As part of the AAAS Social Science Speaker Series, Karyn Lacy will present a talk titled,  “Growing Up Around Blacks:  Identity Construction in Middle-Class Suburbia”

Sponsored by:  African American and Africana Studies and Sociology

Karyn Lacy is Associate professor of Sociology and African American Studies at the University of Michigan. She is a Ford Fellow, and was a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation. Her book Blue-Chip Black: Race, Class, and Status in the New Black Middle Class (University of California Press) received the Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award from the American Sociological Association’s Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities. Lacy’s current work explores the construction and reproduction of racial and class-based identities among members of an elite social organization. 

Description of Dr. Lacy's upcoming talk:  While white ethnics and immigrants of color have been studied in terms of their attempts to assimilate into the American mainstream, sociologists assume that ongoing racial discrimination obviates the need for an extensive examination of the actual assimilation trajectories of middle-class blacks.  Many middle-class blacks travel from the black to the white world rather than existing exclusively in one racially distinct environment. Yet, we do not fully understand how middle-class blacks conceptualize their own integration into American society. Drawing on data collected through in-depth interviews with middle-class blacks and ethnographic research in a white and a black suburb, I establish the link between an affinity for black spaces and the alternative assimilation trajectories of middle-class blacks. I find that middle-class blacks engage in a variant of segmented assimilation, privileging the black world as a site for socializing even if they live in a white suburb.  This selective pattern of assimilation, what I term strategic assimilation, suggests that this population of middle-class blacks does not perceive itself as permanently constrained to the bottom rung of a racial hierarchy.

Title:  Sub-Exponential Decay Estimates on Trace Norms of Localized Functions of Schrodinger Operators

Abstract:  In 1973, Combes and Thomas discovered a general technique for showing exponential decay of eigenfunctions. The technique involved proving the exponential decay of the resolvent of the Schrodinger operator localized between two distant regions. Since then, the technique has been applied to several types of Schrodinger operators. Recent work has also shown the Combes–Thomas method works well with trace class and Hilbert–Schmidt type operators. In this talk, we build on those results by applying the Combes–Thomas method in the trace, Hilbert–Schmidt, and other trace-type norms to prove sub-exponential decay estimates on functions of Schrodinger operators localized between two distant regions.

Gender & Women's Studies is having our Breckinridge Bash, which includes course listings for the Fall 2014 semester.  

Title:  Compressible Navier-Stokes equations with temperature dependent dissipation

Abstract:  From its physical origin, the viscosity and heat conductivity coe!cients in compressible fluids depend on absolute temperature through power laws. The mathematical theory on the well-posedness and regularity on this setting is widely open. I will report some recent progress on this direction, with emphasis on the lower bound of temperature, and global existence of solutions in one or multiple dimensions. The relation between thermodynamics laws and Naiver-Stokes equations will also be discussed. This talk is based on joint works with Weizhe Zhang.

The series explores popular movies through a historically accurate perspective based on primary source materials found in Special Collections

Film:  Beloved

Starring Oprah Winfrey, this 1998 film is based on author Toni Morrison's novel about a former slave from Kentucky who is being haunted by her daughter. 

1. Cosmopolitan Minstrelsy: Race, Gender and Trans-Atlantic Theatre (Dr. Zakiya Adair)

Reacting to American racist policies and post WWI access to international travel a flourish of African Americans migrated to Paris and London in the early 1920s. African American women entertainers found particular success in the genre of vaudeville. Josephine Baker, Mabel Mercer, Aida “Bricktop” Smith and Adelaide Hall are just a few of the popular African American women entertainers who became successful performing in trans-Atlantic vaudeville. As a form of popular entertainment, vaudeville had a long history in the United States and Europe. Originating in the late nineteenth century, vaudeville gained in popularity by featuring white women in both the male and female roles. However early incarnations of vaudeville in the United States did not feature African American performers and did not offer any radical challenges to constructions of race. Boarding ships bound for Europe, African American musicians, singers, dancers and artists made use of the modern availability of international travel and increased European interest for the consumption of American culture during the early twentieth century. The trans-Atlantic vaudeville that African American women performed in in the twentieth century was a composite of nineteenth century variety, blackface minstrelsy and burlesque.

            The difference with trans-Atlantic black vaudeville or what I term, cosmopolitan minstrelsy was that the productions relied on colonial racial and gender tropes and constructions of nation in this vein trans-Atlantic vaudeville became a vehicle for transporting images of blackness. African American women performers were the main drivers of the genre and their popularity illuminates the significance of vaudeville to constructions of various identities. In 1925 Josephine Baker appeared in Caroline Dudley Reagan’s La Revue Negre in Paris, France and in 1928 Adelaide Hall appeared in Lew Leslie’s the Black Birds Revue in New York and Paris. Both of these productions became very popular in large part due to the theatrical spectacle created by Baker and Hall.

My goal with this essay is to map the development of theatrical constructions of black women both on the stage and in the iconography associated with their performances (playbills, advertisements, posters). 

This paper will examine black American artists and their migration to Europe in the genre of early expressive culture. This paper will provoke a lively discussion on black internationalism and African American women’s negotiations of race, gender and class. Additionally this paper will deconstruct masculinist tendencies within scholarship on African American cultural history and performance.

2. New Directions: Madness, Politics Issues, and Aesthetic Practices in African American Literature in the 21^st Century (Dr Therí A. Pickens)

In Victor Lavalle’s The Devil in Silver, the main protagonist, Pepper, must navigate daily life within the strictures of a mental institution after he is unjustly placed there as a way for local police officers to avoid the paperwork necessary for processing him traditionally. As he adjusts to the microcosmic world of the hospital, he begins to understand the relativity of craziness as defined by societal norms, on the one hand, and the inmates’ embodied realities, on the other. In this paper, I question the way madness informs the novel’s political and aesthetic practice.

Lavalle’s novel fits somewhat easily, though not neatly, into a black speculative fiction tradition, which deploys similar themes and aesthetic practices as mainstream (read: white) science fiction, horror, and alternative futurities. Often critics note the way these novels comment on or critique the current social and political issues that seep inside the porous boundary between book and world. I focus on the way Victor Lavalle’s Devil in Silver comments on the relationship between madness and the nation-state. Mad people are not allowed to be part of the citizenry. Yet, Pepper chooses to remain in the institution, in effect relinquishing his citizenship. The loss of his ability as property bears implications not only for how we understand the worth of citizenship, who desires it, and to whom it is available. Pepper’s decision challenges the teleological enterprise of the novel since he does not reach toward a resolution, but rather certain chaos.