Center for the Arts and Humanities

Jimia Boutouba (Modern Languages and Literatures) “ War, Race and Sexual Politics in French Indochina”

This two-part research project investigates French imperial history by tracing the crisscross colonial trajectories of people displaced across the French imperial map. Unsettling colonial cartography, the project attends to narratives of south-south encounters, transnational solidarities in the midst of anti-colonial wars, unexpected unions, invisibilized “métis” (mixed-raced) populations, and forced departures. The project draws on rare archival materials and testimonies from unknown and/or previously unheard minoritized perspectives: those of Black Asian children born during the war of Indochina (1946-1954), and accounts by North African sex workers who were brought to Indochina on a government-approved program of mobile prostitution to “service” combat and support soldiers overseas. In investigating these complex stories that emerge at the intersection of Asian, African, and French imperial histories, Prof. Boutouba’s project seeks to shed new light on the nexus of racial and sexual politics at the heart of French imperialism as well as center the perspectives and historical agency of minoritized trans-imperial groups whose voices and stories are seldom considered as legitimate historical records. 

Hsin-I Cheng (Communication)“ Bridging the Digital and Physical Spaces: Furthering Black and Asian Solidarity”

The Asian-Black Relationality Project stems from Prof. Cheng’s 2022 publication on the theoretical concept of relational citizenship. From 2022 to 2023, a collaboration between SCU students and former colleagues built the Asian & Black Alliances (ABA) website— a multilingual website highlighting historical and cultural interactions between these two racial groups, which also includes individual and organizational voices to illustrate how such solidarity-building is a continuous process. This project further bridges cyber (i.e., website) and physical (i.e., face-to-face interactions) spaces. Prof. Cheng will build a team of educators/collaborators to generate mini-lesson plans based on the website and host public forums to share these plans and discuss Black-Asian relationality. 

Elizabeth Drescher (Religious Studies) “Seeing Spirits of Silicon Valley in Place: Mural Art as Memory, Identity, Resistance, Solidarity, and Transformation in San José, CA”

Urban corporate development projects reconfigure neighborhoods in complexly entangled cultural, economic, political, social, and, not least, aesthetic ways. One facet of this reconfiguration is marked through mural art in neighborhoods most directly impacted by urban development. Murals, described as “the people’s art” and collectively curated as “museums of the streets,” often foreground religious content as resources for resistance, solidarity, and transformation in the face of corporate- and government-sponsored remaking of neighborhoods according to a social aesthetic of generic placelessness. Prof. Drescher’s project will explore the place of mural art in San José, reading murals as artifacts of the ongoing struggle for spatial justice between local residents and small businesses grappling with gentrification and displacement and corporate developers, government leaders, city planners, and tech workers who will work and live in redeveloped San José neighborhoods. Click here to learn more about the murals that inspired the project.

Christina Zanfagna (Music) “Black-Italian Crossroads: Racial Tensions, Social Solidarities, and Sonic Affinities”

From the influence of North African music in Southern Italy to contemporary “hip-wop” in the U.S., Prof. Zanfanga’s project explores Black-Italian musical affinities and racial tensions. Exposing the local and transnational contact zones between Black and Italian communities, this collaborative project will interrogate their overlapping histories of migration and cultural assimilation as well as racial and ethnic exclusion. These submerged histories of interracial musical exchange reveal new understandings of how race and music intersect as they disrupt the dominant polarized optics of race in American popular music (i.e. Black/White) that are often based on notions of racial essentialism. Work during the fellowship period will focus on the Black-Italian nexus in early 20th-century New Orleans jazz and Italian American female pop stars' appropriation of Black musical and dance styles such as voguing and gangsta rap.

An exciting part of these projects is how they will engage with students, faculty, and community partners. Stay tuned for more details about these collaborations.