With India being drawn into global marketplace as the high-tech solution center for business problems and operations, new types of labor demands and work environments  have surfaced. The growing influence of new media technologies and mediated workplaces have created conditions of labor for women that entangle the categories of the national and transnational, private and public. Through a close...

R. L’Heureux Lewis is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Black Studies at The City College of New York. Prof. Lewis is concerned with a the issues facing African-Americans and the African Diaspora. With specializations in race and ethnic relations, he concentrates his research and activism in areas such as education, youth culture, public policy, and mental health.

Robert J.C. Young is Julius Silver Professor of English and Comparative Literature at New York University. He was formerly Professor of English and Critical Theory at Oxford University. His books include White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (Routledge, 1990, new edition 2004), Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Culture, Theory and Race (Routledge, 1995), Postcolonialism: An...

Professor Michael Ralph's presentation centers on the unemployed young men in Senegal who make tea to "kill time" in a context of chronic joblessness. Meanwhile, this demographic is depicted as "lazy," treated as the source of economic stagnation instead of as its high-profile victims. This attitude elides a long history of youth protest...

In 1815, at the Kandyan Convention by which Lanka came under full colonial rule, the British agreed to the following clause; “the religion of Boodhoo professed by the chiefs and inhabitants of these provinces is declared inviolable and its rights, ministers and places of worship are to be maintained and protected.” Throughout the 19th century Buddhist street pageants (peraheras) were...

This presentation explores the contemporary cultural politics of globalization in India, drawing on ethnographic research on youth culture and politics in the south Indian state of Kerala. Situating the state/region at the intersection of its global reputation as a "model" of state-centered development and its re-making through extensive migration of Keralites to the Persian Gulf and elsewhere,...

Rafael Sánchez’s presentation takes as its point of departure Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez’s public decision, taken over a year ago, to create a Presidential commission charged with opening the sarcophagus of the nation’s founding father in order to investigate the “true causes” of Simon Bolívar’s death in neighboring Colombia, almost two centuries ago.

It is true that nothing much has...

This discussion examines how caregivers and patients in Botswana's oncology ward negotiate grounds of treatment, palliation, and hope so as to bring about certain kinds of dying. It explores the implications of a cancer epidemic, now emerging in Botswana, and across southern and east Africa, in part as grim by-product of the life-sustaining power of antiretroviral therapies. This is a setting...

If before 1994, access to housing, jobs, and other benefits of a “free” society were denied Blacks en masse, at least rhetorically, one could point the finger at the apartheid regime’s policies of racial exclusion arguing these were culprits of widespread poverty, particularly amongst the Black majority. But with the expansion of the Black middle class, beginning in the mid 1980s and...

In this talk, Prof. Coleman presents a cultural history and political analysis of one of the oldest Internet wars, often referred to as "Internet vs Scientology," which in recent times has witnessed a different incarnation in the form of "Project Chanology," which is orchestrated by a group called Anonymous who has led a series of online attacks and real world protests against Scientology. I...

How do literary movements emerge? Early post-independence Hindi fiction was marked by an important, often forgotten literary movement, aanchalik sahitya, ‘regional literature’, that helped to cement the village as a literary object in the popular imagination. Marked by the incorporation of local culture, rural life and vernacular dialect, regional literature expanded the definition of...

American taste-makers have framed their appropriation of culinary cultures in two divergent ways: first, as high-status foreign foods, initially limited to Continental and French cuisines, eventually consecrating Italian and Japanese cookery; second, as the product of the labor of the immigrant poor classified as ethnic fare. The appropriation of the first sort is understood primarily in...

Alfonso Gonzales is Assistant Professor and Faculty Fellow of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU. Prof. Gonzales holds a B.A in Political Science and Latin American Studies from UCLA (2001), an M.A in Latin American Studies from Stanford University (2002), and a Ph.D. from the Department of Political Science at the University of California–Los Angeles (2008). He comes to NYU from the...

Ashley Dawson is Associate Professor of English at the City University of New York's Graduate Center and the College of Staten Island. He is author of Mongrel Nation: Diasporic Culture and the Making of Postcolonial Britain and coeditor of Exceptional State: Contemporary U.S. Culture and the New Imperialism.

The topic of Professor Bennett's presentation is African Kingship and New World Slavery: Genealogies of Political Modernity.

Herman L. Bennett has served as Associate Professor of History at Rutgers, and he is joining the CUNY Graduate Center this fall. Professor Bennett received his doctorate from Duke University, and his research interests include Colonial Latin America, early modern...

Professor Beebe teaches Trademark, Copyright, and Advanced Trademark at NYU. He was a senior editor of The Yale Law Journal and an articles editor of Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities, and a Whiting Fellow in the Humanities in the English Department of Princeton University. He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa. In 2002 he clerked for Judge Denise Cote, US District Court for the...

This session will feature a conversation between Emily Martin and Khary Jones, as well as a screening of the short film, HUG, an Official Selection at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival.

Khary Jones was born and raised in Camden, New Jersey. He is currently completing his MFA in film directing at Columbia University. He earned a BA in English from Morehouse College and an MA, also in...