Please join Crossings for their final event of the semester, Cartographies of Power, on Tuesday, May 4, 2010 featuring American Studies graduate students Susie Hatmaker and Waleed Mahdi. This event will take place from 3:30-5:00 p.m. in 105 Scott Hall.
Final Critical Dialogues: May 4, 2010 - Susie Hatmaker & Waleed Mahdi
Critical Dialogues: Crossings in American Studies
Cartographies of Power
Tuesday, May 4th 3:30-5:00 pm
105 Scott Hall
Exchange and Forgetting in Appalachia:
A Meditation on Circulation, Power, and Value
Susie Hatmaker
Varied considerations of the abstract realm that produces value, both commodity and social, lies at the heart of much critical social theory. As discussions of power and its effects raise new questions about the role of modern and post-modern subject positions in the ongoing spread of social injustice, I will revive metaphysical thinking to strip from the individual some of the overdetermined power granted by scientific empiricism, from which the disciplinary divisions of the 20th century emerged. By viewing Appalachia as a terrain of power, exchange and value creation, I hope to invite an open discussion of the creation of progressive temporality, values, and the conditions of contemporary injustices.
"Why They Hate Us?"
Unpacking U.S.-Arab/Muslim Post-9/11 Responses
Waleed Mahdi
Ever since the tragic attacks of September 11, 2001, many Americans have wondered, "why they hate us?" The immediate and dominant response has been a polarizing contention that locates the terrorists' cultural and religious identity as the driving force for their extreme acts of violence. This theoretical beginning, I argue, does not offer an encompassing account of the complexity surrounding the tension that exists between the United States and the Arab and Muslim worlds. Hence, this paper seeks to present a more elaborate and contextualized reading of the interplay of many American, Arabic, and Islamic discursive formations; a reading that neither brands 9/11 as 'the' turning point in the history of the U.S. encounters with Arabs and Muslims, nor de-emphasizes the relevance of the event to U.S. policy-making and its impact on the lives of millions of Arabs and Muslims, including their diasporas in the United States.
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Sponsored by the Department of American Studies
Susie Hatmaker is a second year doctoral student in the department of American studies, and is also completing a minor in cultural anthropology. Her work studies ecologies of connection in Appalachia through theories of exchange, and this is her first public intellectual performance related to her dissertation project.
Waleed Mahdi is a PhD student in American Studies. He received his Master's Degree in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies from the University of New Mexico. His research interests include Middle East studies, Arab American Studies, race and ethnicity, and pop culture.
