Colloquium Series

Previous Colloquia

  • Rosa Clemente, Jacqueline Lazu, and Denise Oliver Velez – “From the Young Lords to Black Lives Matter: Afro-Latinx Identity and Consciousness”
  • Professor Natanya Duncan, Historian of the African Diaspora, Lehigh University – “How Movements Move: The Lessons and Legacy of Marcus Garvey to Malcolm X”
  • Professor Eden Torres, Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Chicano and Latino Studies, University of Minnesota – “Chicana Without Apology”
  • Professor Nathan Titman – “Conjuring Queer Histories: The Troubling Gender Performances of Bill Tilden”
  • Christopher Michael Elias, ABD in the American Civilization Program at Brown University – “Angry White Men: Masculinist Populism from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump”
  • Julietta Hua, Assistant Professor of Women and Gender Studies, San Francisco State University – “The Visual Economies of Sex Trafficking: Public Images and National Identity”
  • Kelly Lytle Hernandez, Associate Professor of History, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) – “Hobos in Heaven: Tramps, Chain Gangs, and the Rise of Mass Incarceration in the American West”
  • Emilye Crosby, Professor of History, SUNY Geneseo – “Anything I Was Big Enough to Do: Women in the Civil Rights Movement “
  • Jasmine Kar Tang, PhD candidate in American Studies, University of Minnesota – “The Management of Racial Difference in the Writing Center”
  • Professor Tlahtoki Xochimeh, Ph.D., L.Ac.University of Minnesota – “Hybridity, Healing, and following your Heart”
  • Genevieve Yue, CFD Postdoctoral Fellow in Media and Cultural Studies Dept., Macalester – “Color Imbalance: Film, Race, and the China Girl”
  • 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”

fall 2013 colloquium schedule

“The Mixed-Blood Moment: Race, Land, and Federal Law Among Two Dakota Mixed-Blood Families on the Ninteenth-Century Eastern Great Plains”

Presented by Jameson Sweet; Professor and Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at the University of Minnesota

Thurs., October 31 from 11:45-1 p.m. in Humanities 401

In treaties between the U.S. government and Indian tribes, from 1805 to the 1860s, the federal government maintained a distinct “mixed-blood” policy, within federal Indian policy, that involved the inclusion of stipulations for mixed-bloods, meaning people of mixed Indian and non-Indian ancestry. Approximately seventy treaties between the U.S. and Indian tribes included such provisions, creating mixed-blood as a legal racial category under U.S. law, a class of people entitled to land. Through these provisions, mixedbloods acquired as much as one million acres of land, most notably two reservations, comprising over 500,000 acres, created in 1830 in Minnesota and Nebraska exclusively for the use of Dakota mixed-bloods. The many decades of litigation regarding mixed-blood landownership, debates over mixed-blood citizenship and legal rights, treaty negotiations, and legislative acts were formative to federal Indian policy of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Drawing on the experiences of my mixed-blood Dakota ancestors, this paper examines the ways that this mixed-blood policy led to a “mixed-blood moment” in American history, when mixed-blood Indians held a unique racial and legal status in the United States.

“Economies of Race and the 19th Century Foundations of U.S. Transracial Adoption”

 Presented by Kelly Condit-Shrestha; Professor and Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at the University of Minnesota

Thurs., November 14 from 11:45-1 in Humanities 401

The emergence of U.S. transracial adoption is often historicized as a mid-to-late 20th century
phenomenon, oftentimes within a “domestic” black/white/Indian paradigm or transnational Asian
adoption framework. This talk shifts our attention to the 19th and early 20th centuries, a time when
the United States had not yet begun experimenting in overseas adoption, but was still undergoing an
unprecedented increase in mobility and transracial child placement practices. I will specifically look
at the early movements of child placement via the orphan trains, Black Codes, and American Indian
boarding schools. This talk will contextualize these practices of sometimes adoption, sometimes foster care, and sometimes indentured servitude within the larger theoretical frameworks of U.S. nation-building, labor, race-making, and kinship to tease out these complicated roots of American adoption.

Fall 2013 Talks

“Indochinese Refugees and the Politics of Compassion, 1975-1981”

Presented by Sam Vong, Bruce Gray Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor in History at Gustavus Adolphus College

Wed., Nov. 13 from 11:45-1 p.m. in Davis Court, Markim Hall

The talk will examine the relationships amongst humanitarian, colonial, and affective politics in the local and international efforts to resettle refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos after the Vietnam War.