5 Questions with AMS Affiliate Faculty Member Dr. Eric Tang

Today we are thrilled to feature an interview with affiliate faculty member Dr. Eric Tang, Assistant Professor in African and African Diaspora Studies and the Center for Asian American Studies and Associate Director of the UT Community Engagement Center.

Dr. Eric Tang, credit by David Woodberry

1. What has been your favorite project to work on and why?

I’m not sure that I have a favorite project. I have different projects that each offer moments of profound reward. I guess, then, I have favorite moments. And those moments are when the exceptions prove the rule: when seemingly unlikely racial alliances explain a community’s resilience; when what seems like social disorganization and disjuncture is in fact the generative force of political movements; when what is misunderstood as hopelessness, despair and ambivalence among oppressed peoples is rather an expression of a profound political critique.

2. How do you see your work fitting into larger conversations in the academy or contemporary society?

My work looks at the poetics of displacement–from third world refugees to the African American communities throughout Austin. Why poetics? Because the violence of displacement necessarily produces among the displaced a specific way of knowing the world–a theory and a form. Some scholars refer to this as a methodology of the oppressed. My goal as a scholar is  to ensure that contemporary society does not squander their vision/theory/method.

3. What projects, people, and/or things have inspired your work?

Far too many to name. Historian Robin Kelley was my dissertation chair and my mentor since undergrad days, so his influence is evident in my work. But it depends on what I’m working on. If it’s the question of justice and its limits, then I’ll be reading Sadiya Hartman. If it’s New Orleans we’re talking about, then it’s the dearly departed Clyde Woods. If it’s 1980s New York City, then I am turning straight to the lyrics of Public Enemy. If I’m focusing on Austin’s genteel apartheid, then it’s the generation of black residents I’ve recently interviewed who recall the city’s unmistakable history of Jim Crow (alive and well today, they insist).

Alumni Voices: Dr. John Gronbeck-Tedesco, Asst. Prof. of American Studies, Ramapo College

Today we share with you some insight from Dr. John Gronbeck-Tedesco, Assistant Professor of American Studies at Ramapo College in New Jersey. Dr. Gronbeck-Tedesco graduated from the department with a Ph.D. in 2009.

How is the work that you’re doing right now informed by the work that you did as a student in American Studies at UT?

The work I do right now evolved out of the nourishing range of experiences I enjoyed as an American Studies graduate student and temporary citizen of Austin, Texas.  UT introduced me to an invigorating intellectual atmosphere where I could explore many facets of humanistic study.  At first, the flexibility of American Studies can be frustratingly amorphous, with its oft-cited lack of consensus on the query, “What is American Studies?” (and outsiders’ persistent question, “What is it not?”)  But as an interdisciplinary, malleable form of study, American Studies continually demands reinvention of itself through its refreshing breadth and creativity.  The program allowed me to tailor my scholarly interests into a set of paradigms and methodologies that still govern my work today.  Classes on Cuban history, the American Left, the African Diaspora, U.S. foreign relations, and on race and ethnicity in the United States helped me produce my own definition and working model of American Studies, which I took with me on the job market, inscribed onto syllabi, and crammed (if uncomfortably in parts!) into my dissertation cum book manuscript.  American Studies at UT gave me the resources and peer/mentor support to travel to Cuba to conduct research and form a community of scholars and friends that continue to shape my personhood today.  And Austin was a place where I politically matured by joining activist organizations that organize on behalf of immigrant rights, compulsions I keep up on a weekly basis in Queens, NY.  UT American Studies is a thriving community that still dazzles on the ASA stage.  I consider myself lucky to have been a part of it.

Do you have any words of wisdom or advice for students in our department about how to get the most out of their time here?

Explore, explore, explore.  Then write a manageable dissertation.  It seems to me that through this exploration we develop an understanding of the scholarly domains to which we will ultimately contribute.  It’s important to have a sense of where our work fits (in journals, departments, conferences) and where it doesn’t.  The advantage of American Studies is that we can have several options in this respect.   Having a good relationship with your mentors is also key.  I have been in awe of my mentors’ capacity to tirelessly help me well beyond graduation.

I think the most important words of advice I can give is something that I did not learn until I was deep into my degree.  That is to indulge in the vulnerability it takes to unmask and remake the hidden assumptions and understandings you carry into the program.  This is intensely personal, much more than I realized until later.  We are intimately invested in our knowledge production because it is inseparable from our profound sense of selfhood.  Breaking down time-tested barriers and defense mechanisms is a discomfiting but unconditional part of the liberatory process of education.  Knowing this at the outset, I think, is advantageous in graduate school.

Undergrad Research: Honors Thesis Symposium TODAY

Research week at UT begins next week, and the American Studies honors thesis writers will be presenting a year’s worth of hard work at our annual symposium on Wednesday, April 17, 5:30-7:30pm in Burdine 214. Below are some brief remarks about each thesis and each presenter. Come by to see the great work these students have done!

Announcements: The End of Austin Featured in ‘Life and Letters’ Magazine

We’ve shared quite a bit of information with you about The End of Austin, a digital journal launched by Dr. Randy Lewis and a smattering of graduate students in the American Studies department.

And, in that vein, we have more exciting news to share. The End of Austin is featured in the Spring 2013 issue of UT College of Liberal Arts’s Life and Letters magazine, and you can read the article here as well as in the print edition (and we highly recommend you click through for some wonderful illustrations of cyclops-like monsters attacking the city, as they often do).

A brief excerpt:

So what does the future hold for Austin? Will the city build a better freeway system or buckle under the heavy pressure of rush-hour commuters? Will the skyline be recognizable a century from now, or will it morph into another sprawling megalopolis? The city’s fate depends on the decisions that are being made right now, Lewis says.

“We have the raw ingredients of a great city based on location, climate and the university,” Lewis says. “But the decisions that we make in the next 10 to 20 years will determine whether Austin will be a world-class, great city, or if it will just be another Sunbelt urban zone.”

The hope for the writers and contributors of the website is to provide a shared brainstorming forum for both the community and the university—and ultimately find possible solutions for Austin’s biggest challenges.

Announcement: Performing Blackness Symposium Today!

The Department of Theatre and Dance’s Performance as Public Practice program and John L. Warfield Center’s Performing Blackness Series will host a discussion today of Charles O. Anderson/dance theatre X’s TAR, with conversation about Black dance, producing Black art, and the role of art in generating social change. The symposium will take place in the Oscar G. Brockett Theatre in the Winship Building on the UT campus from 1:30-5:00p.m.

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Thomas Frantz, Professor of African and African American Studies/Dance/Theatre Studies, Duke University

Featured Panelists:
Ms. China Smith, Founder and Executive Artistic Director, Ballet Afrique, Austin
Dr. Omise’eke Tinsley, Associate Professor, African and African Diaspora Studies, UT Austin
Dr. Michael Winship, Professor, Department of English, The University of Austin

The symposium is in conjunction with two public performances of dance theatre X’s TAR on April 12 and 13 at 8:00 p.m. in the Oscar G. Brockett Theatre. Both performances are free and open to the public.

Hope to see you there!

Conference Preview: Keynote Address by Dr. Claire Jean Kim

Only one more day to wait! This Thursday and Friday, the American Studies Graduate Student Conference will take place at the Texas Union. Click here for a full schedule.

Today we’d like to offer you a special invitation to our keynote address by Dr. Claire Jean Kim (Political Science and Asian American Studies, UC Irvine). Dr. Kim’s address is entitled, “The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Michael Vick” and will take place on Thursday, April 4 from 6:00p.m. – 7:30p.m. in NOA 1.124.

Here’s a little more on our keynote speaker:

Claire Jean Kim received her B.A. in Government from Harvard College and her Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University.  She is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Asian American Studies at University of California, Irvine, where she teaches graduate and undergraduate classes on racial politics, multiculturalism, social movements, and human-animal studies.  Dr. Kim’s first book, Bitter Fruit: The Politics of Black-Korean Conflict in New York City (Yale University Press, 2000) won two awards from the American Political Science Association: the Ralph Bunche Award for the Best Book on Ethnic and Cultural Pluralism and the Best Book Award from the Organized Section on Race and Ethnicity.  She is completing a second book, Multiculturalism On Edge: Contesting Race, Species, and Nature (Cambridge University Press, 2014), which examines the intersection of race and species in impassioned disputes over how immigrants of color, racialized minorities, and Native people in the U.S. use animals in their cultural traditions. Dr. Kim has also written numerous journal articles and book chapters.  She has been the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the University of California Center for New Racial Studies, and she has been a fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey and the University of California Humanities Research Institute.  Dr. Kim is an Associate Editor of American Quarterly and the co-guest editor with Carla Freccero of a special issue of American Quarterly entitled, Species/Race/Gender, forthcoming in September 2013.

Hope to see you there!

Conference Preview: American Nightmares

The conference is two short days away, and today we bring you our last post in a series of sneak peeks at the American Studies Graduate Student Conference: a panel entitled “American Nightmares.”

Photograph by Andrew Jones

• Sara O’Neill, “Longing for the Zombie Apocalypse: Max Brooks’ World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War and Contemporary America”
• Susan Quesal, “The John Wayne Gacy House as Metaphor for America”
• David Juarez, “‘I was Gerard’: Saintliness, Sorrow, and Shame in Jack Kerouac’s Visions of Gerard”
• Kayla Rhidenour, “The Dream of a Soldier, The Promise of a Nation”
• Regina Mills, “The Indescribable and Undiscussable in George Washington Gómez: The Trauma of An American Dream”

This panel will be the final panel of the conference and will take place on Friday, April 5 from 4:00p.m. – 5:30p.m. in the Texas Union, 4.206 Chicano Culture Room. This is definitely one you don’t want to miss!