WGS Research Seminar – Kandice Chuh

Kandice Chuh, City University of New York

Title:  Pedagogies of Il/liberal Humanism

Can the humanities be oriented toward the ends of proliferating imaginaries and sensibilities disidentified from the ideologies and logics of liberalism and derived instead from attention to the entangled histories of and ongoing connection among the impoverishment of peoples and worlds, enslaved and gendered labor, Indigenous dispossession, developmentalism, and knowledge work?  What pedagogies and practices afford the generation of imaginaries organized by the radical, irrevocable relationality of these connections?  Kandice Chuh engages such questions in this talk as she proposes as a collective project for the humanities the elicitation of subjects and social structures capable of reckoning with these entangled conditions.

Bio – Kandice Chuh – Kandice Chuh is a professor of English, American studies, and Critical Social Psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she is also a member of the M.A. in Liberal Studies faculty, and affiliate faculty to the Africana studies program.  She is currently Executive Officer of the PhD Program in English, and in the past served as Coordinator of the American Studies Certificate Program and acting associate director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics. The author of The Difference Aesthetics Makes: on the humanities ‘after Man’ (2019) and Imagine Otherwise: on Asian Americanist Critique (2003), which won the American Studies Association’s Lora Romero Book Award, Chuh is the co-editor, with Karen Shimakawa, of Orientations: Mapping Studies in the Asian Diaspora (2001).  She has published in such venues as Public Culture, American Literary History, American Quarterly, Social Text, and the Journal of Asian American Studies.  President of the American Studies Association from 2017-18, Chuh is a member of the Association for Asian American Studies and the Modern Language Association.  Chuh’s current research focuses on Asian racialization in the era of globalization, and she teaches courses on aesthetic theory, queer theory and queer of color critique, decolonial studies, and Asian and Asian American racialization.