American Studies

Colloquium Series

All colloquia are free and open to the public.

Fall 2007 Colloquia

American Studies Luncheon Colloquium with
Professor Theo Gonzalves

Thursday, November 15
11:45-1 p.m.
Humanities 401

Theo Gonzalves will give a talk on his latest book, a collection called Stage Presence: Conversations with Filipino American Performing Artists. Professor Gonzalves is a cultural historian and an accomplished jazz composer and keyboardist. He received his Ph.D. in Comparative Cultures from the University of California, Irvine and his B.A. and M.A. degrees in Political Science at Santa Clara University and San Francisco State University. His areas of scholarly interest include Filipino/American cultures, histories and politics; U.S-Philippine relations; ethnic and cultural studies; cultural nationalisms and the performing arts. He is currently an assistant professor and undergraduate chair at the University of Hawaii in Manoa. The University of Hawaii is home to one of the oldest and largest American Studies departments in the United States.

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Past Colloquia

"Decolonizing Health: Native AIDS Organizing and Indigenous Methodologies"
Professor Scott Morgensen
Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Scholars and agencies increasingly agree with a longstanding claim by AIDS activists, that the AIDS pandemic arose and is conditioned by social injustice. In the U.S. and in global alliances, Native AIDS activists specifically name colonization as a core condition of Native people’s experiences of HIV/AIDS. This paper examines how Native AIDS activists have theorized and critiqued a colonial governmentality structuring disease and health. Activists destabilized the ‘power over life’ asserted in colonial medicine and modern sexual science, by pursuing indigenous methodologies of health, gender, and sexuality. Native activists thus met health needs among Native people by questioning the colonial logic of public health in settler states and international agencies, and by asserting decolonial methods of health care and organizing. An ethnographer and historian, Scott Morgensen investigates the racial and national formation of movements for sexual justice and the colonial conditions of modern sexuality. His forthcoming book, Welcome Home: Settler Sexuality and the Politics of Indigeneity traces how settler desires for indigenous roots have informed U.S. sexual minority politics, through critical comparison to the decolonial theories and practices of Native lesbian, gay, two-spirit, and AIDS organizers.

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"Jefferson’s Legacies: Racial Intimacies & American Identity"
Professor Duchess Harris
Department of American Studies

Harris discussed the struggles of the Black descendents of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson for public recognition as Jefferson descendents. She compared this to the contemporary story of Essie Mae Washington-Williams. Essie Mae's father was Strom Thurmond, the famous South Carolina white segregationist politician; her mother was Carrie Butler, the Thurmond family’s 16-year-old Black maid. Late in 2003, Washington-Williams reported that although her mother never said whether her sexual relationship with Thurmond was “consensual,” she herself had a “good relationship” with her father. On December 15, 2003, a lawyer for Strom Thurmond’s family confirmed his paternity of Washington-Williams, a Black woman then 78 years old. Unlike the Jefferson-Hemings children, the Thurmond family had known of Essie Mae’s paternity all along. Harris posed the question, "What does it mean, when Black Americans assert their place in the American national narrative through sexual relationships of white men and Black women that were often coercive?"

Cynthia Wu
Assistant Professor, Agnes Scott College
“Japanese American Identity, Disability, and Citizenship”

Sarita Gregory
CSMP Post Doc, Macalester College
“We are the Youth of Banlieues Bleues: Immigrant Youth, Citizenship, and Re-Contextualizing the Cultural Politics of France”

Kim Park Nelson
Macalester College graduate
Ph.D. Candidate, University of Minnesota
“Cultures of Korean American Adoption: National, Racial and Cultural Crossings”

Adam Waterman
Macalester College graduate
Ph.D., New York University
Visiting Professor, University of Virginia
"This Bone is a Spirit: Black Hawk's Body and the Metaphysics of Value"

Jason Ruiz
Ph.D. Candidate, University of Minnesota
CFD Fellow (Consortium for Faculty Diversity)
"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
Assistant Professor, Grinell College
"El Buchón's Legacy:  Native Leadership in the Creation of Catholic Mission Communities in Eighteenth-Century California"