Please join CROSSINGS on Tuesday, MARCH 2, during the first event of the semester, featuring research presentations from Prof. BIANET CASTELLANOS and Prof. KALE FAJARDO. This event will take place in Scott Hall Commons 105, 3:30 p.m.-5:00 p.m.
Critical Dialogues: Crossings in American Studies March 2, 2010
Please join "Critical Dialogues: Crossings in American Studies" for our first meeting of the spring semester:
Department Faculty Present Forthcoming Research
Tuesday, March 2
3:30-5:00pm
Scott Hall Commons, Room 105
Refreshments will be provided
Featuring:
Dr. Bianet Castellanos:
"A Return to Servitude: Maya Migration and Tourism in Cancun"
Dr. Kale Fajardo:
"Bayou Meditations: 'Manila-men' Non-Normativities and U.S. American Orientalism at St. Malo, Louisiana"
Sponsored by the Department of American Studies.
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Bianet Castellanos is an anthropologist and a core faculty member in American Studies. Her research interests focus on indigenous communities in the Americas and their relationship to the modern nation-state and global capitalism. Her book, A Return to Servitude: Maya Migration and the Tourist Trade in Canc√∫n (forthcoming with University of Minnesota Press), examines the foundational role indigenous people play in the development of tourism and transnational spaces in modern Mexico. In addition, she is working on a new project that examines indigenous lives across national boundaries, between Mexico's Yucat√°n Peninsula and Los Angeles, California. This project explores the way gender, class, and racial ideologies intersect to shape how "indigeneity" and "community" are imagined within immigrant communities and migration studies. Castellanos teaches courses on politics and popular culture, immigration, global cities, the U.S.-Mexico border, and transnationalism. In her freshman seminar last spring, her class created a wiki page about life on the U.S.-Mexico border.
Kale Bantigue Fajardo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of American Studies and the Asian American Studies Program at UMN, TC.Professor Fajardo is currently wrapping up his first book, Filipino Crosscurrents: Oceanographies of Seafaring, Masculinities, and Globalization, forthcoming from University of Minnesota Press. He's also working on several essays that further engage with his notion of crosscurrents. In these essays-in-progress, Professor Fajardo is doing close readings of Philippine and Filipino/a American literary texts that engage with Filipino/a watery spaces and masculinities, using postcolonial, feminist, queer, Asian American, and Filipino/a American Studies reading strategies. In order to re-read and re-write Filipino/a water locations, histories, and masculinities that are central to the texts he's working with, he's also traveling to actual waters, beaches, lakes, bayous, rivers, and bays, doing mini-fieldwork projects there, to better understand Filipino/a literary imaginaries and histories. The texts he's currently working with include Carlos Cortes's Longitude; Dr. Jose Rizal's Noli Me Tangere; Marina Espina's Filipinos in Louisiana; Lafcadio Hearn's "St. Malo;" Carlos Bulosan's America is in the Heart; and Nice Rodriguez's Throw it to the River.
