What I Am Thinking About Now
A core component of CSREA's mission is supporting faculty and advanced students in the development of cutting-edge, collaborative intellectual work. The “What I Am Thinking About Now” series provides a collegial, productive workshop space for faculty and graduate students to present and discuss recently published work and work in progress. Scholars test ideas and receive feedback from a diverse and supportive group of scholars on Mondays throughout the semester. View and register for events in the Spring lineup below.
MONDAY, march 14, 2022 | 12PM - 1PM
Adrián E. Hernández Acosta, Postdoctoral Research Associate in International Humanities, Hispanic Studies and Cogut Institute
Notes on Metamorphosis in the Mortuary Poetics of Caribbean Literature
This talk presents a cross-section of my current book project, which proposes “mortuary poetics” as a framework for exploring how Caribbean literature cares for the dead and how religious practices in the region form an integral part of its literary care. With examples from Haitian, Dominican, Cuban, and Puerto Rican artistic catalogues, this talk highlights both the possibilities and limits of metamorphosis as a key tension in how Caribbean literature draws from religious practice to care for the dead.
ABOUT THE PRESENTER
Adrián is an interdisciplinary humanities scholar whose research and teaching explore formations of race, gender, and sexuality through readings of African diaspora religions—broadly understood—in Hispanophone Caribbean literature and culture. Adrián’s current project provides a critical inventory of the ways in which African diaspora religions are portrayed in scenes of death and mourning within Dominican, Puerto Rican, and Cuban literature, film, and visual art. Analyzing this critical inventory leads him to propose a “mortuary poetics” as a fruitful framework for thinking about mourning, literature, and religion in a Caribbean context. This semester, Adrián is teaching a Spanish-language course on mourning and experimental form in 20th and 21st century Hispanophone Caribbean literature.
MONDAY, march 21, 2022 | 12PM - 1PM
Marcelo Ferraro, Postdoctoral Research Associate in Historical Injustice and Democracy, CSSJ and Watson Institute
Slavery, Citizenship, and the Politics of Racial Violence in the Americas
This project analyzes the intersection between slavery, race, and citizenship in the making of regimes of racial violence in the nineteenth-century Atlantic World. It demonstrates how the Age of Revolution inaugurated a wave of emancipations in the Americas and, at the same time, a second age for bondage in the United States, Cuba, and Brazil. People of African descent resisted captivity, disenfranchisement, and state repression throughout the hemisphere. Yet slavery and racialized citizenship prevailed in these three societies. The emergence of new slaveholding classes influenced the making of constitutions and criminal law in Spain/Cuba, Brazil, and the United States. Despite the specificities of each political and racial regime, they shared one common experience. Statesmen from these nations resolved the contradictions between constitutional principles and the material reality of slavery by establishing racialized regimes of exception under the rule of law. For the people of African descent who suffered under these regimes, the exception was the norm.
about the presenter
Marcelo Ferraro is a jointly appointed postdoctoral fellow with the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice (CSSJ) and the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University. Ferraro completed his PhD at the University of São Paulo, Brazil in 2021, having previously received his master’s degree in Social History and his B.A. in History, Law, and Social Sciences at the same institution. His dissertation developed a comparative study on the intersections between slavery and criminal justice in Brazil and the southern United States. He is currently working on his first book on slavery and racial violence in the Americas in the long nineteenth century.
MONDAY, april 4, 2022 | 12PM - 1PM
Erica Kanesaka, Shauna M. Stark '76, P'10 Postdoctoral Fellow, Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women
Before Hello Kitty: Asian Cuteness in the American Imagination
In this talk, Dr. Kanesaka will position the contemporary fetishization of Japanese kawaii (cute) culture in longer histories of American racism and the alignment of Asian bodies with cute objects. Drawing on archival research in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century children’s material culture, she will illustrate how seemingly innocent objects such as teddy bears have underpinned notions of Asian cuteness, associating Asian people with toys, animals, and children in ways that have disguised racial, sexual, and imperial violence as forms of love, protection, and care. With a focus on the forgotten Orientalist backstory of a teddy-bear-like toy called the Billiken doll, Dr. Kanesaka’s talk will discuss the importance of childhood’s lost objects—items that were quite literally “loved to pieces” before being discarded—for how we think about Japanophilia and Asian American sexual politics today.
about the presenter
Erica Kanesaka is the Shauna M. Stark '76, P'10 Postdoctoral Fellow in Gender Studies at the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women at Brown University. Next year, she will be starting as an Assistant Professor of English at Emory University. Her work has received awards from national scholarly organizations, including the Association for Asian American Studies, and can be found in the Journal of Asian American Studies, positions: asia critique, Victorian Studies, and other academic and public forums.
MONDAY, april 11, 2022 | 12PM - 1PM
Kera Street, Presidential Diversity Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Religious Studies
Pure Pursuits: Black Women’s Lived Religion in a Digital Age
For decades, evangelical Christians have given theological and cultural primacy to notions of purity, often pointing to the pure Christian subject as the answer to larger issues in the religious, social, and political world. But given the ways evangelicalism and its pure Christian subject are always imagined as white, what does it look like when black Christian women pursue purity as a spiritual aim? Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork with an evangelical women’s group called Pinky Promise, Dr. Street’s talk examines how evangelical concerns for purity continue to surface in the contemporary moment—one marked increasingly by new media and digital technologies, and inherently organized by racial and gendered logics. With a focus on the faith practices of women in the Boston-area chapter of Pinky Promise, Dr. Street’s talk explores how black women strive to live good Christian lives in a digital age.
about the presenter
Kera Street is a Presidential Diversity Postdoctoral Fellow in Religious Studies at Brown University. She studies the religious ambitions of black Christian women and the ways they live, imagine, and practice their faith in a digital age. Her current project looks at a contemporary evangelical women's movement called Pinky Promise to interrogate how members’ pious efforts are informed by racial, gendered, and class-based logics that conflate purity with whiteness. She has a BA in Religious Studies from Spelman College and a PhD in the Study of Religion from Harvard University. Her work has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the Louisville Institute, the Forum for Theological Exploration, and others.
MONDAY, april 25, 2022 | 12PM - 1PM
Emily Lim Rogers, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Disability Studies in the Department of American Studies, the Program in Science, Technology, and Society, and the Cogut Institute
Whose Fatigue Matters? Long COVID and Longer Histories of Racialized Illness
Sudden interest in post-viral illness during the COVID-19 pandemic has obscured longer histories of chronic illness, including decades of disinterest in chronic fatigue syndrome, also known as myalgic encephalomyelitis or ME/CFS. This exploratory talk presents a longer history of the radicalization of fatigue to discuss the ambivalences that have emerged in this new “wave of disability.”
about the presenter
Emily Lim Rogers teaches and conducts research at the intersection of disability studies; science, technology, and society; the medical humanities; gender/sexuality studies; and the history of capitalism. Her current research project centers on myalgic encephalomyelitis, also known as chronic fatigue syndrome or ME/CFS, probing what scientific uncertainty about the illness reveals about the fraught gendered and racialized dynamics that determine who is considered ill and examining the uneven uptake of debility in the sociocultural context of the United States.