Spring 2012

Thursday, March 8
Genevieve Yue, Media & Cultural Studies
11:45-1:00 p.m. in Humanities 401

"Color Imbalance: Film, Race, and the China Girl"

The "China girl has appeared in more films than any actress, but she is almost never seen, save for the fleeting glimpses an audience might catch at the end of a film reel. Since the late 1920s films have been spliced with a China girl, an image of a woman positioned next to color swatches and patches of white, gray, and black. Her image is instrumental in determining the desired exposure and color balance of film reels, and to create a uniform color temperature, tonal range, and shading to standardize an ideal representation of the human body. What implications and ideological assumptions does the China girl's ubiquitous visual presence have for film, media and feminist theory, discourses of beauty, science, and race?

Past Colloquia

• Photographer Wing Young Huie - "Identity and the American Landscape"
• Daniel Gilbert, Visiting Assistant Professor - "Seattle’s Global Mariners: Baseball’s Politics of Location, 1970 – 2001"
• Terry Janis, Indian Land Tenure Foundation, Macalester Alumnus & Visiting Instructor - "American Indian Homelands-the Indian Land Tenure Foundation"
• Beth Cleary, Associate Professor of Theater and Dance, and Peter Rachleff, Professor of History, Macalester College - "Refiguring and Representing Race: The Jubilee Singers of the Buffalo Historical Marionettes and the Federal Theatre Project."
• Theo Gonzalves, Associate Professor at UH Manoa - "Stage Presence-Conversations with Filipino American Performing Artists"
• Leola Johnson, Associate Professor at Macalester - "Barack the Magic Negro: A Discussion of Race and Politics in the Age of You Tube"
• Ralina L. Joseph, Assistant Professor at the University of Washington - "Post-racial, Mixed-Race Obama: Reading Racial Flexibility in Obama Imagery"
• Waziyatawin, Indigenous Peoples Research Chair, Associate Professor, University of Victoria in British Columbia - "Maka Cokaya Kin (The Center of the Earth): From the Clay We Rise"
• David Serlin, Associate Professor at UC San Diego - "Performing Disabled Masculinities from World War Two to the War in Iraq"
• Scott Shoemaker, CSMP Fellow and Visiting Instructor at Macalester - "kiilaahkwaliaminciki They Speak to Us: ReclaimingMiami Cultural Sovereignty of Museum Collections"
• Scott Morgensen, Assistant Professor Queen's University - "Decolonizing Health: Native AIDS Organizing and Indigenous Methodologies"
• Duchess Harris, Associate Professor Department of American Studies, Macalester - "Jefferson’s Legacies: Racial Intimacies & American Identity"
• Cynthia Wu, Assistant Professor University at Buffalo - "Japanese American Identity, Disability, and Citizenship"
• Sarita Gregory, Assistant Professor Vassar College - "We are the Youth of Banlieues Bleues: Immigrant Youth, Citizenship, and Re-Contextualizing the Cultural Politics of France"
• Kim Park Nelson, Macalester College alumnus, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Minnesota - "Cultures of Korean American Adoption: National, Racial and Cultural Crossings"
• Adam Waterman, Macalester College alumnus and Visiting Assistant Professor - "Black Hawk's Body and the Metaphysics of Value"
• Jason Ruiz, Assistant Professor at Notre Dame - "Landscapes of Difference: U.S. Travel to Veracruz & Narratives of Mexican (Anti)Modernity, 1910-1920"
• Christopher Scott, Assistant Professor Asian Languages and Cultures, Macalester College - "A Dark, Distorting Mirror: Blackness in Le Kenzabur's "Shiiku."
• Nalo Jackson, Ph.D., University of Minnesota - "The History of the Legal Rights Center: A Study in Coalition Building between the Black and the American Indian Communitiesof Minneapolis"
• Ebony Adams, Visiting Professor, Macalester College - "Pumping Iron: American Body Culture and the Logics of Hypermasculine Display"
• P. Albert Lacson, Professor Grinell College - "El Buchón's Legacy: Native Leadership in the Creation of Catholic Mission Communities in Eighteenth-Century California"