2023-24 Events – American Cultures and Global Contexts Center

_{Art: Enrique Chagoya, Shark’s Ink, Illegal Alien’s Guide to the Concept of Relative Surplus Value, 2009, color lithograph on Amate paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment, 2010.26, © 2009, Shark’s Ink}

Continuing our focus on Living Theory, we are inviting speakers who put their theoretical and conceptual work into practice, offering new ways of being in and working beyond the academy—whether crafting a poetics of aliveness; bridging written and spoken word and song; writing through lived and habitual experience; or translating care into pedagogy. Please join us for a series of workshops on writing, creativity, and teaching as we enliven our practice of work in crisis and in community.

Spring 2024

Flyer for a Talk-Story event with Maxine Hong Kingston on April 20th at 4PM. Kingston is pictured, smiling and looking to camera.

Winter 2024

Flyer for a book talk on Feb. 28, 2024 with Timothy K. August's book The Refugee Aesthetic. The caption text notes that this book "looks at Southeast Asian American refugee authors and argues for a new conceptualization of critical refugee studies that attends to aesthetics at its core."

Flyer for Julian Talamantez Brolaski's lecture, "Rhyme and Lies in Medieval Poetry," presented by ACGCC on Feb. 7, 2024. Brolanski is pictured, standing on a staircase in front of a window and looking at camera; there is also a caption: ""Rhymes and Lies in Medieval Poetry" explores the role of rhyme in the verse narratives, or "romances," of the early fourteenth century. These anonymous texts are characterized by their use of repeated formulae at the end of the line, so-called "stock phrases" or rhyming tags like "I swear," or "without lying." The rhyme tags are metatextual, in that they refer to the text itself: they tend to occur at sexually scandalous, gruesome, or hyperbolic moments, and assert the presence of a speaker who may or may not be telling the truth, but who draws attention to the question of authorial veracity. Brolaski suggests that the rhyme tags are conscious artistic devices, spoken in the voice of the poet themself, a narrator who is not part of the plot but who comments on it. They constitute an authorial signature in much the same way as a graffiti "tag," and they are a means by which we may measure an emergent self-conscious sense of authorship in medieval England."