2009-10 Events

With Elise Proulx, CDL Publishing Group, University of California

Introduction by Kathryn Dolan, ACGC Fall RA

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Film Screening
Frozen River (2008)
Monday, October 26, 2009 6:00 p.m. South Hall 2635

Part of the ACGCC “Hemispheric American Studies” Film Series

Stephanie LeMenager will introduce Frozen River. It is the story of Ray Eddy, an upstate New York trailer mom who is lured into the world of illegal immigrant smuggling when she meets a Mohawk girl who lives on a reservation that straddles the US-Canadian border. Broke after her husband takes off with the down payment for their new doublewide, Ray reluctantly teams up with Lila, a smuggler, and the two begin making runs across the frozen St. Lawrence River carrying illegal Chinese and Pakistani immigrants in the trunk of Ray’s Dodge Spirit. – Frozen River Presskit

REMINDER

Save the Date: JTAS/ACGC Reception at ASA (11/7; 7:45PM)

Dear friends:
You are cordially invited to the Journal of Transnational American Studies/ American Cultures and Global Contexts reception at the
upcoming ASA Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C.

Date: Saturday, November 7th
Time: 7:45 p.m  (after the John Hope Franklin event).
Place: The Courtyard by Marriott Washington Convention Center at
900 F Street NW, Washington, DC 20004
(ask for  Shelley Fisher Fishkin/Shirley Geok-lin Lim/Nina Morgan suite).

The Courtyard is a few blocks from the Marriott Renaissance (the convention hotel). Go South on 9th St. NW toward I St. NW (EYE St. NW).  The hotel is on your right at the corner of 9th St. and F St., just after you pass the National Museum of American Art.

Food and drink will be provided, and editors, contributors, and friends of JTAS/ACGC will be present. Please RSVP to slim@english.ucsb.edu

American Studies Association, Washington, D.C.
Thursday, November 5, 2-3:45 p.m.
The Renaissance Hotel/Auditorium

CCS LIT SYMPOSSIUM Presents Poet, Mitsuye Yamada

Join us in welcoming Mitsuye Yamada as she reads from her poetry and prose and shares her early experience of internment during World War II and her life- long contributions to education, the defense of human rights, and the cultivation of the arts.

MITSUYE YAMADA’s writings focus on her Japanese American heritage, women’s and human rights issues. She is the author ofCAMP NOTES AND OTHER WRITINGS published by Rutgers University Press. She is now retired from UC Irvine where she was Adjunct Associate Professor in Asian American Studies, and was a former member of the Board of Directors of Amnesty International USA. She is a member of Interfaith Prisoners of Conscience (IPOC) and founder and director of Multicultural Women Writers.  She recently initiated a Peace and Justice Ministry at St. Andrews Episcopal Church in Irvine. She is presently writing a biography of her father, one of the early Japanese pioneers in the U.S.

For more information contact Professor Ann Plane at plane@history.ucsb.edu

Film Screening
The Birth of a Nation
Monday, April 13, 2009 6:00 p.m. South Hall 2635

Professor Stephanie Batiste will introduce this classic, yet controversial film by D.W. Griffith. Adapted from Thomas Dixon’s novel “The Clansman,” director D.W. Griffith’s historical saga recounts the genesis of the U.S. Civil War, the destruction it wrought upon the populace, and the social ills spawned by Reconstruction, including the ascent of the Ku Klux Klan. The story plays out in the intertwining fates of two fictional families — the Northern Stonemans and the Southern Camerons. Though the film’s legacy is stained by its racist content, it remains a landmark in filmmaking technique (Netflix.com).

The Working Papers Series (WPS) offers graduate students the opportunity to workshop their papers in a supportive environment; we have two official commentators on each paper, one faculty member and one graduate student–and, of course, all who attend the meeting are invited to respond. You needn’t be directly affiliated with the ACGCC to join us. The WPS grew out of the need voiced by graduate students for concrete and helpful feedback from presentations. Thus, the work being reviewed is available in hard copy in the ACGC Center, and the graduate student does not read it at the WPS event. The idea is that the time should be spent discussing the work and responding to it. Therefore, both the faculty and graduate student respondents offer written and verbal responses (the written should be no more than a page), with suggestions and critiques. The meeting will be held in South Hall 2714 and hard copies of the papers will be available in the ACGCC Tuesday April 14. If you want more information or have questions come by the ACGCC or contact Yanoula Athanassakis: at yanoula@umail.ucsb.edu

Global Ecologies Colloquium Film Screening
Mondovino
Regretfully Cancelled

Kathy Richman, Professor of French and Wine Connoisseur introduces Jonathan Nossiter’s documentary that caused a buzz among French movie circles and French wine circles. Set in seven countries across three continents, Mondovino weaves together the family succession saga of napa Valley power brokers with the bitter rivalry of two aristocratic Florentine dynasties, and the intergenerational struglle of a Burgundarian family trying to preserve its few acres of vineyard. It also connects these stories–and several others–to the exploits of a gleeful “flying winemaker” from Bordeaux who preaches the gospel of modernity and globalization from the hills of Tuscany to the pampas of Argentina (mondovinofilm.com). This even it co-sponsored by Arnhold Postdoctoral Fellow Allison Carruth and Professor Stephanie LeMenager.

CONFERENCE: “Beyond Environmentalism: Culture, Justice and Global
Ecologies” Featuring Ursula Heise and Elaine Scarry
Friday May 22 – Saturday May 23, 2009 UCSB IHC, McCune Conference Room HSSB

In the global context, right action on the part of humans toward each other and the biotic community, what Aldo Leopold called the land ethic, is difficult to represent in political speech, in policy, and even in the imaginative realm of the arts. Like the troubled concept of the global, the concept of justice, as Elaine Scarry has argued, founders in the problem of imagining other people, distant people, strangers. As our species faces anthropogenic climate change, world water shortages and world famine, the twin projects of giving expression to a truly global ecology and to global environmental justice have never been more urgent. This conference aims to bring together individuals whose life’s work has been the study or practice of writing—literary historians and theorists, journalists and cultural critics, social scientists and environmental policy makers who have made the written word central to their understanding of how social changes are achieved. All will be asked to pursue a knotty question: are we up to the task of writing a global environment, a global sensorium that impinges upon us so intimately that we are forced to recognize its crises as our own? Can the culture of letters bring the biosphere into our embodied sense of the everyday? What we are interested in is the task of creating a social aesthetic, if we use the term in Ramon Saldívar’s sense to mean “those complex emotions, reflections, and sensations which give rise to a peculiarly poetic organization, responsive to the demands of history.” See the Conference Web Site.

Global Ecologies Colloquium Film Series
Up the Yangtze
Friday, January 16, 2009, 6-8:00 p.m. American Cultures and Global Contexts Center

Professor Teresa Shewry will introduce this award winning documentary. A luxury cruise boat motors up the Yangtze – navigating the mythic waterway known in China simply as “The River.” The Yangtze is about to be transformed by the biggest hydroelectric dam in history. At the river’s edge – a young woman says goodbye to her family as the floodwaters rise towards their small homestead. The Three Gorges Dam – contested symbol of the Chinese economic miracle – provides the epic backdrop for Up the Yangtze, a dramatic feature documentary on life inside modern China. Chinese-Canadian filmmaker Yung Chang’s beautifully photographed documentary of China’s peasant life and cultural upheaval had its U.S. premiere at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival.

The Working Papers Series (WPS) offers graduate students the opportunity to workshop their papers in a supportive environment; we have two official commentators on each paper, one faculty member and one graduate student–and, of course, all who attend the meeting are invited to respond. You needn’t be directly affiliated with the ACGCC to join us. The WPS grew out of the need voiced by graduate students for concrete and helpful feedback from presentations. Thus, the work being reviewed is available in hard copy in the ACGC Center, and the graduate student does not read it at the WPS event. The idea is that the time should be spent discussing the work and responding to it. Therefore, both the faculty and graduate student respondents offer written and verbal responses (the written should be no more than a page), with suggestions and critiques. The meeting will be held at a home in Isla Vista and hard copies of the papers will be available in the ACGCC Wednesday February 11. If you want more information or have questions come by the ACGCC or contact Yanoula Athanassakis: atyanoula@umail.ucsb.edu.

Global Ecologies Colloquium Panel Discussion
“The Psychological Dimensions of Climate Change”
Friday, March 13, 2009, 10-11:30 a.m. South Hall 2635

Professors Catherine Gautier and Dan Montello from the Department of Geography at UCSB will lead the panel discussion. Professor Gautier is the former Director and Principal Investigator at the Institute for Computational Earth Systems Science and head of the Earth Space Research Group. Professor Montello’s research interests include: spatial, environmental and geographic perception, cognition, affect and behavior; behavioral and cognitive geography; environmental psychology and cognitive cartography.