Siting A/P/A Studies: A Celebration of Scholars

Presented by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU. Co-sponsored by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality, Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program in the NYU Department of Social & Cultural Analysis, and NYU Doctoral Program in American Studies/Department of Social & Cultural Analysis.

We celebrate three new books by alumni from the NYU Doctoral Program in American Studies with a series of presentations, one-on-one conversations, and a roundtable discussion.

In Insurgent Aesthetics: Security and the Queer Life of the Forever War (Duke University Press, 2019), Ronak K. Kapadia (University of Illinois, Chicago) shows how Arab, Muslim, and South Asian diasporic multimedia artists force a reckoning with the US War on Terror’s violent destruction and its impacts on immigrant and refugee communities. He is joined in conversation by Nicole R. Fleetwood (Rutgers University). Manu Karuka’s (Barnard College) Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad (University of California Press, 2019) boldly reframes the history of the transcontinental railroad from the perspectives of the Cheyenne, Lakota, and Pawnee tribes, and the Chinese migrants who toiled on its path. Elizabeth Ellis (NYU Department of History) leads the discussion with Karuka. In A Nation on the Line: Call Centers as Postcolonial Predicaments in the Philippines (Duke University Press, 2018), Jan M. Padios (University of Maryland, College Park) examines the massive Philippine call center industry in the context of globalization, race, gender, transnationalism, and postcolonialism. Nell Geiser (Communications Workers of America) serves as her discussant. A roundtable, featuring all three authors and moderated by Cristina Beltrán (NYU Department of Social & Cultural Analysis), concludes the program.

This venue requires a photo ID for entry. It has an elevator and is accessible for wheelchair users. There is an all-gender restroom. If you need any accommodations, please email apa.rsvp@nyu.edu.

Ronak K. Kapadia is associate professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and affiliated faculty in Art History, Global Asian Studies, and Museum & Exhibition Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. An interdisciplinary cultural theorist of race, security, and empire in the contemporary US, Kapadia is author of Insurgent Aesthetics: Security and the Queer Life of the Forever War (Duke University Press, 2019). This book theorizes the queer world-making potential of contemporary artistic responses to US militarism in the Greater Middle East. Kapadia is also co-editor of the 2017 special issue of Surveillance and Society on race, communities, and informers, and his other works appear in Asian American Literary Review, Journal of Popular Music Studies, Feminist Formations, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, and edited volumes including: Shifting Borders: America and the Middle East/North Africa (American University of Beirut Press, 2014), Critical Ethnic Studies: A Reader (Duke University Press, 2016), and With Stones In Our Hands: Writings on Muslims, Racism, and US Empire (University of Minnesota Press, 2018). Kapadia is currently researching his second book, on healing justice in the wilds of imperial decline, provisionally titled “Breathing in the Brown Queer Commons.”

Manu Karuka is the author of Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad (University of California Press, 2019). He is a co-editor, with Juliana Hu Pegues and Alyosha Goldstein, of “On Colonial Unknowing,” a special issue of Theory & Event, and with Vivek Bald, Miabi Chatterji, and Sujani Reddy, he is a co-editor of The Sun Never Sets: South Asian Migrants in an Age of U.S. Power (NYU Press, 2013). His work appears in Critical Ethnic Studies, J19, Settler Colonial Studies, The Settler Complex: Recuperating Binarism in Colonial Studies (UCLA American Indians Studies Center, 2016), and Formations of United States Colonialism (Duke University Press, 2014). He is an assistant professor of American Studies at Barnard College.

Jan M. Padios is an associate professor of American Studies and Director of Graduate Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is also affiliate faculty in Women’s Studies and the Asian American Studies Program. Padios is the author of A Nation on the Line: Call Centers as Postcolonial Predicaments in the Philippines (Duke University Press, 2018). Her academic and creative work has also been published by Cultural Studies journal, NYU Press, Oxford University Press, The Center for Art + Thought, Zócalo Public Square, and Indiana Review. Padios is currently a visiting professor at Pratt Institute in the Graduate Program in Media Studies. She received an MA in American Studies from NYU in 2005 and a PhD in 2012.