Amar Chitra Katha (Immortal Picture Stories) is India’s leading comic book series, with more than 400 titles and 90 million issues sold annually. In this presentation, Prof. McLain examines the range of heroines represented in the series and explores debates in the production and consumption of comic books in relation to shifting notions of the ideal woman in contemporary India.
Through history, women’s eating behavior and body image have been related in complex and often pathological ways to their religious practices and beliefs. Professor Boyatzis will discuss contemporary psychological research on young women’s body image and eating behavior in relation to their spirituality and religiosity.
When William Hart Coleridge arrived in Barbados in 1825, the Bishop immediately embarked upon a campaign of building churches, hiring clergy, and educating both whites and blacks. The new churches constructed by the Bishop, evoked the architecture of the English middle ages, creating a sharp contrast with the earlier edifices. By building churches and schools with features that conflated Christian faith with cultural enrichment, architectural beauty with the Motherland, and piety with Englishness, the Bishop did more to entrench Englishness on Barbados than to further the position of the emancipated slaves.
In colonial Southeast Asia during the late 19th and early 20th c., important populations of people of mixed-race background began to develop and assert hybrid identities that superceded identification with either local or European cultures. In this talk, David Del Testa examines the case of one such mixed-race individual, Ms. Claudie Beaucarnot, whose colonial-era diary and contemporary interviews reveal the intimate edges of a creole identity, arguing against stereotypes of “mixed-race” people as universally oppressed, self-hating, and rootless, and for a reconsideration of them and their voices in the context of modern colonialism.
In the late 1880s, American labor unions were a central nativist force, crucial to understanding restrictive immigration policies of the era. A hundred years later, unions were beginning to be a critical part of an alliance for immigrant rights. Unions began to organize rather than demonize immigrant workers because it was in their own interest, resulting from a decrease in the importance of borders for commerce and an increasing immigrant service industry. By highlighting how notions of race, worker and citizenship change over time within the labor movement, we gain insight into the impact of labor unions on […]