2024: Asian Americans in an Anti-Black World

Where do Asian Americans fit into the U.S. racial order? Are they subordinated comparably to Black people or permitted adjacency to whiteness?

In a talk based on her provocative new book, Dr. Kim asks these questions and tells us we must consider both anti-Blackness and white supremacy—and the articulation of the two forces—in order to understand U.S. racial dynamics. The construction of Asian Americans as not-white but above all not-Black has determined their positionality for nearly two centuries. Following rigorous archival and historical research, tracing a genealogy of these positionalities, Dr. Kim insists that how Asian Americans choose to respond to this status will help to define racial politics in the U.S. in the twenty-first century.

Claire Jean Kim is Professor of Political Science and Asian American Studies at University of California, Irvine. She is the author of two award-winning books—Bitter Fruit: The Politics of Black-Korean Conflict in New York City and Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age–and her third book, Asian Americans in an Anti-Black World, was published by Cambridge University Press in September 2023. Dr. Kim has published in popular venues such as The Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The American Scholar, and Ms. Magazine, and she is regularly interviewed by the media on topics related to race, animals, and ecology. She has appeared as a commentator on MSNBC, NPR, and PBS and in numerous podcasts and documentary films. Dr. Kim has provided expert testimony in court cases testing the reach of the California Racial Justice Act of 2020, a statute seeking to combat racial discrimination in policing and the prison system. She has been the recipient of a grant from the University of California Center for New Racial Studies, and she has been a fellow at the University of California Humanities Research Institute and a visiting fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

Watch the lecture here.

2022: Feminist and African: Women’s Resistance to Gendered Pacification

What are the possibilities for transnational
feminist solidarity, in the context of the
deepening North-South inequalities
exposed by the global climate crisis, border
controls, and responses to the COVID-19
pandemic? Dr. Mama discussed how Africa’s postcolonial states continue to exhibit profound contradictions in the arena of gender politics. While women’s movements have successfully pursued a great many legal and policy reforms, the implementation of new laws and policies remains very challenging, as state structures often lack the will and the capacity, or worse, work to appropriate and subvert real change. Yet feminism continues to spread on the continent, constituting an intellectual and political force for freedom that challenges the ongoing exploitation and oppression of women on a variety of fronts. In previous work, Dr. Mama addressed the contribution of feminist women to the theory and practice of women’s movements. In this lecture, she presented some examples of bridging strategies that seek to push the frontier of change through new activist research collaborations. Today’s academic publishing reiterates Western hegemony in feminist knowledge production, even in the field of African studies.

Dr. Amina Mama is a widely published and traveled Nigerian/British feminist activist, researcher, and scholar, as our keynote speaker. She holds a Doctor of Philosophy in Occupational & Applied Psychology from Birkbeck, College, University of London, a Master of Science in Social Psychology, London School of Economics and Political Science, University of London, and a Bachelor of Science (with Honours) in Psychology from University of St. Andrews, Scotland. She spent 10 years (1999-2009) leading the establishment of the University of Cape Town’s African Gender Institute as a continental resource dedicated to developing transformative scholarship and bringing feminist theory and activism together.

Watch the lecture here.

2019: Slaying the Gerrymander: Inside the battle to take back democracy

Thursday, April 4, 2019

Speaker David Daley discussed how Republicans reinvented and weaponized the gerrymander during the 2010 election, then took advantage of big data and sophisticated mapping technology to draw themselves nearly unbeatable district lines for congress and state legislatures nationwide. Using state by state examples, including North Carolina, Michigan, Wisconsin and Florida Daley demonstrated how they pulled this off, how Democrats fell asleep, and what the consequences have been for public policy and political polarization during this era. He also pivoted to the response to this rigging of our elections: A citizen movement centered around fair maps and voting rights that scored historic victories during the 2018 election, including in red states like Utah, Missouri and Ohio. On the verge of the 2020 election and the next decade of redistricting, with gerrymandering back at the Supreme Court — including one case from North Carolina — where does the fight for fair maps stand?

David Daley is the author of the national best-seller “Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count” and the forthcoming “Unrigged: How Americans Fought Back, Slayed The Gerrymander, and Reinvented Democracy” (both W.W. Norton). His journalism on democracy and voting rights has appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Slate, the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and many other leading publications. He is a senior fellow at FairVote, an Institute for the Liberal Arts fellow at Boston College, and the former editor in chief of Salon. He earned his B.A. in political science at Boston College and his M.A. in journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Co-sponsored by:
English and Comparative Literature
Institute for the Arts & Humanities
Public Policy
School of Media and Journalism
Sociology

Legislative Districts in North Carolina: A Conversation
with David Daley, Pricey Harrison, and David Lewis

*VIDEO* On April 3rd, Carolina Seminars-Douglass Hunt Lecture and the UNC School of Media and Journalism hosted a related panel discussion with David Daley and NC General Assembly Representatives Pricey Harrison (District 57) and David Lewis (District 53). The topic of this panel discussion centered gerrymandering and its affects on North Carolina legislative districts.

Past Lecturers

2018: Clifford Johnson – professor of physics & astronomy at the University of Southern California. Talk: Black Holes, Space, and Time
Co-sponsors: COSMS Institute, Morehead Planetarium & Science Center

2016: Danielle Allen – Professor; ethicist; political theorist; Harvard; Director, Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics Talk: Difference without Domination – Reconciling Free Speech and Social Equality on College Campuses
co-sponsors: Department of African, African American, and Diaspora Studies; Department of Political Science; Department of Sociology; Institute for the Arts and Humanities; The Institute of African American Research (IAAR); Parr Center For Ethics

2015 April: Panel – Namibian Democracy: 25 Years After Independence –
Moderator: Dr. Andrew Perrin, Director of Carolina Seminars
Gwen Lister, Founding Editor, The Namibian; Chair-Person of the Namibia Media Trust
Cassandra Butts, UNC ’87; Senior Advisor, Millenium Challenge Corporation; US Ambassador-Designate to the Bahamas
Helena Gray, Political Counsellor for the Republic of Namibia Embassy1995: Thomas Wolfe – author and social commentator

2010 February-May: ICE Counterpoint: Encounters in Antarctica and the Artic – music performance and art exhibit, Photography: Brooks de Wetter-Smith; Paintings: Nerys Levy; Polar Exploration: Captivating Tales of Polar Explorers – family oriented music performance and photography

2010 October: Elie Wiesel “Against Indifference” – Nobel Laureate, Boston University

2009: Greg Mortenson – author and philanthropist (in collaboration with the Student Government Distinguished Speaker Series and the Global Education Distinguished Speaker Series)

2005: Stephen Murray – Professor of Art and Archaeology at Columbia University

2000: Russian classical pianists (in collaboration with the Music Department and Newman Series)

2000: Thomas Berry – geologian and author