Announcement: "Como La Danceflor," Artist Talk/Music Set/Interview with AB Soto
We're excited to share with you the first of a few events within a series called "MIGHTY REAL The Politics of Queer Nightlife." AB Soto, a visual/performance artist and musician, will be sharing and discussing his work on Thursday, September 17 in the Ransom Center's Prothro Theater, from 1:30pm - 3:15pm.A brief word about Soto:
Born in East Los Angeles AB’s work as a visual / performance artist and musician is an amalgamation of his Latin roots and early influences; street and pop culture. This combined with a rebellious streak that challenges and questions mainstream gay culture and norms is what defines AB as a recording artist. AB’s early background as a professional dancer and fashion designer informs his work as the artist he is today - all of AB’s work is original and self produced; choreography, lyric, styling and design. AB’s art is a stylized commentary on homophobic attitudes present in the dominate culture. His aim is to show the diversity of the more marginalized members of the gay community and bring them to a wider audience.
And a brief word about the MIGHTY REAL series:
This artist/speaker series, open to the university and Austin communities, will invite musicians, entertainers, DJ, and organizers working in queer nightlife spaces to offer their perspectives on politics, performance, and labor. Prior to the infamous Stonewall Riots of 1969, bars, house parties, and nightclubs have been essential sites of community making and political action for gender and sexual dissidents. While these spaces are imagined as utopians and escapist, nightlife has long been the target of state surveillance and moral legislation. Additionally, recent scholarships have demonstrated how people of color, working class people, and gender non-conforming people are kept at the margins of entertainment cultures. It is imperative, in a climate of state-sanctioned racial surveillance, border patrols, and trans phobic attacks, to more critically politicize queer nightlife, an industry that is assumed to offer refuge from the psychic and physical violence of heteronormativity and racism. This series will offer perspectives from those working on the ground, and will provide a nuanced understanding of nightlife as a space of political action.
Alumni Research: Andrew Busch publishes piece on gentrification in Austin
UT AMS grad Andrew Busch passed along an article that he published in the journal Southern Spaces at the end of the summer. Although sometimes our research can seem a little distant from us, Dr. Busch's essay, "Crossing Over: Sustainability, New Urbanism, and Gentrification in Austin, Texas" is one that, quite literally, deals with what's happening on the homefront. We've excerpted a section below:
In July of 2011 Bon Appétit named Franklin Barbecue of Austin, Texas, the best barbecue restaurant in America. As one of the flagship businesses in an area of the city undergoing significant redevelopment Franklin (which began as a food truck three years earlier) had recently moved into a building on East Eleventh Street, adjacent to downtown across Interstate 35. Franklin Barbecue helped enhance the city's wider reputation while locally it helped the reputation of the central Eastside. The white-owned Franklin took the former space of Ben's Long Branch Barbecue, an African American–owned business operating since the 1980s; African Americans had served barbecue at this site since at least the early 1960s. The corridor, formerly the hub of black commerce and social life during the era of segregation, fell into blight and disrepair in the 1970s and sunk into deeper trouble by the 1980s as residents of means and local businesses fled. In the 1990s the Austin Revitalization Authority (ARA) was formed as a non-profit to assist in the commercial development of the neglected neighborhood as well as to renew historic buildings and homes to maintain architecture consistent with the area's heritage. In 1997 the ARA declared the area a slum, making it eligible for Section 108 Community Development Block Grants (CDBG) from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). After completing the Central East Austin Master Plan, which called for 140,000 square feet of mixed-use development, the ARA and the city acquired over $9 million in CDBGs to initiate revitalization. Almost all development took place along the Eleventh Street corridor.Although development in the East Eleventh Street corridor began slowly, by the mid-2000s the area's importance to the city's Eastside efforts and to the downtown was apparent. Eleventh Street is one of only two downtown streets that bridge I-35, the physical barrier between minority and Anglo neighborhoods since its completion in 1962. People coming from downtown to East Eleventh do not have to pass underneath the highway. Signs displaying the East End slogan "Local Spoken Here" invite consumption along the corridor. A gateway arch laden with the Texas Star welcomes traffic from downtown. The cityscape here appears more modern, newer, and cleaner than much on the Eastside. Multiple use zoning allows for architecture consistent with New Urbanism: higher density, mixed use, better public transport and bike lanes, historic districts, and heritage-based public spaces. The area has undergone significant demographic change as middle class whites and upscale businesses have moved in.
Announcement: Fall Soiree highlights faculty and graduate research
The department is launching a few new events this fall that we hope you'll join us for! The first is a Fall Soiree: today, on the fourth floor of Burdine from 4:00 - 6:30pm, Dr. Shirley Thompson and Ph.D. candidate Elissa Underwood will be giving short talks about their research, followed by discussion and food and drinks.Shirley Thompson: #BlackLivesMatter and My Year of Economic ThinkingDuring this past year, as a widespread, coordinated resistance to anti-Black state violence crystallized in various US locales and on social media, I was able to embark on a systematic study of economic theory and methods for my project on Black Americans and the problem of property and ownership. I will discuss the implications for my work of both this formal study and a newly invigorated insistence on the value of black life.Elissa Underwood: Pop-Up Prison Kitchens: A Food-Based Challenge to the Prison Industrial ComplexI will be discussing non-traditional prison cookery and exploring its role as a counter-narrative to the personal and structural misery experienced by incarcerated individuals.Should be a great conversation!
Undergraduate Research: A visit to Vienna
Every other summer, our department chair Dr. Steve Hoelscher teaches a Maymester course in Vienna, Austria, about the city and historical memory. Undergraduate Rebecca Bielamowicz penned this wonderful essay about her experience in the course, and we share it with you today. For more information about the Maymester in Vienna course, see the department webpage here.
Doing American Studies in Austria
On a beautiful, mild, and sunny Sunday afternoon in the middle of the Austrian countryside, 20 of us gathered around the concrete skeleton of an abandoned swimming pool. Surrounding us in every direction were green, bucolic pastures that stretched out as far as we could see, and we stood at the top of this hill in silence, gazing at an object that seemed so out of place. After letting us contemplate, our tour guide asked us what seemed like too obvious of a question: “Do you know what this is?”No one responded. If we had been anywhere else, a swimming pool would have seemed like a logical answer, but today we were visiting Mauthausen, the concentration camp that was active between 1938-1945, and such a simple answer seemed beyond reason. The silence continued as we wrestled with imagining the various macabre ways a swimming pool could have been used as an instrument of death in this former camp until our tour guide broke the silence.“This is exactly what it appears to be. This was a pool that was used by SS officers for leisure.”He assured us that we were not alone in our shock. In tour after tour, he stopped by this swimming pool to make the point that the SS officers were not some larger-than-life, untouchable evil forces who committed unimaginable injustices against their fellow man; instead, and perhaps more frightening, is understanding that they were human beings who enjoyed normal activities like swimming but who made conscious decisions every day to perpetrate heinous acts.
As a class the week before, we visited the Karl-Marx-Hof, a municipal housing complex whose mission was the antithesis to the ideology that created Mauthausen. The embodiment of a vision for a better, more-fulfilled humanity, the complex offered affordable housing, on-site doctors’ and dentists’ offices, communal yards, kindergartens, and daycares. This juxtaposition of sites - the embodiment of all of the good and, conversely, all of the bad that humans are capable of - brought me back to the point that our tour guide made: despite how out of control the social world may seem, it is mutable by nature, created and changed by even our smallest actions.Living in Vienna and studying its history for a month has helped me get in touch with biases that I, of course, didn’t even know I had. Prior to applying to the Maymester program, taught by Prof. Steven Hoelscher, I was skeptical about investing time and money in traveling abroad when I felt that there was so much of the United States that I had not yet seen. Moreover, as an American Studies major, I felt that domestic travel needed to be prioritized before traveling elsewhere. Returning to the U.S., I realize how unfounded this argument was and how I was perpetuating my own self-inflicted tunnel vision: if you’re an American Studies student living in America, there’s all the more reason to travel abroad and defamiliarize yourself from an all-too-familiar history and culture. Only through comparison could I come back and understand the United States on a deeper level and learn to see all histories as the sum of human experiences and therefore integral to understanding U.S. history, no matter how unrelated they may seem across time or geographical location.
While traveling and studying the history of the places that I visited has certainly achieved the goal of expanding my worldview, it is also a reminder of the infinite amount of learning there is still to be done. I may know more than when I left, but I also now have a better grasp on all there is left to know.-- Rebecca Bielamowicz, (UT AMS major, Vienna, Austria, July 2015) 