Marginalized Belonging: Asian American and Latinx Professionals Navigate the Black/White Binary
Monday, Jan. 12, 3:30 – 5 p.m. | Crosland G120, Wilby Classroom
Yung-Yi Diana Pan is the director of the American Studies Program and an associate professor of Sociology at City University of New York, Brooklyn College. Her research interests intersect race/ethnicity, immigrant adaptation, culture, and professions.
"White adjacent" nonwhite professionals are presumed to face fewer barriers as they ascend the socioeconomic ladder. Yet, Asian American and Latinx attorneys, physicians, and professors contend with marginalization, explicit microaggressions, and implicit biases within their respective professions. Subtle and not-so-subtle remarks and patterns of exclusion further heighten their invisibility in these spaces. As a result, Asian American and Latinx elite professionals find varying ways to cope and navigate their work life – between the Black/White binary -- through panethnic empowerment and pan-minority solidarity.
A Marshall Plan for India?: The History and the Present of the Green Revolution
Monday, Feb. 9, 3:30 – 5 p.m. | Crosland G120, Wilby Classroom
Prakash Kumar is an associate professor of history and Asian studies at Pennsylvania State University. His scholarship interrogates the nature of development and modernization in agricultural and rural societies on the one hand and in domains of diseases on the other hand. He examines these themes in the colonial and post-colonial history of India and in the dynamics of a US-dominated global order in the twentieth century.
India embraced the key technology of high-yielding variety seeds (or HYVs) of wheat and paddy in the 1960s to tide over food scarcity and yet ambivalences towards such agrarian transitions to productivity have remained. Deviating from the historiography that praises the HYV expansion in terms of a diplomatic Marshall Plan or a technological magic bullet, my talk beckons attention to the history of past efforts at raising agrarian productivity that paved the path to the green revolution and was folded into its history and its present. As the green revolution carved its place in technocratic celebrations of pulling India out of food scarcity, the prior history of efforts to improve yield, the alternate beliefs in reforms and community participation, and of colonial era developments were forgotten. I argue that colonial legacies and a twentieth century history of post-independence reconstruction were rolled in to this momentous agrarian transformation. This contingent history of India’s HYV agriculture is often hidden by a dominant technocratic perspective that speaks of moments, magical silver bullets, and the wondrous efficacy of steps taken by a postcolonial bureaucracy.
Vine City as the World Trade Center: Structural Violence in Atlanta and the Crisis of the Black Worker Today
Monday, March 9, 3:30 – 5 p.m. | Crosland G120, Wilby Classroom
Augustus Wood is an assistant Professor in the School of Labor and Employment Relations at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He is a scholar of African American history of the urban south with an interdisciplinary focus on political economy, intra-racial class struggle, working class social movements, and gentrification in modern urban regions.
The social construction of Atlanta is a structurally violent process where a pro-growth movement — led by the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce and executed by the majority-Black junior partners of capital — restructured the political economy into a neoliberal pillaging of Black working class bodies, labor, and land. Through the lens of the Black working class and their neighborhood social movement capacity, we can fully interpret the complex social relations of the class warfare responsible for Atlanta’s transformation into the central hub of global capital accumulation and circulation in the U.S. South.
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