Last week, I said I’d share the other thing I did at the shoulda-been-2020-but-there-was-a-pandemic-so-it-was-2022-instead “Crossroads in Cultural Studies” conference. And so here it is. The “Giulia” who gets mentioned is my co-panelist, Giulia Pelillo-Hestermeyer, who only lacks a full name in my talk because she had spoken immediately before me, and the live audience presumably […]
Suspicious Minds
1997 was the 20th anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death. It was also the year after Elvis After Elvis was published. And so I found myself talking about Elvis a lot that year. In August, I gave one version of the talk below in Memphis, at the third (and also, I think, the last) Annual International […]
Minneapolis 2020
Everyone has a crazy pandemic story (or three). Mine found me traveling to Heidelberg for a 12-day working vacation (part spring break, part set-up for a course I was hoping to co-teach in Heidelberg that summer) in March 2020, and then getting “stuck” there for 9 months. The same travel restrictions that kept me from […]
Fifty Shades of Black (conference version)
Continuing the slow march through the archives that I promised/threatened to engage in a few weeks ago, here’s a conference paper that I wrote, but never delivered. This was supposed to be part of a panel at the 2018 “Crossroads in Cultural Studies” conference in Shanghai . . . but Air Canada decided (wrongly!) that […]
You Can Look
As I promised (threatened?) last week, I’m going to start sharing a range of “lost”/ephemeral presentations here on an occasional basis. I don’t plan on making any revisions to the texts themselves (a bit of format-cleaning and typo-fixing notwithstanding) — and this also means that there will be citational shortcomings, since I have always edited […]
White Lies
My friend and (many years ago) former student, Wendy Adams, was kind enough to invite me to give a talk as part of the International Film Series that she runs at the College of Central Florida. And this seems like as good as anywhere to share what I had to say about To Kill a […]
Reminds Me of Somethin’
So I did a thing tonight as part of this thing. And though I know no one came to see me, when the real stars of the show were Shelby J and Dr. Fink, several people said kind words to me after about my talk. So I figured I’d share it here, with a few […]
Running the race
You’ve heard about them, I’m sure. Special interest groups who think it’s fine to disrupt the everyday routines of ordinary people so that they (the special interest people, that is) can promote their own agenda. Shutting down major roads, blocking traffic, getting large crowds of people to yell in the streets for hours on end […]
Fifty shades of red
The more I read about the Rachel Dolezal story, the angrier I get. But not at her. Because, as I mentioned before, none of us know enough to say with any certainty who or what she “really” is. Race isn’t that simple. Identity isn’t that simple. Yet all sorts of people — too many to […]
Fifty shades of black
I don’t know the truth about Rachel Dolezal or her heritage. And neither do you. Yet an awful lot of people seem quite confident — even as they acknowledge the slipperiness of racial identity and/or the artificiality of race itself — that they know she’s really white. Maybe they’re right. Maybe. But the swiftness with […]