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Film Screening: “My Brilliant Friend”
A tv show inspired by Elena Ferrante’s novels
We will watch the premiere episode–with snacks!
❖ November 18 @ 8:30 PM | Schapiro # 241
Sponsored by Department of Romance Languages
The Feminist Awakening in China
A talk by journalist and scholar Leta Hong Fincher
Leta Hong Fincher is a journalist and scholar who has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, Dissent Magazine, Ms. Magazine, BBC, CNN and others. Her latest book, Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China (Verso) was named one of Vanity Fair’s top eight political books of fall 2018.
❖ November 15, 7:30PM | Griffin 3
Songs from Sardinia
A Documentary Film Screening followed by a concert by Tenores de Aterúe
and Q and A with the singers
Working from a YouTube video, four New England singers reverse-engineer an obscure Sardinian tradition of quartet throat-singing. When a video of their first performance goes viral in Sardinia, they set off on a quest to find the true heart of this deeply intimate, molecule-rearranging music.
❖ November 13, 2018 @ 7PM | Spencer Studio Art Building, room 212
China and the Global Neoliberal Turn: What does Labor have to do with it
This talk will discuss why and how “neo-liberalism” — often understood to be about the retreat of the state from markets and the economic — is a suitable term for China’s 1990s and beyond. It will enter the problem through the issue of labor to argue that it is from the premise of labor control that all neo-liberalisms operate, no matter what their particular cultural or historical manifestations might be. By starting from labor/labor control, we can begin to sketch not only China’s economic formation but the global formation to which it contributes and in which it is embedded.
❖ Monday, October 15th, 2018 @ 4:00 pm – 5:00 pm
❖ Hollander Hall, Room 241
What Are We Thinking? The Challenges and Delights of Arabic Studies Today
Professors Amal Eqeiq, Radwa El Barouni and Brahim El Guabli (Arabic Studies) will reflect on the field of Arabic Studies today and what are some of the challenges and delights of studying the difficult Arabic language. They will describe their research and provide an overview of some of the scholarly trends in Middle Eastern studies. The panel will be moderated by Magnús Bernhardsson (History and Chair of Arabic Studies). Regionally inspired cuisine will be offered.
❖ Wednesday, October 17th @ 7:00 PM – 8:30 PM | Schapiro Hall, 129
The Chinese Exclusion Act: A Documentary Film
The Chinese Exclusion Act explores in riveting detail this little known, yet deeply resonant and revealing episode in American history—one that sheds enormous light on key aspects of the history of American civil liberties, immigration and culture during one of the most formative periods of U.S. history.
Discussion following with Professor Scott Wong and Director Li-Shin Yu
❖ Free
❖ Sunday, October 28th, 2018 @ 8:00 pm – 10:30 pm | Images Cinema
Be Natural: Linguistic Practices of Japanese Transgender Speakers
Hideko Abe, Professor of East Asian Studies at Colby College, is a leading researcher on Japanese lesbian and gay speech. Her research has provided comprehensive characteristics of the linguistic strategies employed by Japanese sexual minorities. She will present her latest research on Japanese transgender speakers. She is author of Queer Japanese: Gender and Sexual Identities through Linguistic Practices and is co-author of forthcoming Learning Japanese through Real Conversation.
❖ Monday, October 22nd, 2018 @ 4:15 pm – 5:15 pm | SCHAPIRO HALL, 129
Gossip and Reputation in Early Medieval China
The Shishuo xinyu, a medieval Chinese collection of anecdotes, seems to consist largely of gossipy accounts and a fascination with reputation. Indeed, the figures who stand at the heart of the collection are referred to (both in the text and in later periods) as mingshi or “gentlemen of reputation.” In this talk, Professor Chen will discuss some recent accounts of gossip as constitutive of society and social networks, and then turn to a reading of a selection of anecdotes that illustrate how gossip is framed and thematized in the collection.
❖ Thursday, October 25th, 2018 @ 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm | Griffin Hall, Room 7
Remembering the Great War
❖ Remembrance and Forgetting: The Great War in France
Susan McCready, University of Southern Alabama
October 10, Griffin 3, 6 PM
❖ German Society and Politics during the First Total War, 1914 – 1918
Raffael Scheck, Colby College
October 23, Griffin 3, 6:30 PM
Flesh, Fur, Forgetting Creaturely Remains in de Bruyckere and Coetzee
The practice of taxidermy traditionally served as a means of remembering. Taxidermied animals were displayed as trophies to memorialize human-animal encounters and, in particular, the successful slaying of the beast. More recently, the art of taxidermy has been used to investigate the matter of memory itself, and the different ways that traumatic wounds are written upon or stored within flesh and fur. This is especially true of the taxidermied horses created by Belgian artist, Berlinde de Bruyckere, and visible in her collaboration with the author, J.M. Coetzee. My talk will focus on their collaboration entitled, “We Are All Flesh,” and the questions they raise about creaturely memory, forgetting and healing, evoked through their evocative interplay of words and skins.
Kari Weil is Professor of Letters at Wesleyan University. She has authored several books and essays on androgyny, literary representations of gender, animal otherness and human-animal relations. Her current book project, Horses and their Humans in Nineteenth-Century France: Mobility, Magnetism, Meat, is forthcoming from the University of Chicago.
❖ Thursday, November 8th, 2018 @ 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm | Schapiro Hall, 141
