Weather Update

Due to the storm, Barnard College closed at 4pm Friday, for non-essential personnel. “Essential personnel" include staff in Facilities, Public Safety and Residence Halls.  

Friday evening and weekend classes are cancelled but events are going forward as planned unless otherwise noted. The Athena Film Festival programs are also scheduled to go forward as planned but please check http://athenafilmfestival.com/ for the latest information. 

The Barnard Library and Archives closed at 4pm Friday and will remain closed on Saturday, Feb. 9.  The Library will resume regular hours on Sunday opening at 10am.  

Please be advised that due to the conditions, certain entrances to campus may be closed.  The main gate at 117th Street & Broadway will remain open.  For further updates on college operations, please check this website, call the College Emergency Information Line 212-854-1002 or check AM radio station 1010WINS. 

3:12 PM 02/08/2013

American Pietàs: Visions of Race, Death and the Maternal

Mellon Mays Distinguished Lecture by Ruby Tapia
Thursday, March 29, 2012
5:30 PM
Ella Weed Room, Milbank Hall
visual arts
In a lecture based on her recently published book, Ruby C. Tapia will discuss how a range of 21st century visual representations of death conjoined to the maternal reflect and produce racialized citizenship. By means of a sustained engagement with Roland Barthes's suturing of race, death and the maternal in Camera Lucida, American Pietàs contends that the contradictory and generative essence of the photograph is both as a signifier of death and a guarantor of resurrection.  
 
Tapia's study explores the implications of this argument for maternal representations in the context of specific visual cultural moments: the photojournalistic documentation of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina; the commemoration of Princess Diana in U.S. Magazines; the intertext of Toni Morrison's and Hollywood's Beloved; the social and cultural death in teen pregnancy, imaged and regulated in California's Partnership for Responsible Parenting campaigns; and popular constructions of the "Widows of 9/11" in print and televisual journalism.  
 
Her talk will provide an overview of how her book treats these seemingly disparate texts as visual nodes in a larger network of racialized discourses of national death and remembering, focusing at length on a long history of both well known and lesser known pietas that are distinctly "American" if not in title, then in literal form and racially figured national substance.

Sponsored by the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program.