Upcoming Campus Event: “City of Radical Memory: Reclaiming Spaces of World War II Home Front Repression and Resistance in the San Francisco Bay Area”
CULTURAL STUDIES GRADUATE GROUP
Fall 2014 COLLOQUIUM SERIES
===============================
Thursday, October 16, 2014 4:10-6:00 pm, 3201 Hart Hall
Javier Arbona, Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow, American Studies, UC Davis.
“City of Radical Memory: Reclaiming Spaces of World War II Home Front Repression and Resistance in the San Francisco Bay Area”
Javier Arbona works at the intersection between architecture, landscape, theory, and geography. A Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the American Studies program at UC Davis, his current book project focuses on spaces of memory and militarization in the San Francisco Bay Area. In this talk, Arbona will discuss the role of space and images in producing a visual remembrance of radical acts that took place during World War II on the “home front.” To uncover hidden or forgotten spatial histories, his research draws on mixed methods of archival work, walking practices, and oral history. At this event, he will talk about his research on a little-known 1942 African American uprising in Vallejo against segregation in the Navy, and will discuss how this unfinished past is made present through art and architecture.
Previously, as a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Arbona researched the US military bombardment of Vieques, Puerto Rico, and studied how military occupation and the production of the landscape shaped Arcadian nature readings by protest and opposition groups that could detract from the social struggle for land rights on the island. Before his graduate studies, Arbona practiced as an architectural designer in Los Angeles. He received a Bachelor’s of architecture from Cornell University, where he has also served as a visiting critic. He completed a PhD in geography at UC Berkeley, where he was a Ford Foundation dissertation Fellow and a Bancroft Library Award recipient. In 2010, he co-founded the Demilit collective with Bryan Finoki and Nick Sowers. Together, they practice experimental forms of exploring military landscapes and everyday space. Their work has been featured at the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Istanbul Design Biennial, and the UCSD Art Gallery.
Co-sponsors: American Studies, Militarization Research Group