Dehumanizing descriptions of Asian people have saturated the U.S. cultural imagination, and encouraged a long history of anti-Asian violence. In particular, Asian women and femmes have been objectified in popular culture in ways that have marked their racial difference and femininity as licentious, morally corrupt, and threatening. Because of this perceived threat, portrayals of Asiatic femininity as complex and multitudinous are often arrested through representations of disfigurement, mutilation or harm.

Rejecting these representations as foregone conclusions, Asian American diasporic, and cultural producers are re-appropriating the aesthetics of disfigurement. This talk explores the relational and feminist possibilities that emerge when disfigurement is not merely a reflection of racial and gender-based violence, but a mode of engagement that explores differentiated histories of imperialism, lived and embodied experiences, and human and non-human intimacies. By paying attention to the ways bodies, flesh, and in/animacies are rendered in their works, this talk offers a critical reading practice of disfigurement through Asian American feminist frameworks.

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While contributing to the founding of American psychology and philosophy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, William James (1842-1910) applied his insights to controversial public issues. Using lectures, essays, and letters to the editor, he was a social influencer of his day. He spoke out about the unfair treatment of alternative healthcare providers, the “lynching epidemic” oppressing African Americans, and the cruelties of American expansion. Dr. Paul Croce will be discussing how James’s achievements and his challenges present lessons for steering through the fraught differences of our own time.

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From the late 17th century to the abolition of the slave trade in the Atlantic, Almost Dead (University of Georgia Press, 2022) is an account of the lives, sufferings, and resistances of thousands of enslaved people in the Black urban Atlantic, and how the survival of those captives led to the formation of unique and dynamic communities. Dr. Michael L. Dickinson explores a network of commercially linked cities to reveal commonalities, differences, and connections between urban communities of enslaved Black people across the Atlantic: both in the mainland United States and the Caribbean. As Dr. Dickinson reveals through the adoption of the perspectives of the enslaved, the similarities far outweighed the difference, and cities continued to be key sites for both Black subjugation and resilience. These similarities root themselves in the all-too-similar environments of oppression and a shared transnational need of enslaved Black people to resist social death and maintain their humanity.

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While the American Revolution is the agreed-upon beginning of our nation’s origins, the meaning of that revolution has never achieved anywhere near the same degree of consensus. For almost as long as the United States has existed, a wide range of political and social actors have narrativized and reimagined the Revolution to match their current climates and personal agendas. Through revealing the Revolution’s singular presence as an American national myth, Dr. Hattem reveals the ever-changing nature of the Revolution’s meaning, how the nation’s founding is used far more often as a divisive tool than a unifying one, and how reinventing the past is a central and long-lived American sociopolitical pastime.

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In the first twenty-five years after its founding, the United States experienced an extreme wave of land speculation, so intense that people referred to it as a “mania” both then and now. Dr. Michael A. Blaakman’s Speculation Nation (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023) traces the revolutionary origins of this real-estate fanaticism in a catalogue of ambition, corruption, capitalism, and politics that spanned millions of acres and was intrinsically tied to Native American land dispossession. Dr. Blaakman follows the schemes of these speculators from boom to bust, and in doing so creates a picture of the economic realities that underpinned (and underpin) U.S. settler colonialism: a frontier defined by profit first, and land second, where the conventions of the era firmly rooted land theft as an axiom of the American republic and made speculative capitalism intrinsic to the land of the free.

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