Cultural Studies

IAS Thursdays | The Shared Spaces of Yellowface and Blackface

Join Josephine Lee and Sarah Bellamy for a conversation about the intersecting histories and contemporary dynamics of black and Asian representation in American theater. Lee will share current research on how different theatrical forms such as minstrelsy, vaudeville, and musical theater juxtaposed blackface representation and stage orientalism in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Bellamy will comment on how this history has affected theater practice today, and what kinds of change and collaboration we might imagine for the future.

Eduardo Díaz | First Voice Representation in Museum Practice

Latinos shaped this country and its culture even before there was a United States. Historically, however, museums have overlooked the Latino experience despite the fact that Latino history is American history, Latino art is part of the American canon, and Latino research scientists’ contributions are American achievements. What responsibilities do museums have to tell more complete stories? Who should tell them? What changes in institutional culture will ensure programmatic authenticity, accuracy and organizational diversity?

IAS and Northrop | Borderline

In this panel discussion, we'll look at Borderline, a piece by Company Wang Ramirez, in advance of their performance on the Carlson Family Stage on Saturday, March 3. The discussion will include examining the role of dance as a tool to analyze and interpret international relations, issues of immigration and borders, and hip hop, in an international context.

Alison Collis Greene | ‘We Didn’t Know We Was Poor’: Southern Churches, the New Deal, and the Myth of the Redemptive Depression

In the twenty-first century, white southern churches overwhelmingly support Republican efforts to dismantle the welfare state, and religious leaders like Franklin Graham provide the language and rationale for that work. They have not always done so. In the wake of the most devastating economic crisis of the twentieth century, southern churches helped build a New Deal welfare state that in turn reshaped the place of churches in their local communities.

Performing the Archive: At Buffalo

The Institute for Advanced Study is excited to cosponsor this one-of-a-kind event. From the listing:

At the World’s Fair in Buffalo, New York, three exhibits give radically conflicting visions of blackness in America and leave behind a fragmented archive of newspaper articles, photos, and letters.

Scholar-Artist Dr. Amma Y. Ghartey-Tagoe Kootin chronicles how her national team aims to perform this archive virtually verbatim on the theatrical stage through At Buffalo, a new musical in development.

Jodi Byrd | Not Yet: Indigeneity, Antiblackness, and Anticolonial Liberation

In the song “Immigrants (We Get the Job Done)” from Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton Mixtape, the settlement of the Americas is framed through liberal understandings of arrival that transform chattel slavery and forced labor into the exceptional narratives of pulling oneself up from hard labor to freedom. It reflects current political mobilizations against xenophobia and immigration bans that insist that we are all immigrants to the Americas. And it erases completely the ongoing colonization of Indigenous peoples and lands.

Can the Subaltern Genome Code? Envisioning Innovation & Equity in an Era of Personalized Medicine

This talk examines the relationship between scientific innovation and social inequity. Drawing on work that investigates how racial and caste distinctions shape genomic science in Mexico, South Africa, India, and the US, Dr. Benjamin argues that it is the epistemic and normative dexterity of the field — not its strict enforcement of social hierarchy — that makes it powerful, problematic and, for some, profitable. Linking this insight to a range of contemporary issues at the nexus of data and democracy, Dr.