3/8/2012

Laura Fugikawa public lecture: 'What Falls Outside: Narratives of Resettlement'

12:00 pm - 1:00 pm, Asian American Cultural Center lounge

“What Falls Outside: Narratives of Resettlement” examines 21^st century texts that imagine or recall the Japanese American experience of resettlement during and after WWII:  Julie Otsuka’s novel When The Emperor was Divine (2003), Philip Kan Gotanda’s play Sisters Matsumoto (2005) and Making Home From War: Stories of Japanese American Exile and Resettlement (2011), a collection of memoirs edited by Brian Komei Dempster. I discuss how the seemingly ordinary spaces of neighborhoods, workplaces, schools and home function as what Xiaojing Zhou calls “apparatuses of power,” or spaces through which unknown threats loom large over Japanese Americans, especially during the early resettlement period.^[1]. Throughout all three examples, the affects of dispossession and displacement are depicted through the construction of the domestic sphere and struggles over property ownership. These texts demonstrate the limits of the agencies promises of “a new life” through relocation and the psychic impact of agencies’ “citizen-making.” One can also garner from the narratives relocatees’ different strategies for survival used to combat feelings of fear and alienation.

3/9/2012 - 3/10/2012

American University Meets the Pacific Century Conference

Many American universities, like top-tier universities throughout the world, are increasingly becoming global institutions, no longer held exclusively to national interests. What is the impact of the escalating numbers of international undergraduates and how are they transforming the American university? These questions will be examined on March 9-10, 2012 at the American University Meets the Pacific Century Conference at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This conference will feature research from scholars in the United States, Great Britain, and South Korea.

The conference is hosted in association with the American University Meets the Pacific Century Project (AUPC, 2010-), an interdisciplinary team of social scientist faculty and students who are currently researching the internationalization of the undergraduate student body at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The project is principally interested in the American university as a contact zone in which record levels of international undergraduates, largely from Asia, meet American students whose futures are increasingly impacted by global transformations, the economic and scientific rise of Asia among them.

Please check http://aupc.weebly.com/aupc-conference-2012.html for more information and to register for the conference. It is free and open to the public. Please pre-register by March 1, 2012.

Accommodations are available at I-hotel (http://stayatthei.com/). A limited number of rooms have been blocked for the conference. Please mention American University Meets the Pacific Century Conference.

3/13/2012

Asian American Studies Minors Open House

5:00 pm - 6:30 pm, 1210 W. Nevada, Urbana, IL

Open to anyone interested in learning more about the Asian American Studies Minor.  Participants will have the opportunity to talk with some AAS minors as well as AAS program affiliates.