Munk School of Global Affairs

Series

CSUS and F. Ross Johnson Distinguished Speaker Series

Room Information

Contact Info

Stella Kyriakakis

Description

"To dwell is to think and to reflect. To dwell is to build material and social architectures. To dwell is to confront and engage. To dwell is to live - however ordinary - a life upon which one ultimately establishes a way of being in the world."

This presentation "builds" and reflects on the nuances of Martin Heidegger’s notion of dwelling in these precarious times. Although about the early 20th century, Heidegger's understanding of dwelling offers a way of critically engaging with the present-day violence and banality of survival by undocumented immigrants in the U.S. Utilizing ethnographic fieldwork and deploying recent critical theories on affect, the senses, and ideas about queer time and space, Manalansan's presentation focuses on the exigencies and struggles of a group of undocumented immigrants in New York City. "Queer Dwellings" is about the paradoxical, ambivalent, often incoherent messy daily arrangements and encounters between people living in the margins. He is interested in inter-subjective experiences and actions that fuel people lives, actions, and imaginings, and the creation of specific affective and sensory landscapes. He focuses on the bodily productions of selfhood and collectivity in the midst of squalor, exclusions, and isolation, particularly as these people deploy their sensorial and bodily techniques to worldly situations, His account is based on the quotidian dispositions of the immigrant queer body, and how a politics of affect and the senses can provide a window into more expansive ways of acting and being in the world. To put it another way, Manalansan is concerned with the ethics and aesthetics of habitation that hopefully, will give flesh to a politics that is responsive to some of the ways queer lives are lived now.

Martin F. Manalansan IV is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Asian American Studies and Conrad Professorial Humanities Scholar at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is an affiliate faculty in the Gender and Women’s Studies Program, the Global Studies Program and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory. He is the author of “Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora” (Duke University Press, 2003; Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2006), which was awarded the Ruth Benedict Prize in 2003. He is editor/co-editor of two anthologies namely, “Cultural Compass: Ethnographic Explorations of Asian America” (Temple University Press, 2000), and “Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism” (New York University Press, 2002), as well as a special issue of “International Migration Review” on gender and migration. Presently, Manalansan is Social Science Review Editor of “GLQ: a journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies,” and is on the editorial board of the “American Anthropologist,” the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association.

Main Sponsor

Centre for the Study of the United States

Co-sponsored by