CSREA's Spring New Book Talks Celebrate Recent Publications on Race and Ethnicity

 

CSREA's New Book Talks series highlights new and notable work in the study of race, ethnicity, and indigeneity from scholars both internal and external to Brown. The aim is to facilitate thought-provoking and critical engagement with emerging scholarship that helps the campus community understand how we study, research, and engage with these central topics. In addition, these events provide important spaces for students, faculty, and fellows to familiarize themselves with new literature and ask detailed questions of writers in a constructive environment. During the Spring semester, the Center will invite four authors representing a wide spread of focus areas and disciplinary lenses for virtual discussions.

 

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 17, 2022  |  4-5:30PM

The first installment brings Yelena Bailey, author of How the Streets Were Made. The book discusses the creation of “the streets” not just as a physical, racialized space produced by segregationist policies but also as a sociocultural entity that has influenced our understanding of blackness in America for decades. Drawing from fields such as media studies, literary studies, history, sociology, film studies, and music studies, this book engages in an interdisciplinary analysis of how the streets have shaped contemporary perceptions of black identity, community, violence, spending habits, and belonging.

This event is moderated by Robert Self, Mary Ann Lippitt Professor of American History at Brown.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Yelena Bailey is a writer and researcher whose work focuses on the intersections of race, policy, and popular culture. She received her doctorate from the University of California, San Diego and worked as a professor of English and Cultural Studies in Seattle before transitioning to public policy. She is currently the Director of Education Policy at the State of Minnesota's Professional Educator Licensing and Standards Board.

      

 

THURSDAY, march 10, 2022  |  4-5:30PM

The next event features Lindsey Stewart, author of The Politics of Black Joy. During the antebellum period, slave owners weaponized southern Black joy to argue for enslavement, propagating images of “happy darkies.” In contrast, abolitionists wielded sorrow by emphasizing racial oppression. Both arguments were so effective that a political uneasiness on the subject still lingers. In this text, Stewart wades into these uncomfortable waters by analyzing Zora Neale Hurston’s uses of the concept of Black southern joy, drawing upon Zora Neale Hurston’s essays, Beyoncé’s Lemonade, and figures across several disciplines including Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Toni Morrison, Angela Davis, Saidiya Hartman, Imani Perry, Eddie Glaude, and Audra Simpson. 

This event is moderated by Melvin Rogers, Associate Professor of Political Science at Brown.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lindsey Stewart is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis. Her research focuses on developing black feminist conceptions of political agency, with special attention to the intersection of sexuality, region, religion, and class. Much of her research has done this by philosophically developing the social and political insights that Zora Neale Hurston’s nonfiction corpus presents. Her manuscript, The Politics of Black Joy: Zora Neale Hurston and Neo-Abolitionism, was recently published by Northwestern University Press.

      

 

THURSDAY, APRIL 7, 2022  |  4-5:30PM

The next New Book Talk invites Mary Beltrán, author of Latino TV: A History. The text asks: whose stories are told on television? Who are the heroes and heroines, held up as intriguing, lovable, and compelling? Which characters are fully realized, rather than being cardboard villains and sidekicks? And who are our storytellers? In this first-ever account of Latino/a participation and representation in US English-language television, Beltrán offers a sweeping study of key moments of Chicano/a and Latino/a representation and authorship since the 1950s. Drawing on archival research, interviews with dozens of media professionals who worked on or performed in these series, textual analysis of episodes and promotional materials, and analysis of news media coverage, Beltrán explores the histories of Latina/o television narratives and the authors of those narratives, shedding important light on how Latina/os have been included―and, more often, not―in the television industry and in the stories of the country writ large.

This event is moderated by Paula M. L. Moya, Director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and Professor of English at Stanford University.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mary Beltrán is an Associate Professor of Radio-Television-Film and a Faculty Affiliate of Mexican American & Latina/o Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She specializes in critical studies-driven scholarship at the intersections of film and television studies, Latina/Latino and ethnic studies, and gender studies. Informed by her prior careers as a journalist and social worker, Dr. Beltrán writes and teaches on race, class and gender and the U.S. media industries and U.S. television and film history, with emphasis on U.S. Latina and Latino representation and authorship. Sheis the author of Latina/o Stars in U.S. Eyes: The Making and Meanings of Film and TV Stardom, co-editor of Mixed Race Hollywood, and author of the newly released Latino TV: A History. Dr. Beltrán is the Associate Director of the Latino Media Arts & Studies Program in UT-Austin’s Moody College of Communication.

ABOUT THE MODERATOR

Paula Moya is the author of The Social Imperative: Race, Close Reading, and Contemporary Literary Criticism (Stanford UP 2016) and Learning from Experience: Minority Identities, Multicultural Struggles (UC Press 2002). She has also co-edited three collections of original essays: Doing Race:21 Essays for the 21st Century (W.W. Norton, Inc. 2010), Identity Politics Reconsidered (Palgrave 2006), and Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism (UC Press 2000). Her teaching and research focus on twentieth-century and early twenty-first century literary studies, feminist theory, critical theory, narrative theory, interdisciplinary approaches to race and ethnicity, and Chicanx and Latinx studies. She loves her family and is proud to be from New Mexico.

      

 

THURSDAY, APRIL 21, 2022  |  4-5:30PM

The final New Book Talk spotlights Anne Gray Fischer, author of The Streets Belong to Us. Men, especially Black men, often stand in as the ultimate symbol of the mass incarceration crisis in the United States. Women are treated as marginal, if not overlooked altogether, in histories of the criminal legal system. In The Streets Belong to Us—a searing history of women and police in the modern United States—Anne Gray Fischer narrates how sexual policing fueled a dramatic expansion of police power. The enormous discretionary power that police officers wield to surveil, target, and arrest anyone they deem suspicious was tested, legitimized, and legalized through the policing of women's sexuality and their right to move freely through city streets. By illuminating both the racial dimension of sexual liberalism and the gender dimension of policing in Black neighborhoods, The Streets Belong to Us illustrates the decisive role that race, gender, and sexuality played in the construction of urban police regimes.

This event is moderated by Tricia Rose, Director of CSREA; Chancellor's Professor of Africana Studies, and Associate Dean of the Faculty for Special Initiatives at Brown University.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Anne Gray Fischer is Assistant Professor of Gender History at the University of Texas at Dallas. Her first book, The Streets Belong to Us: Sex, Race, and Police Power from Segregation to Gentrification, was published in the Justice, Power, and Politics series by the University of North Carolina Press in 2022. Her research on gender, race, and law enforcement has been published in the Journal of American History and the Journal of Social History, as well as popular outlets including the Washington Post and the Boston Review.