The 2021-2022 Pembroke seminar, “Color,” co-led by respective HIAA and VISA chairs, Professors Evelyn Lincoln and Leslie Bostrom, concludes with its annual research workshop, led by the Pembroke Center’s postdoctoral fellows. Postdoctoral Fellows Erica Kanesaka, Bernabe Mendoza, and Allison Puglisi, alongside Professor Maria de Simone (Gender and Sexuality Studies), will hold Color Crossings: Race, Affect, Aesthetics from April 22-23, 2022, in Pembroke Hall 305.

Professor Lincoln and Bostrom’s seminar asks how global histories of race, gender, and class are connected to structures of knowledge and power that are ordered by color. Over the course of the academic year, they have gathered with an interdisciplinary and intergenerational cohort of undergraduates, graduate students, post-docs, and faculty to study pictures, performances, and pigments. In doing so, they explore how the experience of color itself has been central to the historical taxonomies and discriminations that have ordered lives — culturally, socially, politically, and personally.

Color Crossings turns to the work of artists, writers, and other creators of color to examine how their art evokes color’s aesthetic and affective affordances. This research roundtable studies the transgressive potential of color when employed by people of color — its potential to challenge the fixity of racial hierarchies and subvert hegemonic structures. 

Kareem Khubchandani (Tufts University) delivers the Keynote Artist/Scholar Talk, “The Auntology of the Senses: More Ways to be an Aunty,” on Friday, April 22 from 5:00-7:00 pm. Programming on Saturday, April 23 runs from 10:00 am-4:15 pm; speakers will discuss hip hop, alter egos, choreography, and more. 

This symposium is free and open to the public. Visit the Pembroke Center website for more information. We hope to see you there.