets are for purchase here: https://www.dakotatavern.ca/shows/march232023)

 Eric Lott teaches American Studies at the City University of New York Graduate Center.  Lott has published widely and lectured at dozens of universities and other institutions on the politics of U.S. cultural and performance history, and his work has appeared in a range of periodicals including The Village Voice, The Nation, The Chronicle of Higher Education, PMLA, Representations, Transition, Social Text, American Literary History, and American Quarterly.  He is the author of Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford UP, 1993; 20th Anniversary ed., 2013), from which Bob Dylan took the title for his 2001 album “Love and Theft”; The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual (Basic Books, 2006), which was widely reviled by the boomer liberals it critiqued; and Black Mirror: The Cultural Contradictions of American Racism (Harvard UP, 2017), a study of race, culture, and fantasy across the long twentieth century.  Lott has appeared on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, CBS Sunday Morning, Turner Classic Movies, C-Span Book TV, Al Jazeera TV, and various radio shows and podcasts.

 Florence Dore teaches in both the Creative Writing and Literature Programs at Carolina. She earned her doctorate at UC Berkeley in 1999 and, after stints at New York University’s Draper Program and Kent State University, finally found her permanent home as a member the faculty at UNC Chapel Hill in 2010. Several books and articles—both academic and public-facing—appear on Dore’s c.v., but she has also released three records, one of which, Highways and Rocketships, won Best Americana Album of 2022 at Lonesome Highway Magazine. She has held fellowships at New York University, the National Humanities Center, and UNC’s Institute for Arts and Humanities and has won several grants, including one from the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is also a member of Phi Beta Kappa. Dore is known for her work on the Steering Committee of the national scholarly group Post45, for whom she was founding co-editor of the Pos45 Book Series at Stanford University Press. In her work as a singer and songwriter, which she is increasingly connecting with her academic pursuits, Dore has become passionate about the Public Humanities. During the pandemic, she created and acted as co- executive producer for the community fundraiser Cover Charge: NC Musicians Go Under Cover to Benefit Cat’s Cradle, a benefit compilation record that came in #1 on the Billboard charts and raised funds for the iconic local rock venue, Cat’s Cradle. She has organized two public conferences on rock and literature, in 2017 at the National Humanities Center with the Carolina Performing Arts and in 2010 at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011. Form these endeavors emerges Dore’s new book, The Ink in the Grooves: Conversations on Literature and Rock ‘n Roll (Cornell Univ. Press), which features essays and interviews with Richard Thompson, Dom Flemons, Lucinda Williams, and members of John Prine’s ban, among others. She sits on the advisory board for the Institute for Bob Dylan Studies at the University of Tulsa’s Bob Dylan Archive, and, most recently, has launched Ink in the Grooves Live, a Traveling Public Humanities.

Sponsored by the Centre for the Study of the United States and co-sponsored by the Department of English, Department of History and the Facult of Music, University of Toronto.

Description

From the Red Desert to the Red Planet: Military engineers, granular materials, and how we know what we know about extreme environments

In the 1940s and 1950s U.S. military engineers fanned out across the world to construct military installations in some of the world’s most extreme and inhospitable environments. This talk charts the work of the engineers as they moved from sand dunes in the Sahara, to the ice on top of Greenland, and then to plans for building a base on the Moon. All the while, the engineers were acutely aware of the materials in question: the sand, the snow, the stardust. By exploring such materials — at field stations around the world and in laboratories closer to home – military engineers created new ways of understanding such environments. What they learned, over time, is that places such as the desert and Arctic are not discrete landscapes; they are tied to our everyday in surprising and intimate ways.

This talk is drawn from Heefner’s current manuscript, Sand, Snow, and Stardust, the history of how we know what we know about extreme environments. Places such as the desert, the Arctic, and outer space that exist out there somewhere, on the edges of our maps. These are places that have long and generally been written off – wastelands, useless, remote, lifeless. Heefner traces the relationship between U.S. military engineers and their construction projects in the extremes beginning in the 1940s, when the U.S. government realized it knew nothing about such places, through a Cold War near-obsession with mastering them, to the present day, when we find ourselves in the uncomfortable predicament that the U.S. military might be the one organization that can best help navigate a world in which more and more of our environments are becoming extreme.

Gretchen Heefner is an Associate Professor of History at Northeastern University where she is also the Associate Director of the Center for International Affairs and World Cultures. Her work centers on militarization, the environment, and the surprisingly intimate relations between national security regimes and the everyday. Her first book, The Missile Next Door: The Minuteman in the American Heartland (Harvard University Press, 2012), was a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2013. Other work has appeared in Diplomatic History, Environmental History, Modern American History, the Western Historical Quarterly, and the Pacific Historic Review. Her current book project, Sand, Snow, and Stardust: U.S. Military Engineers and the Environmental Extremes will be published by the University of Chicago Press in 2024.

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Description

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