TODAY AT 4PM
STERN LOUNGE / AUSTIN 217
SEMINAR ON RIGHTLESSNESS by A. NAOMI PAIK and UNSETTLED by ERIC TANG
SPONSORED by ASIAN/ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES INSTITUTE
FLYER
Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in U.S. Prison Camps Since World War II (UNC Press, 2016) by Asst. Professor of Asian American Studies at Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign A. NAOMI PAIK grapples with the history of U.S. prison camps that have confined people outside the boundaries of legal and civil rights. Removed from the social and political communities that would guarantee fundamental legal protections, these detainees are effectively rightless, stripped of the right even to have rights. Yet rightless people are not silent. Drawing from an expansive testimonial archive of legal proceedings, truth commission records, poetry, and experimental video, Paik reveals a powerful ongoing contest over the nature and meaning of the law, over civil liberties and global human rights, and over the power of the state in people's lives.
Unsettled: Cambodian Refugees in the New York City Hyperghetto (Temple Univ. Press, 2015) by Asst. Professor of African/African Diaspora Studies and a faculty member for the Center for Asian American Studies at Univ. of Texas at Austin ERIC TANG tells the harrowing and inspiring stories of the 10,000 Southeast Asian refugees who arrived in the Bronx during the 1980s and 90s to make sense of how and why the displaced migrants have been resettled in the “hyperghetto.” He argues that refuge is never found, that rescue discourses mask a more profound urban reality characterized by racialized geographic enclosure, economic displacement and unrelenting poverty, and the criminalization of daily life, as Cambodian refugees experience life in the U.S. as a form of captivity, since self-sufficiency remains an elusive goal.
This event is free and open to the public.
For more information, contact: Ms. Fe Delos-Santos at fe.delos-santos@uconn.edu