4th Annual Ask-A-Vet Forum
2011-02-23 00:00 (America/Denver) | CA
A panel of UCSB student veterans will participate in this event, now in its fourth year. The students will discuss their experiences in the armed forces, including service in Iraq and Afghanistan, and their transition to university life. This event is sponsored by Student Veterans at UCSB, a non-partisan student group sponsored by the Office of Student Life. Professor John Lee from the Department of History will serve as moderator for the forum.
jwil 15.ii.2011

Migrant Rights and Migrant Melodrama, or Elvira Arellano as Suffering Mother and Evil Mother, Criminal and Saint
2011-02-24 00:00
Date: Thursday, Feb. 24th from 5:00-6:00 p.m.Location: 2nd Floor conference room, #2135, Social Sciences and
Media Studies building
Abstract of Talk:
Ana Elena Puga trains a theater/performance studies lens on the
struggle to control public perception of undocumented migrant rights
activist Elvira Arellano, who was deported in 2007. Puga coins the
term “migrant melodrama” to describe how key media coverage,
cultural production, and social performance in Arellano’s case
recycled and deployed tropes from nineteenth-century melodrama.
Migrant melodrama was used by Arellano herself, as well as by both
supporters and detractors of the single mother, who sought
sanctuary in a Chicago church together with her US-born son. Can
melodramatic spectacles of suffering insist on a common humanity
and make ethical claims for inclusion into an imagined community?
Yet can they also backfire by setting the price of inclusion at an
impossibly high level of virtue?
Bio of Speaker:
Ana Puga’s current book project, Desperate Acts: Melodrama and
Spectacles of Suffering in the Performance of Migration,
interrogates the reliance on melodrama in late twentieth and
twenty-first century artistic and social performances featuring
undocumented migrants from Latin America, especially women and
children. Desperate Acts shows how performances that involve
suffering migrant bodies often re-circulate nineteenth-century
melodramatic tropes from race, domestic, and sensation melodramas,
asking how those tropes circumscribe contemporary political agency.
Puga is the author of Memory, Allegory, and Testimony in South
American Theatre: Upstaging Dictatorship (Routledge 2008) and
translator, with Mónica Núñez-Parra, of Finished from the Start and
other Plays, an anthology of six works by Chilean playwright Juan
Radrigán (Northwestern University Press 2008). Puga has published
articles in Latin American Theatre Review and Theatre Journal,
among other journals. She co-founded LaMicro Theatre, dedicated to
the staging of contemporary Spanish, Latin American and US Latino
plays in English and bilingual productions.
hm 2/21/11; jwil 22.ii.2011

When Wall Street Met Main Street, 1890-1932
2011-02-25 00:00
Please join us for a talk by JULIA OTT, New School for Social Research, “When Wall Street Met Main Street, 1890-1932.” Ott’s book of the same title will be published by Harvard University Press in the spring of 2011. Her next project considers the enduring influence of financial institutions and pro-investor ideology in recent U.S. political history.
The talk, and subsequent discussion, is part of the History 294: Colloquium in Work, Labor, and Political Economy, 2010-2011 lecture series.
The Winter Quarter topic is “The Financial Crisis and its Origins.”
The Colloquium meets on Friday, January 25 at 1 p.m. in 4041 Humanities and Social Science Building.
jmj 01/03/2011
