Grace Hong, Associate Professor of Asian American Studies and of Women's Studies, University of California at Las Angeles
Thursday, September 17, 2009. 12 noon – 1:00 PM, AACC Lounge.

Topic: Death as Possibility:  Racialized Social Death and Contemporary Idioms of Power
This talk will address the contemporary idiom of power, manifested globally, whereby certain lives are deemed lives and others not, and certain deaths appear able to be mourned, and others not at all. Currently, the idiom of power legitimates violence by defining those upon whom this violence is levied as already-dead: expendable and unworthy of life. This talk is derived from a larger project that argues that this mode of governance around death demands a politics that is not limited to the preservation of life. Beginning with the understanding that the protection of life for some is inextricably linked to the foreclosure of life for others, Hong looks to culture as providing an alternative vocabulary or imaginary for a politics that does is not limited to the preservation of life.

Biography: Grace Kyungwon Hong is Associate Professor in the Department of Asian American Studies and the Department of Women’s Studies at UCLA, where she teaches courses on women of color feminism, Asian American cultural production, and social and cultural theory.  She is the author of The Ruptures of American Capital:  Women of Color Feminism and the Culture of Immigrant Labor (University of Minnesota, 2006).