"Writing Hawai'i into the Nation: Narrative Re-mapping in Mark Twain's Letter's s a Colonial Prelude to Annexation" This portion of my dissertation project examines the 1866 letters written by Mark Twain (while dispatched by The Sacramento Union in Hawai'i) as engaged in the colonial process of cartographic incorporation by encouraging American ambitions in, and imaginings […]

"Black Storm Clouds and a Queer Yellow Light: Reading the Affective Edges of Symbolism in Maru" My project is to read postcolonial novels that have typically been analyzed as representations of postcolonial politics and instead attend to the nonrepresentational aspects of their language: namely, their affect and literariness. In this talk I focus on Bessie […]

"Historicizing Interviews: A Mode of (Re)living and (Re)writing Memories of the Korean War through Documentary" How can we write a history of the officially unsaid and the unsayable? My talk focuses on the case of the Korean War whose language of antagonism and ideological conflict remains very much alive in Korean society today. I will […]

"Polemics of Disintegration: Advaita Metaphysics in the Works of Alejandro Jodorowsky" The Chilean artist Alejandro Jodorowsky (b. 1929) often engages with non-linearity and non-sense as narrative devices in his work. Throughout his career Jodorowsky's thematic repertoire has adopted elements of the Kabbalistic science of the Marseille tarot, European alchemy, and New Age formulations of Hindu […]

"Enemy Inside Out: Birth Defects in Fallujah" Hotly debated and widely misunderstood is the epidemic of birth defects in Fallujah, Iraq. While the possibility of knowing the exact cause of this epidemic is diluted by ongoing war, layers of chemical toxicity, and mass displacement/destruction of doctors, patients, and medical facilities; the surrounding enviro-medical discourse is […]

"Homozionism: 'From the Closet into the Knesset'" My project focuses on the role of sexual politics in Israel's settler colonial occupation of Palestine, international (queer) complicities, and anti-colonial queer resistance. For this presentation I look forward to discuss the first chapter of my dissertation that charts the globally celebrated genealogy of Israel's gay movement from […]

Veronika Zablotsky "Dealing with the East: Orientalism and the Ideas of Eurasia in Contemporary Geopolitics" In this talk, I mobilize Edward Said's critique of Orientalism (1978) as a Europrean "style of thought," a "corporate institution" and a "systematic discipline" that produces, manages and deals with the "Orient" by means of discourse to think about the idea […]

Rebecca Ora "Filming Israel From Afar: Ambivalent Diasporic Visions in Performative Non-Fiction" Citing her recent short film The Intifada-ing and the work of other Jewish American women filmmakers, I discuss the ability of performative nonfiction to map new geographic territories through ethical panic and identity-loss responding to diasporic relationships with Israel-Palestine. This paper cults from theorizations […]