Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere

Wednesday, December 5, 2018 @ 4:00 pm, Walker 201D

The Production of Race in Music and Science

• Vassiliki (Betty) Smocovitis (Biology and History, Rothman Faculty Summer Fellow) “Masuo Kodani, Genetics, and the Japanese American Experience”

Dr. Betty Smocovitis’s presentation traces the life of Masuo Kodani (1913-1983), a promising Japanese American geneticist, who found himself a stranger in his land after Executive Order 9066 sent him to a prison camp in 1942. Smocovitis follows his subsequent work as geneticist for Occupation Forces in Japan surveying the effects of the atomic bombs on survivors, and then his inability to obtain permanent positions as research scientist.  Kodani’s life is thus a study of marginalization and exclusion, of race and ethnicity, of hybridity and displacement, and the history of immigration policies in the United States with respect to Asian Americans in general and Japanese Americans in particular.

• Bryce Henson (African American Studies, Rothman Faculty Summer Fellow) “Race, Gender, and Bahian Hip-Hop Cultures” 

Dr. Bryce Henson’s talk presents his ethnographic study of black hip-hop artists in Bahia, the northeastern state of Brazil. He frames hip-hop as a form of diasporic cultural politics that challenges forms of oppression. Within that study, however, he emphasizes cultural expression that move beyond hegemonic representations of black cultural politics, including those of gender and sexuality. He thus highlights how the Bahian hip-hop movement re-imagines blackness beyond discourses of respectability. Based on the methodology of critical ethnography, his project contributes to a fuller account of black communities in the national imaginary of Brazil but including those who are marginalized in the nation and the diaspora.