Migrant Subjects Across & Within

THE WOLF HUMANITIES CENTER AT THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA IS AN INNOVATIVE RESEARCH CENTER STRIVING TO DEMONSTRATE HOW VITAL THE HUMANITIES ARE TO ALL ASPECTS OF OUR LIVES. THE CENTER SUPPORTS

AN

ANNUAL

THEME-BASED

FELLOWSHIP

PROGRAM, A SERIES OF PUBLIC EVENTS, AND A VARIETY OF RESEARCH-RELATED ACTIVITIES FOR MEMBERS OF THE PENN ACADEMIC COMMUNITY. WITH THESE AND OTHER EFFORTS, SUCH AS OUR HUMANITIES AT LARGE COLLABORATIONS, WE INVITE PEOPLE OF ALL AGES AND PLACES TO JOIN US IN A HUMANISTIC EXPLORATION OF THE MOST IMPORTANT ISSUES OF OUR TIME.

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March 25, 2022 Wolf Humanities Center School of Arts & Sciences University of Pennsylvania Humanities Conference Room • 623 Williams Hall 255 South 36th Street • Philadelphia

A PROGRAM OF THE WOLF HUMANITIES CENTER'S 2021–2022 FORUM ON MIGRATION

UNDERGRADUATE HUMANITIES FORUM RESEARCH FELLOWS, 2021–2022

Katherine Busch Nicolas Fonseca Brendan Lui Caitlyn Marentette

Claire Nguyen Chinaza Ruth Okonkwo Christopher Schiller Samuel Strickberger

UNDERGRADUATE HUMANITIES FORUM DIRECTOR

David Spafford Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations University of Pennsylvania

WELCOME On behalf of the Wolf Humanities Center's Undergraduate Humanities Forum, I am delighted to welcome you to this year’s research conference, “Migrant Subjects Across & Within.” Organized around the Wolf Humanities Center’s 2021–2022 topic of Migration, today's conference showcases research by eight undergraduate scholars from disciplines across the humanities and social sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. The fellows' projects reflect diverse ways in which we can conceptualize migration as both a human experience and as a phenomenon tied to objects and ideas.

In the last few years, migration has become an ever greater topic of concern—from Somalia and Syria and, recently, in Afghanistan and Ukraine, human migrants have been on the rise. In the last decade, the UNHCR has noted a drastic increase in migrants, reporting over 84 million displaced persons in mid-2021. Moreover, the migration of not only people, but also of ideas, of digital entities, and of disease, among other things, have proliferated in recent years. For these reasons and many more, this year’s theme reads as especially timely.

Our conference covers both a depth and a breadth of topics, reflecting the universality of the experience of migration in its many forms. Our first panel, “Migrants in Resistance,” explores vignettes of opposition and endurance among projects concerning indigeneity, revolutionary filmmaking, and workers’ unions. The second panel, titled “(Im)position: Self-Determination, Criminalization, Morality,” examines pivotal decisions made among migrant bodies in light of antebellum chattel slavery, Vietnamese war refugees, and migrant citizenship. Our final panel, “Remembrance and Erasure,” analyzes the roles of belonging and of exclusion among artist-migrants in the global novel and the role of language and affect as mobilizing forces against the nation.

This year, the undergraduate fellows have gathered for bimonthly meetings led by Undergraduate Humanities Forum Director, Dr. David Spafford. Visits from Wolf Humanities Center Director Dr. Jamal Elias and 2021-2022 Forum on Migration Topic Director Dr. Dagmawi Woubshet helped prepare the fellows to consider migration as a topic of academic study. Dr. Spafford led group discussions and exercises, helping us to develop our research projects. The fellows were also invited to present their research in progress to the group for peer review, sparking wideranging, interdisciplinary discussions on the theme.

The Undergraduate Humanities Forum also hosted guests from outside the Wolf Center. In November, we welcomed College of Arts and Sciences junior Maya PrattFreedman for a rough-cut screening of her film, Essentially Criminal, about the perils of migration at the US-Mexico border. More recently, the group met with Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen, following his March 16th Dr. S.T. Lee Distinguished Lecture in the Humanities at the Wolf Humanities Center. We launched our year-long exploration of migration with a discussion about his novel The Sympathizer and were grateful for the opportunity to talk with him about his inspiration and scholarship.

There are several distinguished faculty and staff members who have made this year's research seminar and conference possible. The fellows owe our gratitude to the Wolf Humanities Center staff: Sara Varney, Associate Director, and Pamela Horn, Program Coordinator. Our thanks also go to Wolf Humanities Center Director Dr. Jamal J. Elias, as well as this year’s Topic Director, Dr. Dagmawi Woubshet. For their time and support, we are indelibly grateful. We are most appreciative of Dr. David Spafford. His time, advice, and support have been of tremendous help to each of us as we have refined our research and presentation skills. We are lastly grateful for the faculty advisors who have supported our fellows’ research as it has taken form over the last year.

We hope that you will join us in an enthusiastic dialogue across all our presentations today. On behalf of the Wolf Humanities Center's 2021–2022 cohort of Undergraduate Fellows, thank you for your support and attendance at this year’s Undergraduate Humanities Forum research conference.

Caitlyn Marentette 2021–2022 Chair Undergraduate Humanities Forum

9:00–9:30 AM

BREAKFAST AND REGISTRATION

9:30 AM

OPENING REMARKS

David Spafford, Director, Undergraduate Humanities Forum; Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations 9:40–10:50 AM

MIGRANTS IN RESISTANCE

MODERATOR: Esmeralda Arrizón-Palomera, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Wolf Humanities Center

Nicolas Fonseca | Comparative Literature, Latin American Studies Tercer Cine, Otra Vez: Subversive Pedagogy and Nomadism in Latin American Film Brendan Lui | Political Science Called In, Kept Out: Explaining Variation in Construction Trade Union Behavior Towards Migrant Workers in the Advanced Industrial Democracies Chinaza Ruth Okonkwo | Philosophy, History The Great Migration: Igbo Movement, Indigeneity, and Identity 11:00 AM–12:10 PM

(IM)POSITION: SELF-DETERMINATION, CRIMINALIZATION, MORALITY MODERATOR: Sarah Barringer Gordon, Arlin M. Adams Professor of Constitutional Law and Professor of History

Katherine Busch | Moral and Political Philosophy An Exploration of the Ethical Foundations of Citizenship Claire Nguyen | History, minors in Asian American Studies and English (Dis)placed: A Story of the War on Southeast Asian Refugee Youth in Philadelphia from 1975–2000 Samuel Strickberger | History; minors in Survey Research and Data Analytics The Jewish Orthodox Race-Based Slavery Debates, 1848–1861

UNDERGRADUATE HUMANITIES FORUM RESEARCH CONFERENCE

12:10–1:15 PM

LUNCH

1:15–2:00 PM

REMEMBRANCE AND ERASURE MODERATOR: Ishani Dasgupta, PhD Candidate, South Asia Studies and

Anthropology; Research Associate, Wolf Humanities Center

Caitlyn Marentette | South Asia Studies How Masses Mobilize: The Bangla/Urdu Divide in Pakistan, 1947–1971 Christopher Schiller | Comparative Literature; Philosophy, Politics, and Economics; minor in French and Francophone Studies The Vagabond Novelist: Roberto Bolaño's Migrant-Artists and the Global Novel 2:00 PM

CLOSING REMARKS Caitlyn Marentette, Chair and Research Fellow, Undergraduate Humanities Forum

ABSTRACTS Katherine Busch Moral and Political Philosophy; CAS, 2023 An Exploration of the Ethical Foundations of Citizenship In order to fully understand migration, we must first examine what it means to belong. Movement is dictated by desires to reside and inhabit, and without this context we cannot fully grasp the rights of migrants as well as the political and interpersonal forces that seek to restrict their mobility. For modern nation-states, belonging is rooted in citizenship. It is only from the web of moral and political ideals surrounding what it means to be a citizen that we can fully comprehend the issues surrounding human movement. In order to contribute to this pivotal framework, I will investigate the ethical underpinnings of citizenship and how these concepts influence questions of belonging and entitlement.

Nicolas Fonseca Comparative Literature; Latin American Studies; CAS, 2022 Tercer Cine, Otra Vez: Subversive Pedagogy and Nomadism in Latin American Film As neoliberalism cracks across the Americas, the original calls for insurgent and didactic modes of cinema require reconsideration beyond their origins in the atmosphere of the late 1960s. While 20th-century techniques of vertically organized rebellion were often useful, contemporary scholars focusing on the prism of indigeneity have highlighted the European origins of class analysis and the need to theorize the political potential of non-European political philosophies and modes of thinking/organizing. As such, the figure of the “nomad,” who exists outside of European categorization and thrives in unfamiliar epistemological territory, has been revealed to be a privileged position in social change and particularly useful in understanding the relevance of indigenous metaphysics to contemporary politics.

As such, this paper draws out particular continuities and contrast between Marxist Latin American Cinema of the 20th century and contemporary Indigenous Cinema, utilizing the nomad as a mode of interpreting the relationship between these two strains of radical thought and their respective theories of aesthetics and politics.

Brendan Lui Political Science; CAS, 2022 Called In, Kept Out: Explaining variation in construction trade union behavior towards migrant workers in the advanced industrial democracies In the advanced industrial democracies, migrant workers have become an integral part of the construction sector workforces. Migrant workers are a particularly appealing source of labor to construction firms hoping to cut costs and increase profits by relying on irregular forms of employment. As a result, construction trade unions are experiencing downward pressures on wages, deteriorations of labor standards, and declines in sectoral union density. While these trends are occurring across the advanced industrialized world, construction trade unions have not responded uniformly to these new challenges. This cross-national study seeks to uncover why unions behave differently towards migrant workers as they fight to maintain collectively bargained wage levels and working conditions. Based on

evidence from Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the United States, this research project argues that union democracy and organizing capacity interactively explain why some construction trade unions behave more inclusively towards migrant workers than others.

Caitlyn Marentette South Asia Studies; CAS, 2022 Chair, Wolf Undergraduate Humanities Forum How Masses Mobilize: The Bangla/Urdu Divide in Pakistan, 1947–1971 This study investigates the lived legacy of Bangla amid the flow of people and languages to and from the eastern portion of Pakistan between 1947 and 1971. Using primary- and secondary-source literary materials to trace a legal history of Bangla, I will explore how Bangla and Urdu—the definitions extended to them through legal codes, the exclusionary and assimilatory properties they developed in Pakistan, and the anxieties and prides that manifested in Bengali sources—constructed the culture of a nascent Bangladeshi national identity and mobilized masses to fight for an independent nation. In particular, this independent study strives to emphasize how Bangla operated and continues to operate as an affective and politically mobilizing force within and beyond eastern Pakistan’s—and, later, Bangladesh’s—borders.

Claire Nguyen History; Minors in Asian American Studies and English; CAS, 2022 (Dis)placed: A Story of the War on Southeast Asian Refugee Youth in Philadelphia from 1975-2000 Drawing from oral histories and archival material, this project will tell the story of how newly resettled Southeast Asian refugee youth in Philadelphia navigated their neighborhoods fraught with neoliberal under-resourcing, racism, bullying, and violence. As they formed gangs to assert their own sense of belonging and to protect themselves, the War on Drugs and the War on Crime against poor Black and Brown youth quickly swept these subjects of "American rescue" into prison, demonstrating how—for these refugees—the war truly never ended. This story contextualizes the lives of over 16,000 formerly incarcerated Southeast Asian refugees now facing deportation and the struggle to free the Southeast Asian refugee community from the ongoing violence of American imperialism.

Chinaza Ruth Okonkwo Philosophy; History; CAS, 2022 The Great Migration: Igbo Movement, Indigeneity, and Identity This project seeks to draw attention to an understudied event within Igbo history by putting the concept of indigeneity and the subsequent relationship with the land that stems from this concept with mass migrations that occurred during and after the age of colonization as a result of forced labor and/or a desire to acclimate into a changing economic and social world. Using historical, archival, and literary research, this project will examine the ways that migration has impacted an indigenous Igbo conception of home, kinship, and relationship to land. By examining this period of colonization, I will examine how Igbo people’s connection to their villages of origin has transformed.

Christopher Schiller Comparative Literature; Philosophy, Politics, and Economics; Minor in French and Francophone Studies; CAS, 2022 The Vagabond Novelist: Roberto Bolaño's Migrant-Artists and the Global Novel Increasingly, cross-cultural and international narratives have pervaded into the Anglo-American cultural consciousness, with the global novel and translated novel assuming a more and more prominent position in the American literary landscape.

Bolaño is perhaps more widely read in English translation than in Latin America, where authors like Horacio Castellanos Moya accuse him of not being national enough, or of playing in too much to Anglo-American sensibilities. My project will examine Roberto Bolaño’s place in this landscape of the global translated novel, analyzing his artist protagonists as migrants and vagabonds who use the process of artistic creation to escape the political and economic disasters of their nations of origins. I will then analyze the position of these artist-migrant protagonists within the context of Anglo-American readership of Latin American authors, arguing that the history of domination and exchange between Anglo-America and Latin America informs Bolaño’s narratives and their reception.

Samuel Strickberger History; Minors in Survey Research and Data Analytics; CAS, 2022 The Jewish Orthodox Race-Based Slavery Debates, 1848–1861 Race-based chattel slavery was the most contentious moral and political issue in the antebellum United States. The debates, and their stakes, confronted the onehundred thousand Jewish immigrants of the 1840-1850s almost upon arrival.

This history honors thesis will study antebellum Jewish Orthodox reactions. It will situate the Orthodox debates within a broader set of disputes, including those of leading Protestant theologians along with recent and long-term Jewish history, such as European persecution, American assimilation, and the Jewish Enlightenment.

This paper will highlight a key, but under-examined, moment in the development of American and post-Enlightenment Jewish thought. The author is indelibly grateful for the mentorship and encouragement of Professors Sarah Gordon and Kathy Peiss.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The Undergraduate Humanities Forum Research Fellows also thank the following individuals for their generous contributions, guidance, and support.

Esmeralda Arrizón-Palomera Eiichiro Azuma Rita Barnard Sara Belasco Michelle Bigenho Ishani Dasgupta Karen Detlefsen Laura Eckstein Brent Fujioka Srilata Gangulee Sarah Barringer Gordon Fariha Khan Noor-Aiman Khan Arthur Kiron Julia Lynch Lisa Mitchell Bruce Nielsen Nick Okrent Deven Patel Kathy Peiss Rupa Pillai Jennifer Ponce de Leon Jean-Michel Rabate Jim Sykes Kok-Chor Tan Linn Washington Jr. Beth Wenger

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