Events & Calendars Cripping Assimilation Genres: Latinx and Filipinx Borderlands in Transpacific Encounter

The Amherst College Spanish Department is pleased to present a lecture by Jason Coráñez Bolton: “Cripping Assimilation Genres: Latinx and Filipinx Borderlands in Transpacific Encounter”

Bolton says of his lecture: "This talk will develop a postcolonial crip and queer analytic to understand histories of US imperialism in the Philippines and the US Mexican borderlands as flash-points in global disability histories. I propose a framing of comparative racialization in transpacific American encounter to demonstrate how colonialism has historically relied on an enduring and insistent assumption in the cognitive inferiority of the colonized – an assumption constructed through the perverse deviations of the “native” from proper respectable civilization. Using Multiethnic American and hemispheric fictions in literature and film, particularly Latinx and Filipinx cultural archives, I seek to crip genres of assimilation to show that disability is not epiphenomenal to the political violence of imperial statecraft but rather its principal engine."

This lecture is free and open to the public.