News and Announcements
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Matt Sandler, Program Director for MA in American Studies, published an essay in The Baffler about the novelist, screenwriter, critic, and folklorist Cecil Brown. “Stand Up and Spout” focuses on his hard-fought and quixotic attempt to revive, using artificial intelligence technology, the enslaved poet George Moses Horton.
Mae Ngai, Professor of History and Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies, has recently been published in the New York Times, “Ron DeSantis ‘Banned China From Buying Land in the State of Florida.’ How Did We Get Here?”
Carlos Alonso Nugent and Emma Shaw Crane were awarded the 2022 Annette Kolodny Prize, given by the Environmental Justice Caucus, and awarded to the best environmentally-themed paper presented at the annual American Studies Association Meeting.
Excerpt from the announcement:
The Annette Kolodny Prize Committee of the ASA Environmental Justice Caucus is proud to announce the winners of the 2022 Kolodny Prize for Best Environmentally-Themed Paper at the Annual ASA Meeting: Emma Crane and Carlos Alonso Nugent. These two winners presented deeply researched and theoretically sensitive papers about places produced by war and colonial border conflict.
Emma Shaw Crane for “Lush Aftermath: Labor, Landscape, and War in the Suburb”
Emma Shaw Crane’s paper situates us in Homestead, Florida, home to a military base, a detention camp for migrant children, and a military Superfund site: a place “produced by war,” as Crane writes. Crane connects these martial sites with their unlikely near neighbors: ornamental plant and palm nurseries staffed largely by Maya migrants from Guatemala. Deploying theories of racism by Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Jodi Melamed, Crane explores the suburb of Homestead, Florida as a constellation of sites that seem separate, but are in fact intimately connected as products of war. Working from extensive ethnographic research, Crane argues that landscapes of war need to be understand as both “ruinous, destructive, and disordered” and also as “ordered, lucrative, and lush.”
Carlos Alonso Nugent for “Mescalero Apache Imagined Environments across the US-Mexico Borderlands”
Carlos Alonso Nugent’s paper excavates the work of the Binational Boundary Commission, created after the U.S.-Mexico War of 1846-1848. This commission of explorers and engineers created a wide array of borderland media: charts, sketches, fieldnotes, maps, formal reports, and—significantly—representations of Mescalero Apache and Chihene Apache art that reveal alternative ways of dwelling in and representing the desert. Nugent reads the work of the Boundary Commission’s as a colonialist “struggle against harsh terrain, but also against imagined environments”: namely the imagined environment of the Apache. The Boundary Commission’s report inadvertently brought to light, preserved, and recirculated Apache epistemologies, acts of resistance, aesthetics, and ecological knowledge. The survival of these ecomedia helps us see, as Nugent demonstrates, how “this Indigenous imagined environment has moved beneath and beyond its settler counterparts.”
PRIZE WINNERS
Academic Excellence
Junet Bedayn, Grace Fox
Best Thesis
Benjamine Mo, Nikita Leus-Oliva
Special Citation: Student Leadership and Service
CSER Student Advisory Board
GRADUATES
MAJORS
Ezequiel Baiza, Junet Bedayn, Zane Braudrick, Rachel Chang, Adelina Correa Loftus, Grace Fox, Sofia Grosso, Benjamine Mo, Deja Operana-Fox, Kianna Pete, Antonio Rodriguez, Karime Sanchez, Samuel Slater, Rae Stokes, Nathalia Tavares
CONCENTRATORS
Lisbel Guzman, Kaya Kim, Euni Lee, Michelle Molina, Pooja Patel
Nominated Work: Seeing Red: Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America
A piercing analysis of exploitative colonial arrangements made by the U.S. in the settling of the Old Northwest, and of Native resistance.
Please join us in congratulating Professor Shana Redmond on her award of a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation.
Professor Mae Ngai delivered the Hatfield Lecture for the Oregon Historical Society at the Schnitzer Concert Hall in Portland on March 27 and the Holden Lecture at the University of New Hampshire on April 4.
The auditorium in Avery was full for a teach-in on Ethnic Studies on March 24, sponsored by the CSER Student Advisory Board and Azine. Speakers included veterans of the 1996 ethnic studies hunger strike, Sung E Bai, Liz Kaufman, and Irene HongPing Shen. Grad student Ethan Chua led an interactive workshop on effective student organizing.
Marie Myung-Ok Lee’s book “The Evening Hero” was highlighted in Columbia’s Article “These 9 Faculty Books Will Make Terrific Holiday Gifts.” It is a novel that follows the life of a Korean immigrant, Dr. Yungman Kwak, by moving back and forth between the past and the present.
Professor Mae Ngai gave a lecture on The Chinese Question at History Books, a program for NYC public school teachers, sponsored by the NYC Dept. of Education Social Studies Dept and its Asian American- Pacific Islander curriculum program, on Dec 12, 2022, at Immigrant Social Services in Chinatown.
An essay with the above-mentioned title was published this month as:
Chapter 13 for the Handbook of Linguistic Human Rights, Robert Phillipson and Tove Skutnabb-Kangas eds,, Wiley-Blackwell Publishers, Hoboken N.J., pp. 195-209, 2023; also available online as of November 2022, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/9781119753926.ch13.
Summary: A human rights approach to language means that we focus on the people, on the language community, and their dignity. Practices of the past, but even of today, make clear that the eradication of Indigenous languages is not a ‘natural phenomenon’, but mostly a result of systemic discrimination. This chapter approaches linguistic human rights from an international law point of view, specifically, two aspects: (a) linguistic human rights as part of the broader category of cultural human rights; and (b) how the lens of time impacts on LHRs and what international law has to say about the issues that arise. The human rights approach and the concept of continuing violations of human rights undergird this essay.
Excerpt from the article:
“Two ‘grand masters’ of Asian American Studies have produced provocative recent books. Mae Ngai’s The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics (W.W. Norton) takes the well-known story of Chinese gold miners in 19th-century California and expands it to incorporate global movements of people and capital from California to Cape Town. Ngai’s inclusion of the voices of Chinese gold miners is groundbreaking.”
Read the full article here.
Catherine Fennell’s current project about public housing in the Midwest has received a faculty grant from the Office of the Provost. Her work examines how the social and material legacies of 20th-century urbanism shape the politics of social difference, collective obligation, and utopian imagination in the contemporary U.S. In this article on Columbia News, Fennell discusses her work along with how she came to be an urban anthropologist, and advice for anyone contemplating the same path.
Professor Mae Ngai is featured in the PBS Series The Bigger Picture (with Vincent Brown) on Alfred Stieglitz’s 1907 photo, “The Steerage.”
Professor Mae Ngai spoke in conversation with poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong at Rutgers-Newark, “Responding to Anti-Asian Hate: Politics, Organizing, and Education” on September 28th, 2022 and delivered the Howard Zinn Memorial Lecture at Boston University on September 29, 2022.
