Events Calendar
“Vietnamese, Cubans, and Mexicans in the South: An Intertwined History” a virtual SouthTalk presented by Perla M. Guerrero
How are the histories of Vietnamese, Cubans, and Mexicans in the South articulated through national policies but defined through regional specificities? Perla M. Guerrero’s talk will focus on the Asian and Latinx communities in Arkansas in the last quarter of the twentieth century to explore placemaking. Guerrero argues that to fully understand the experiences of Asians and Latinxs in the South, we must also understand the history of place-specific ideologies that are at the center of more recent instantiations of racialized relationships.
Guerrero is associate professor of American studies and US Latina/o Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research and teaching interests include relational race and ethnicity with a focus on Latinxs and Asian Americans, space and place, immigration and legality, labor, and US history. She has received multiple awards, including a Ford Postdoctoral Fellowship and two fellowships from the Smithsonian Institution. She is working on her second book about deportation and coerced return to Mexico.
This event is cosponsored by the University of Mississippi Center for the Study of Race and Racism.
SouthTalks is a series of events (including lectures, performances, film screenings, and panel discussions) that explores the interdisciplinary nature of Southern Studies. This series is free and open to the public, and typically takes place in the Tupelo Room of Barnard Observatory unless otherwise noted. There are quite a few interesting virtual offerings this semester. Virtual events allow us to connect to larger audiences unable to attend programming in person and allow speakers to participate in the series no matter their location. Visit the Center’s website for up-to-date-information about all Center events.
Gallery Walk: “Within the Bittersweet” with Allison Grant
Within the Bittersweet is a dark, pastoral narrative about raising children amid concerns about the impacts of climate change and environmental contamination. All the photographs in the exhibition were taken in and around Grant’s home in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where dense vegetation and natural beauty intersect with industrial and fossil-fuel facilities that dot the region. These industries spread noxious particulates and hazardous toxins across the terrain and into the air, water, and our bodies.
In Grant’s artwork, the dark realities of the landscape we live in are interlaced with representations of her deep love for her children and the physical world around them—a living tapestry of incredible complexity that her daughters are just coming to know. The climate crisis will undoubtedly reshape the world they inherit, and through these photographs Grant negotiates the beauty and heartbreak of raising them on a wondrous planet amid such rapid and impactful change.
Allison Grant is an artist, writer, curator, and assistant professor of photography at the University of Alabama. Her artworks have been widely exhibited. She holds an MFA from Columbia College Chicago and BFA from the Columbus College of Art and Design.
An African American Dilemma: A History of School Integration and Civil Rights in the North presented by Zoë Burkholder
Since Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, Americans have viewed school integration as a central tenet of the Black civil rights movement. Yet, school integration was not the only—or even always the dominant—civil rights strategy. At times, African Americans also fought for separate, Black-controlled schools dedicated to racial uplift and community empowerment.
To date, much of what we know about the history of school integration comes from the South. In her book An African American Dilemma: A History of School Integration and Civil Rights in the North, Burkholder offers the first and most comprehensive analysis of the history of Black struggles for educational equality in the North. She argues that since the 1840s, African Americans have employed multiple strategies to fight for equal educational opportunities, including school integration and its opposite—separate, Black-controlled schools. This study considers what is unique about Black struggles for school integration in the North, how these struggles differed from those in the South, and why these regional distinctions matter in shedding light on the complex relationship between school integration and the larger Black freedom struggle.
Zoë Burkholder is an historian of education, professor of educational foundations, and the founding director of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights Education Project at Montclair State University.
This event will also be available for virtual attendance. Register for the webinar here.
SouthTalks is a series of events (including lectures, performances, film screenings, and panel discussions) that explores the interdisciplinary nature of Southern Studies. This series is free and open to the public, and typically takes place in the Tupelo Room of Barnard Observatory unless otherwise noted. There are quite a few interesting virtual offerings this semester. Virtual events allow us to connect to larger audiences unable to attend programming in person and allow speakers to participate in the series no matter their location. Visit the Center’s website for up-to-date-information about all Center events.