Kimberly Alidio, Asian American Studies Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Wedmesday, November 18, 2009. 12 noon – 1:00 PM, AACC Lounge.

Topic: The Child as Self and Nation: Stories of Dependence in Early Twentieth-Century American Juvenile Travel Literature and the American Indian Day School Movement
In 1934, the U.S. Congress passed the Philippine Independence Act, also known as the Tydings-McDuffie Act, and the Indian Reorganization Act. Both legislated economic self-sufficiency and local governance for Filipinos and Native Americans, respectively. This talk considers the problems of political agency and subjectivity in U.S. state programs of limited self-government. It juxtaposes two case studies: U.S. children’s travel literature about the Philippines, and a Filipino teacher’s brief career in a Pine Ridge Reservation (Lakota) kindergarten school. By examining the interwar institutionalization of child-centered culture, this talk revisits colonial discourses of childhood and paternalism.

Biography: Kimberly Alidio is a postdoctoral fellow in Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she will teach AAS 238: Asian American History in spring 2010. She earned her Ph.D. in History from the University of Michigan, and taught at the University of Texas at Austin. She is preparing for publication a book manuscript, Colonial Cosmopolitanism: American Empire and Filipino Identity, 1898-1946, which traces idealized encounters between Filipinos and Americans in narratives of U.S. colonial education and immigrant social science literature.