Monkey in Residence & Other Speculations

Observations of contemporary life that make monkeys of us: this existential disbelief thrums through speculative stories and essays in Xu Xi’s latest collection, Monkey in Residence & Other Speculations.

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Refusing Death: Immigrant Women and the Fight for Environmental Justice in LA

In Refusing Death, Nadia Y. Kim tells the stories of Asian and undocumented Latin@ immigrant women, finding that they are influential because of their ability to remap politics, community, and citizenship in the face of the country’s nativist racism and system of class injustice, defined not just by disproportionate environmental pollution but also by neglected schools, surveillance and deportation, and political marginalization.

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“We’re the New Citizenship”: LA’s Asian and Latin@ Immigrant Activists on Politics as Embodied and Emotional

In recent decades under runaway neoliberalism, “foreignized” and unauthorized immigrants have increasingly made political inroads by way of grassroots community activism and by sidestepping the need for formal political channels and, at times, even dismissing them. By way of nearly four years of ethnographic observation, 49 in-depth interviews, and extensive document analysis, Prof. Nadia Kim … Read more

The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian Americans and the Everyday Politics of Race

In this talk, based on her new book The Limits of Whiteness (2017, Stanford University Press), sociologist Neda Maghbouleh shares the under-theorized and sometimes heartbreaking story of how Iranian American young adults and teenagers move across a white/not-white color line. By contextualizing her ethnographic data with a century’s worth of neglected historical and legal evidence, she offers new evidence for how a “white” American immigrant group might become “brown,” and what such a transformation says about race in North America today.

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