Description

This is an in-person event at the Munk School, 1 Devonshire Place, Seminar room 208, North House, Toronto, Ontario.

In the 1950s and 1960s, many psychiatrists in the US used the mind-altering drug lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) to help patients explore their unconscious minds. A handful of these psychiatrists discovered that if LSD was taken in a comfortable, compassionate, and aesthetically pleasing environment, it could generate powerful, spiritually transformative experiences that had lasting mental health benefits. This specific approach to LSD therapy became known as "psychedelic" (mind-manifesting) therapy. In 1962, after becoming impressed with psychedelic therapy, the clinical psychologist Gary Fisher decided to see if LSD could help twelve “severely disturbed” children who he worked with at Fairview State Hospital in Costa Mesa, California. The environment at Fairview though was less than ideal. The children’s ward was “bleak and barren” and the atmosphere was “constant pandemonium.” Many children were “hyperactive, screaming, [and] assaultive.” Despite these difficult conditions, Fisher did his best to create a comfortable setting in the visitor’s room to help children have positive LSD experiences. Drawing on Fisher’s notes about these LSD sessions, I explore how children reacted to psychedelic therapy in such difficult circumstances. Surprisingly, Fisher found that some of the children were often able to enjoy the “psychedelic experience” in the same way that “normal adults” did: they took pleasure in sensory stimuli and in music, they became “more alive,” and they seemed to have profound, transcendental experiences. What this case ultimately highlights then is the resilience of these children. In the chaotic environment of a state institution, suffering from difficult mental conditions and subjected to unethical experimentation, these children were able to have positive experiences.  

Speaker Bio:

Andrew is a PhD Candidate in the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto. Before coming to Toronto, he did a BA and an MA in Philosophy and Science and Technology Studies at the University of British Columbia. His dissertation follows the stories of three American mental health experts who in the 1960s used LSD in radically different ways to treat children in state hospitals. His research is funded by a Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship.

Description

This is an-in person event at the Munk School, 1 Devonshire Place, Seminar Room 208, North House, Toronto, Ontario.

There’s something about Paul Beatty’s humour in The White Boy Shuffle (1996) that’s easier to intuit than it is to put into language. It is this characteristic of Shuffle’s comedy that invites readers to question what makes literature “literature.”   With this question in mind, “Meditations on the Self” explores how Beatty guides our reading of Shuffle as a collection of comedic psychological fables. In other words, this presentation reflects on how Beatty uses humour to prompt (or dupe) the reader into acting out the text through the very reading of it. The so-called “reading effect” produced by Beatty’s comedic novel is precisely what opens up a larger conversation about the relationship between “literature” and “psychoanalysis”—as well as the uneasy relationship between psychoanalysis and race. By attempting a close reading of Shuffle’s self-reflexive humour, Jasleen willingly allows herself to fall for Beatty’s running joke on the reader—with the hope of better understanding the significance of The White Boy Shuffle not only as a work of African American literary fiction, but as a work of literary and cultural theory.  

Speaker Bio:

Jasleen Singh (she/her) is a PhD Candidate in English. Jasleen’s dissertation seeks to identify the language and categories that will allow us to more fully understand the way humour functions in African American literature. Her research focuses primarily on the novels of Paul Beatty, which Jasleen reads as ideal instances of Black psychoanalysis. Prior to joining the Department of English, Jasleen graduated with Honours in Journalism and English from Carleton University, and completed an MSc in postcolonial literature at the University of Edinburgh. She has reported on racial and economic inequality for radio and print in Ottawa, and has been stationed in Kigali, Rwanda, where she covered breaking news for the TV10 network. In addition to receiving funding from SSHRC and OGS, Jasleen’s doctoral project is funded by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Top Doctoral Fellowship at the University of Toronto.

Description

This paper explores the intersections between the study of comparative racialization of Asian and Indigenous peoples and the study of comparative empires between Imperial Japan and the US. By reading Leslie Marmon Silko’s 1977 novel, Ceremony, I propose how interracial alliances are imagined and desired in the novel and in its criticism by compounding experiences of imperial violence and misrecognizing racial and familial belonging at the intersection of empires, US’s and Japan’s. The novel’s protagonist, Tayo, a Laguna Pueblo veteran, imagines kinship with Japanese soldiers in the Philippines during WWII, whom he fails to kill because he misrecognizes them for his Laguna family members. I argue that the novel cites the Bering Strait theory—which problematically proposed that Indigenous peoples originally migrated from Japan to the Americas through the Bering Strait—and remembers the atomic bomb as an intersection of imperial violence of resource extraction of Laguna Pueblo land to create the bomb and nuclear destruction of Japan to end the war to make sense of these misrecognitions as imagined solidarities. In these instances of making sense of solidarity, the novel elides Japanese imperial contexts and histories. This specific elision of Japan plays into Orientalist clichés of making the Orient supine in the Western imagination. In the US, this supine portrayal is specifically used for the subordination and liberation of the Orient. In this way, the novel inadvertently asserts US imperial/Orientalist intentions that mirror US-Japan geopolitical relations in the postwar to Cold War period. By building on Jodi Byrd’s “cacophony of colonialism” in its global and inter-imperial contexts, and by engaging with recent Asian-Indigenous scholarship by Iyko Day, Quynh Nhu Le, and Juliana Hu Pegues, this paper explores the following questions: Are interracial/global encounters with Japan often misread or desired as solidarities? And how do we reckon with interracial solidarity through the global framework of comparative empires?   

Speaker Bio:

Lilika Ioki Kukiela is a PhD candidate in the Department of English and the Center for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto. Her dissertation explores the intersections between Japanese and American empires through figurations of Japan in post-1945 ethnic American literary texts that complicate or make sense of one’s relation to empire.

Description

Today, more than ever before, US politics is intertwined with media, from legacy print publications and broadcast networks through social media platforms. This has led to competing, poll-driven narratives–especially at election time. Despite the wealth of data, however, experts consistently get things wrong. The latest example is the 2022 midterm elections when the predicted "red wave" never materialized. The stakes will be even higher in the presidential election of 2024–with Donald Trump as an announced candidate. Why does US politics remain so hard to analyze and interpret–and what can be done to clarify the picture at this critical moment?  

Speaker Bio:

Sam Tanenhaus, visiting professor at St. Michael’s College and the Munk School, is a historian and journalist. The former editor in chief of the New York Times Book Review, he has also been a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, writing feature articles on politics and culture. His books include Whittaker Chambers (winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, shortlisted for both the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize; and a national best seller) and The Death of Conservatism (New York Times Best Seller and one of The New Yorker’s “100 Favorite Books” of 2009). His articles and essays have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, New Yorker, New York Review of Books, Atlantic, Esquire, Time, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and many other publications in the United States and abroad. He has taught at the New School for Social Research and City University of New York and lectured at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and New York University as well as at the White House and at the Clinton, Kennedy, and Johnson Presidential libraries, the Aspen Ideas Festival, and the Sun Valley Writers Conference. He is currently completing a biography of William F. Buckley Jr.

Description

This presentation will discuss how print culture, or “polite propaganda” was utilized to deploy images of supposedly happy American women as feminine wives, mothers and homemakers living under a capitalistic consumer culture.  Through magazines such as the Ladies’ Home Journal and Amerika, the latter distributed in the Soviet Union, the U.S. government hoped to convince American women and Russian “babushkas” of the superiority of the American way of life and in the process, undermine a Soviet regime that promoted “gender equality” in place of the “special status” of American women.  More broadly, it sheds light on the significance of women, gender, and consumption to international politics during the Cold War. Analyzing the Cold War through this unique lens reveals a broader U.S. foreign policy approach which sought to gradually destabilize the Soviet government not just through political and military means, but also through cultural diplomacy.

Diana Cucuz specializes in American, women’s and cultural history and the intersections of foreign and domestic policy, and politics and culture.  Her research focuses on the post-World War II era, and in particular the ways in which the U.S. government and media politicized women, traditional gender roles and consumer culture during the early Cold War. Her first book, Winning Women’s Hearts and Minds (University of Toronto Press), will be released in February 2023.  She is currently working on a second book, on the American National Exhibition which took place in Moscow during the summer of 1959.  Dr. Cucuz holds a PhD from York University and teaches at the University of Toronto and Toronto Metropolitan University.

Sponsored by the Centre for the Study of the United States and co-sponsored by the Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, Munk School.

Description

This lecture will examine the ways that African peoples in North America imagined and pursued self-determination after World War II. It will illuminate how the U.S. and Canadian governments discredited Black people’s justice claims by using counterinsurgency and counter-revolutionary methods to undermine Black communities in North America (including the Caribbean).  

Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey (Nii Laryea Osabu I, Oblantai Mantsè, Atrékor Wé) is William Dawson Chair, assistant professor, and specialist in post-Reconstruction U.S. history and the history of the African Diaspora in North America and the Atlantic World at McGill University. He is the author of Cross-Border Cosmopolitans: The Making of a Pan-African North America (UNC Press). Dr. Adjetey is working on two new book projects. One examines how revolutionary messianism in Black liberation movements in the United States and beyond inspired Western governments to pursue counter-revolutionary, counter-insurgent, and genocidal measures to thwart African-centered self-determination. His other project unearths just war theory, abolitionism, and humanitarianism in the context of nineteenth-century warfare along the Gulf of Guinea Coast.  

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