The Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race (CSER) presents:

Theorizing Liberation: Third Worldism and the Legacy of Gary Okihiro at CSER

A conversation with Moon-Ho Jung (University of Washington, History), Susie J. Pak (St. John’s University, History), Vivek Bald (MIT, Comparative Media Studies), and Elda Tsou (St. John’s University, English); moderated by Manu Karuka (Barnard, American Studies)

Monday, March 24, 2025, 5:30-7PM

The Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine
1047 Amsterdam Avenue
New York, NY 10025

Light refreshments provided

RSVP HERE

Description:

The Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race (CSER) invites you to “Theorizing Liberation: Third Worldism and the Legacy of Gary Okihiro at CSER,” a gathering in honor of the legacy of CSER’s founding director, Gary Okihiro (1945-2024), who passed away in May of last year.

Gary served as CSER’s director from the Center’s formation in 1999 until 2007. He laid the groundwork for CSER to become Columbia’s only hub for comparative and interdisciplinary analysis of ethnicity, race, and Indigeneity, nationally recognized for its academic initiatives and transformative scholarship. CSER now serves over 100 undergraduate majors, minors, and M.A. students a year.

Gary’s 2016 book, Third World Studies: Theorizing Liberation (Duke University Press), contends that contemporary Ethnic Studies has fallen short of its original mandate, which emphasized the interconnectedness of the struggles of all Third World peoples. This event brings together five of Gary’s former students, several of whom studied with him during his years at CSER, and went on to become accomplished scholars in the field.

Our panelists will reflect on the histories of CSER and the field of Ethnic Studies more broadly, Gary’s scholarly contributions, and the prospect of Third World studies. In doing so, they will be engaging in “a work of imagination,” envisioning possible futures for Ethnic Studies at Columbia and beyond.  

Panelists: 

Moon-Ho Jung is a Professor of History and the Harry Bridges Endowed Chair in Labor Studies at the University of Washington. He is the author of Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation (Hopkins Press, 2006), winner of the OAH Merle Curti Award, and the editor of The Rising Tide of Color: Race, State Violence, and Radical Movements across the Pacific (University of Washington Press, 2014). Most recently, he published Menace to Empire: Anticolonial Solidarities and the Transpacific Origins of the US Security State (University of California Press, 2022), which seeks to reconsider Asians within the American nation-state.

Susie J. Pak is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at St. John’s University where she teaches U.S. American history (late-19th and 20th centuries). She specializes in the study of American business networks, and her research bridges the divide between social and economic history through the innovative use of quantitative and qualitative methods. Her book, Gentlemen Bankers: The World of J.P. Morgan, was published by Harvard University Press in 2013. 

Vivek Bald is a scholar, writer, and documentary filmmaker whose work focuses on histories of migration and diaspora, particularly from the South Asian subcontinent. He is the author of Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America (Harvard University Press, 2013) and co-editor of The Sun Never Sets: South Asian Migrants in an Age of U.S. Power (NYU Press, 2013). His films include “Taxi-vala/Auto-biography” (1994) and “Mutiny: Asians Storm British Music” (2003).

Elda Tsou (GSAS ‘08) is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at St. John’s University. She offers undergraduate and graduate courses on Asian American literature, American ethnic literature, and literary theory. Broadly, her research explores the formal relationship between literature and society, particularly in the context of ethnic literature. She has published work on how the social formation is supplemented by literary interventions. Currently, she is completing a manuscript on Asian American critical reading practices.

Manu Karuka is an Associate Professor of American Studies at Barnard College, where he has taught since 2014. He studies imperialism and anti-imperialism, and he teaches courses on imperialism, Indigenous critiques of political economy, cultural studies, and liberation. He is the author of Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad (University of California Press, 2019). He co-edited a special issue of Theory & Event, “On Colonial Unknowing,” (Vol. 19, No. 4, 2016), as well as The Sun Never Sets: South Asian Migrants in an Age of U.S. Power (NYU Press, 2013). 

Please note: due to campus access restrictions, non-CU/BC affiliates will be required to RSVP at least 48 hours in advance in order to receive a QR code to their emails which is required for access. 

This event is made possible with the generous support of Barnard American Studies, Columbia Department of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia Department of History, Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, and Barnard Asian Diasporic and Asian American Studies. 

Join us on March 7th! The Center for Institutional and Social Change is hosting an event at Columbia Law School to celebrate the launch of Professor Susan Sturm’s new book, What Might Be: Confronting Racism to Transform Our Institutions. Especially amidst troubling times, “What Might Be” is a call to action for those who care deeply about racial justice, offering pathways to make positive change.

This event is not just about the book—it’s about coming together to explore how we can navigate the paradoxes of change work and reimagine what is possible. More than just a book launch, this gathering is an opportunity to connect with the inspirational community that has shaped Professor Sturm’s work.

For event details and to RSVP: https://forms.gle/28isXTKzJvZ94SD17

The Greater Caribbean Program presents: Climate Change & the Caribbean, the first of four roundtables in a series highlighting Columbia and Barnard faculty work on Greater Caribbean Studies.

Join CSER students and faculty to learn more about the Ethnicity and Race Studies major and concentration and become involved with programming and the CSER community! Dinner will be served.

A native from South Africa, Jordache A. Ellapen is an anti-disciplinary Black studies scholar with expertise in the visual and performing arts cultures of Africa and the African Diaspora. He is the recipient of numerous awards including the Feminist Studies Claire G. Moses award for Most Theoretically Innovative article published in 2021 for “SiyakakaFeminism: African Anality and the Politics of Deviance in FAKA’s Art Praxis.” He is the author of Indenture Aesthetics: Afro-Indian Femininities and the Queer Limits of South African Blackness (Duke University Press, 2025). Ellapen is Associate Professor of Black Studies and Associate Chair of the Frederick Douglass Institute and Department of Black Studies at the University of Rochester.

This talk, titled Indenture Aesthetics: Family photo-archives and South African Blackness, examines the photographic practices of two South African artists, Lebohang Kganye and Ellapen’s own creative work, which are influenced by family photoarchives. The talk delves into the dynamics of the black and Afro-Indian home-space in the afterlife of colonial-indenture-apartheid. Both artists draw on their mother’s photoarchives playing with gender and sexuality as critical aesthetic commentaries on the making of memory, and its relationship to race, history, migration, diaspora, and space, in post-apartheid South Africa. This talk reads Ellapen’s curatorial and creative work—Queering the Archive: Brown Bodies in Ecstasy and The Brown Photo Album: An Archive of Feminist Futurity—in relation to Kganye’s projects Ke Lefa Laka: Her-Story and Ke Lefa Laka: Heir-Story. By juxtaposing the aesthetic practices of an Afro-Indian artist with a black African artist, the talk gestures towards the emergence of an Afro-Indian aesthetic informed by the maternal feminine. This talk situates maternal photoarchives as sites of queer and feminist worldmaking that trouble the very parameters of South African blackness.

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Join the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race (CSER) on Thursday, February 27th at 5:30PM in 420 Hamilton for a listening session with Dr. Shana Redmond, Professor of English and Comparative Literature and CSER.

A writer and interdisciplinary scholar of race, culture, and power, Dr. Redmond is the author of Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora (NYU Press, 2014) and Everything Man: The Form and Function of Paul Robeson (Duke University Press, 2020).

Join Professor Omar Valerio-Jiménez (History, University of Texas at San Antonio) for a presentation on his publication Remembering Conquest: Mexican Americans, Memory and Citizenship (2024), featuring comments from Professor Karl Jacoby. In this text, Omar Valerio-Jiménez addresses the politics of memory by exploring how succeeding generations reinforced or modified earlier memories of conquest according to their contemporary social and political contexts. The book also examines collective memories in the US and Mexico to illustrate transnational influences on Mexican Americans and to demonstrate how community and national memories can be used strategically to advance political agendas.

The Columbia University Seminar in American Studies presents: Not Only Carpenters, but Architects: Design Pedagogy and Racial Capitalism on the Industrial Campus With Dr. Maura Luckling

This talk will engage histories of design pedagogy and the representation of student labor on campus construction within industrial schools in the wake of the U.S. Civil War. It asks how race, labor, and the material politics of Reconstruction shaped education in architecture and the building trades relative to racialized hierarchies of labor and illuminates the changing ways that students and instructors at schools in the Hampton-Tuskegee model negotiated and transformed these pedagogies through the production and circulation of their design drawings for a global audience.

Maura Lucking is a historian of architectural modernism, building labor, and American empire. Her in-progress book, Building the Settler Campus, is an architectural history of the nineteenth century public college movement that examines land use, campus planning, and design pedagogy across three rarely integrated sites: land grant colleges, industrial institutes for the formerly enslaved, and Indian boarding schools. New research considers the entanglement of state and philanthropic homebuilding projects in nineteenth century Indian country. She holds a Ph.D. from UCLA and is a current fellow of the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for American Architecture and Society of Fellows/Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University and assistant professor of architectural history at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

RSVP AND CAMPUS ACCESS:

RSVP to Miriam Vonnahme at mgv2123@columbia.edu no later than Monday, Feb 24th if you do not have a Columbia University ID card. Due to current campus restrictions, attendees without a Columbia ID will need to register for the event 48 hours prior to the seminar to obtain a guest pass. Guest Passes are QR codes that registered attendees will receive via email from caladminnoreply@columbia.edu ahead of the seminar. It is advised for guests to enter campus from Wien Gate at 411 W 116th Street (between Amsterdam Ave. and Morningside Drive

Edwidge Danticat is the Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Professor of the Humanities in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University. She received her B.A. in French Literature from Barnard College and her Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Brown University. She is the author of eighteen books, including, most recently, the essay collection We’re Alone.  She is a 2009 MacArthur Fellow, a 2018 Ford Foundation Art of Change Fellow, and a two-time National Book Critics Circle Prize winner. Her next book, Watch Out For Falling Iguanas, is forthcoming from Akashic Books in the summer of 2025.

Register here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScmq6XMwXfR-rE7MDyYSraFpb5DCp7rL4TwIME4MJBIHGoeDQ/viewform?vc=0&c=0&w=1&flr=0