American Studies Talks this Spring

This spring, American Studies at IU is sponsoring talks by three outstanding Native Studies scholars, who will be sharing their latest work with us.
Please mark your calendars and encourage your students to come.

1. Nancy Shoemaker (History, UConn), Tuesday, March 23, Walnut Room, IMU, 5-6.
"Indians on the Beach: New England Indians and Oceania in the Nineteenth Century"

Nineteenth-century New England Indian whalemen witnessed cultural encounters and imperial expansion from a different vantage point than their ancestors 200 years earlier. They were on the ships, while people called "Indians" were on the beach. Their experiences expose the contingency of race, the multi-faceted meanings of "Indian," and the ambiguities, contradictions, and ironies inherent in race, nation, and indigeneity as categorizing schemes.

2. Julie Kim (English, Fordham), Thursday, April 1, Dogwood Room, IMU, 4-5:30.
"Tactics of Taste: Food, Alliance, and Resistance in the Early Caribbean"

Food and culinary rituals have played central symbolic roles in imperial ideologies of assimilation and cultural mixing. Nevertheless, descriptions of food in accounts of the colonial Caribbean reveal heated conflicts taking place among Europeans, Africans, and Amerindians over matters of cuisine and consumption. Of course, these groups did have to accommodate each other in order to survive the extreme transformations in daily life and societal structure that characterized emerging plantation regimes. In particular, Africans and Amerindians often had to acquiesce to the appropriation not only of their labor but also of their knowledge of plants, animals, and cuisine. Yet the diverse environments of the Caribbean also provided individuals with modes of resistance—what I am calling tactics of taste—that suggest new ways of understanding and foregrounding the roles played by non-Europeans in the history of the region.

3. Malinda Maynor Lowery (History, UNC), Thursday, April 22, Maple Room, IMU, 5-6:30.
"Indian, Southern, and American: Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South"

The Lumbee Indian community of North Carolina resides in the cracks between Indian, southern, and American histories, but doesn't belong there.
Lowery, herself Lumbee, examines Indian identity and federal policy during the Jim Crow era, situating the Lumbee story squarely in the history of the United States.
American and southern identities acquire new layers of meaning when confronted with the Lumbees, whose history and culture illumi-nate the profound ambiguities of race, citizenship, and colonialism.