2003-2004 Provost Lecture Series

Globalization and Its Discontents: Exposing the Underside
Friday, September 26, 2003
10:30 am to noon
Hemisphere Room
5th Floor, Hale Library

Dr. Evelyn Hu-DeHart
Professor of History
Director, Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America
Brown University

Biographical sketch

Evelyn Hu-DeHart is Professor of History, and Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown. She joins Brown from the University of Colorado at Boulder where she was Chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies and Director of the Center for Studies of Ethnicity and Race in America. She has also taught at the City University of New York system, New York University, Washington University in St. Louis, University of Arizona and University of Michigan, as well as lectured at universities and research institutes in Mexico, Peru, Cuba, France, Hongkong, Taiwan, and China.

Evelyn Hu-DeHart often describes herself as a multicultural person who speaks several languages (including English, Chinese, French, and Spanish) and moves easily among several cultures. Her professional life has focused on what Cuban historian Juan Perez de la Riva calls "historia de la gente sin historia." She was born in China and immigrated to the United States with her parents when she was twelve. As an undergraduate at Stanford University she studied in Brazil on an exchange program. She became fascinated with Latin America and that interest eventually led her to a Ph.D. in Latin American History from the University of Texas at Austin. In 1988 she left the City University of New York to become the CSERA Director at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She has written two books on the Yaqui Indians, and is now engaged in a large research project on the Asian diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Abstract

This lecture is a critique of the dominant idea of globalization as a universal good and as an inevitable force, by examining the impact of corporate-led globalization on low-end workers-- women, poor people in Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean and around the Pacific Rim, as well as immigrants from these same regions of the world to the U.S.