Department of History, UC Santa Barbara

Mia Dragnic and Pierina Ferretti: "An Expansive Rebellion: Feminism and Social Revolt in Chile"
2021-02-01 16:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Zoom, CA
UCSB and UCSD have joined together to welcome Pierina Ferretti and Mia Dragnic García, sociologists and doctoral candidates in Latin American Studies at the University of Chile.
In October 2019, Chile experienced its largest social revolt since the return to democracy in 1990. The mobilization, which began as a spontaneous reaction to protest against a 0.30 USD rise in the Santiago transport fare, soon after became a widespread outburst against the precarious and unjust conditions that affect the majority of the population after almost fifty years of life under a neoliberal regime. Throughout Chile, high school and university students, young precarious professionals, residents of peripheral neighborhoods, sectors of a fragile and unstable “middle class”, soccer hooligans (a symbol of popular and stigmatized youth), qualified salaried workers and unqualified, retirees and older adults, office workers, and app workers, among others, joined together in mass demonstrations.
As an immediate antecedent to this revolt in Chile, there had been a recent emergence of a new wave of the feminist movement that has since caused a general awareness of sexist violence, sexual abuse, and the need for an abortion law, issues that today they occupy the center of social debate. One can see the underground work that Chilean feminism has carried out for many years and that has gained symbolic capital – this is key to understanding how it has moved from private malaise to collective revolt today. Feminism has acted in Chile as an expansive rebellion, starting with women and sexual dissidents and has advanced towards the politicization of broad social sectors, preparing the conditions for mass revolt.
Zoom link: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/89256077958?pwd=[REDACTED]
Password: [REDACTED]

This event is part of the Feminismos desde abajo, y hacia el sur/ Feminisms from Below, and Toward the South series. This speaker series welcomes feminist militants from Latin America to share their perspectives and experiences on building popular power towards a mass feminist movement. Over the past decade, Latin American feminists have identified manifestations of gender-based oppression under capitalism in everyday women’s conditions in order to successfully mobilize them as part of a political movement. Feminists produce analyses and subsequent strategies around reproductive rights, resource extractivism, housing, debt, and more. This mass feminism has grown to be arguably the most insurgent political force across the continent.

LAIS Tertulia | "Race and Caste in Latin America, India, and the USA: A Global Conversation"
2021-02-02 12:00 - 13:30 | Zoom, CA
Latin American and Iberian Studies invites you to a Tertulia in the Time of COVID, 2020-2021! Two History Department faculty members will speak at this exciting event.
In her widely acclaimed book Caste: The Origins of our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson complicates the category of race, as it is commonly understood in the US, by bringing caste to the fore. She discusses the “caste” historical experience of the US in light of those in Nazi Germany and India. Insofar as the term “caste” was first introduced in India by the Portuguese at a time when the Spanish and Portuguese empires had a global colonial reach, Wilkerson’s book provides a perfect pretext for the Program in Latin American and Iberian Studies (LAIS) to launch a global conversation. In this roundtable, UCSB faculty from Black Studies, History, and LAIS specialized in the US, India, and Latin America discuss their take on caste, race, and Isabel Wilkerson.
Speakers (UC Santa Barbara)
Utathya Chattopadhyaya is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He specializes in the history of modern South Asia, British imperialism, and agrarian commodities in global markets. His essays have appeared in A Cultural History of Western Empires, the South African Historical Journal, Historical Reflections, English Language Notes, and the edited volume Animalia: An Anti-Imperial Bestiary for our Times. He is currently working on a monograph on cannabis and empire in British India.
Cecilia Méndez is a Peruvian historian specialized in the social and political history of the Andean region. She is the director of the Latin American and Iberian Studies Program at UC Santa Barbara and an Associated Professor in History. Her work calls the attention on the importance of late eighteenth-century, and nineteenth-century political developments in shaping modern conceptions nationhood, citizenship, and “race.”
Terrance Wooten is an Assistant Professor in Black Studies. He is currently working on his first book manuscript, “Lurking in the Shadows of Home: Homelessness, Carcerality, and the Figure of the Sex Offender,” which examines how those who have been designated “sex offenders” and are homeless in the Maryland/DC area are managed and regulated through social policies, sex offender registries, and urban and architectural design. His scholarly interests are located at the intersections of Black studies, gender and sexuality studies, studies of poverty and homelessness, and carceral studies.
Join the Zoom meeting here: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/84061612112.

History Club Weekly Meetings
2021-02-04 19:00 - 21:00 | HSSB 4020
UCSB’s new and improved History Departmental club is for majors, minors, and anyone with a passion for the past! Meetings are held every Thursday at 7:00 PM in HSSB 4020. See flier below for information about upcoming events. Please email histclub.ucsb@gmail.com with any questions.

Public History Colloquium Event–”Reinterpreting Slavery and the Emotional Labor of History”
2021-02-05 12:00 - 13:30 | Zoom, CA
Join the History Department’s Colloquium in Public History on Friday, February 5 at noon for a Zoom talk by Professor Hilary N. Green (University of Alabama).
Professor Green reflects on the powerful legacy of Jim Crow era efforts to erase the history of slavery from the landscape of her workplace, the University of Alabama, and shares a project she pursued to rewrite this historical narrative. She researched, designed and implemented a campus tour to tell the actual history of slavery and enslaved workers in the University’s past. She collected oral tradition and pursued deep archival research, to historicize “the experiences, activism and collective memories of African American men, women and children,” and describes her efforts to get the campus community to rethink its understanding of the past, even as an untenured member of the faculty. Her project exposed the racist structures undergirding the University Archives; it highlights the tenacity of older narratives and exposes some of the physical and psychological burdens of this sort of historical recuperation for the practitioner. All this unfolded in the larger social struggle over historical monuments and commemoration in recent months. As Green writes, “when exploring the racial history of one’s employer, the Jim Crow era archival project of white supremacy is no longer an abstract concept read about only in scholarship.”
Register for this Zoom event at https://ucsb.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_yzLVlQ62QNGv7sZz1DenDA.
To download the flyer for this event, click here.
Recommended reading:
• Hilary Green, “The Hallowed Ground Tour: Revising and Reimagining Landscapes of Slavery at the University of Alabama,” in-progress seminar paper.
• Hilary Green, “The Burden of the University of Alabama’s Hallowed Grounds,” The Public Historian 42: 4 (November 2020): 28-40.
