Lectures: Tracing Postcolonial Configurations, and Reckoning with the Dictator’s Body

The public is cordially invited to two lectures: “Tracing Postcolonial Configurations,” and “Reckoning with the Dictator’s Body”
by Dr. Josen Masangkay Diaz.
Date and time: February 19, 2020, 3:00-4:30 pm (Tracing Postcolonial…)
February 20, 2020, 3:00-4:30 pm (Reckoning with the Dictator’s…)
Venue: BusAd A102 (both lectures)
Abstract: In 1965, Ferdinand Marcos was elected to the Philippine presidency and would remain in office until he was ousted in 1986. That same year, U.S. president Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Hart-Celler Act, effectively liberalizing U.S. immigration policy by eliminating national quotas from immigration law. In this talk, Dr. Diaz will explore the relationship between Filipino American subjectivity and Marcosian martial law by considering the important confluence of these two events.. She will also analyze the significance of Marcos’s exile and death in Honolulu for memorializing and remembering the legacies of martial law. Reading two poems by R. Zamora Linmark and Vince Gotera, this talk considers the ways that a poetics of reckoning contends with the meanings of dictatorship in the present.
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About the Lecturer: Dr. Josen Masangkay Diaz is Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies and affiliated faculty in the Women and Gender Studies program at the University of San Diego. Her research and teaching focus on the study of race, gender, colonialism, empire, and authoritarianism. She has published work in Kritika Kultura, Journal of Asian American Studies, and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society.