Where did the Asian sit on the segregated bus? Drawing from her book, ‘Partly Colored’: Asian Americans and Racial Anomaly in the Segregated South, Leslie Bow traces narratives that attempted to reconcile Asian Americans to segregation’s distinction between black and white.
Investigating the ways in which racially “in-between” subjects and communities were understood within the South, Bow locates Asian American representation in visual culture and memoir as a site of cultural anxiety and negotiation. What she uncovers is not so much an alternative account of white supremacy, but a genealogy of repressed dissonance that has consequence for the ways that we remember the Jim Crow era and its legacy. This lecture will be held in the Kresge Foundation Room (039 Graham Memorial Hall).
Leslie Bow is Professor of English and Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of ‘Partly Colored’ (NYU Press, 2010) and Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion (Princeton UP, 2001), as well as the editor of the four-volume collection Asian American Feminisms (Routledge, 2012). Bow has served as Director of Asian American Studies, on the editorial board of American Literature, and on the Executive Committee of the Modern Language Association (MLA). Her current book project examines fantasy portrayals of race.
This lecture is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served.