Events

Drawn from her forthcoming book Worlding Latin Asian: Cultural Intimacies in Food, Art, and Politics, this chapter examines the Getty-sponsored 2017 Chinese Caribbean Art Exhibition that was jointly organized by the Chinese American Museum and the African American Museum. The exhibition offered the rare opportunity to showcase internationally acclaimed artists like Wifredo Lam, Albert Chong, and Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, as well as other notable artists of Chinese Caribbean descent, and to explore the different facets of their cultural heritage, the complicated histories of mixing and migration, and the diverse cultural sources that inform their work. As a form of public culture, the exhibition facilitated encounters among vastly different social groups and created possibilities for engagement and mutual recognition. Yet this exhibition strived to do more. To give rise to an intimate public, she suggests that one must engage as an active spectator in the different registers of self-reflection, of meaning-making through one’s interactions with the artworks and with the narrative of the exhibition, and of communing together in a suspended space of memory, imagination, and affect.

Dr. Lok Siu is Professor of Ethnic Studies and Associate Vice Chancellor for Research at UC Berkeley. She is an award-winning author and cultural anthropologist working in the areas of Chinese diaspora, Asian diasporas in the Americas, transnational migration, non/belonging and cultural citizenship, food, and ethnography. Her books include Memories of a Future Home: Diasporic Citizenship of Chinese in Panama (2005),Asian Diasporas: New Formations, New Conceptions (2007) co-edited with Rhacel Parreñas, Gendered Citizenships: Transnational Perspectives on knowledge Production, Political Activism, and Culture (2009) co-edited with Caldwell et. al.; Chinese Diaspora: Its Development in Global Perspective (2021) co-edited with Khachig Tölölyan, and Worlding Latin Asian: Cultural Intimacies in Food, Art, and Politics (forthcoming with Duke U. Press). She recently guest edited the special issue on “Diasporic Futures: Sinophobia, US-China Relations, and the Fate of Chinese Overseas” for the Journal of Chinese Overseas (2024). As a regular public speaker, she contributes and appears in various national and international media, including CNN, NYT, WSJ, Bloomberg, CBS, VOX.com, and Le Temps.

Remixing Wong Kar-wai: Music, Bricolage, and the Aesthetics of Oblivion

Thursday, February 27, 2025 | 5 pm CST

Franke Institute for the Humanities, 1100 East 57th Street Chicago, IL 60637

BOOK GIVEAWAY!

Score a FREE copy of Giorgio Biancorosso’s book!

The first (5) University of Chicago students (currently enrolled) who register to attend the event will receive their very own copy, compliments of the Center for East Asian Studies! Please click HERE to register and for more information!

This event is presented in partnership with the Seminary Co-op Bookstores and sponsored by the University of Chicago Center for East Asian Studies.

March 3, 2025 3:00 PM 315 Haskell Hall Afro-Brazilian Archaeology at the Margins Dr. Anna T. Browne Ribeiro University of Louisville

ABSTRACT: Common images of Afro-Brazilians at home and abroad place them and their cultural heritage in urban centers in the Brazilian Southeast, like Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, and in the Northeast, in Salvador, Bahia, and the greater historical cacao plantation region. This, in spite of the deep roots of Afro-Brazilian archaeology in the rural Southeast of Brazil. I examine this conflict between expectation and evidence in light of emerging archaeological, archival, and oral-historic data from the North of Brazil, in Amazonia, and the Brazilian deep south. Our emerging understanding of the expanded geographical presence of Africans and Afrodescendant peoples in historic Brazil reveals their material impact on cultural, social, and economic systems, which reverberated throughout the Atlantic world. The enduring marks of these histories generate a productive tension: even as these racial legacies configure contemporary Afrodescendant lives and national social, economic, and political realities, their material realities offer opportunities for intervention and revindication.

Anna T. Browne Ribeiro: I am an anthropological archaeologist interested in historical and contemporary representations of peoples and places. I practice an engaged, socially informed anthropology. I have focused my field-intensive research in primarily in Amazonia, bringing a broader perspective on the tropics (and the idea of the Tropics) to bear on Latin American contexts.

Please join us for a reception on Haskell’s mezzanine immediately following Dr. Browne Ribeiro’s talk.

March 31, 2025 3:00 PM 315 Haskell Hall Dr. Aalyia Sadruddin Wellesley College

April 7, 2025 3:00 PM 315 Haskell Hall Dr. Jennifer C. Hsieh University of Michigan