Elda María Román, “Race and Upward Mobility Narratives”

Date
Wed October 3rd 2018, 12:00 - 1:30pm PDT
Location
Black Community Services Center
Event Sponsor
Sponsored by the Research Institute of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity; co-sponsored by the American Studies Program; the Department of English; and the Center of Poverty and Inequality
CCSRE Faculty Seminar Series | Elda María Román | “Race and Upward Mobility Narratives”
Speaker: Elda María Román

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What cultural work do ethnic upward mobility narratives perform? In this talk, Román will present work from her book Race and Upward Mobility (Stanford UP, 2017), which analyzes African American and Mexican American cultural production from the 1940s-2000s. Turning to literature, television, and film, she reveals how comparative ethnic studies allows us to understand why particular narratives have arisen to make sense of and to render conflicts in a stratified society, and why the two largest racialized ethnic groups in the U.S. share as well as differ in their narrative strategies. As a genre, the ethnic upward mobility narrative includes sincere portrayals of desires for financial solvency and social incorporation, satiric critiques of or ambivalence toward material accumulation in a society with a severe racial wealth gap, and varied interpretations of what the end goal of socioeconomic mobility should be. Román will discuss the ways in which these narratives give form to otherwise abstract ideas and social patterns and how they participate in shaping the way we think about socioeconomic hierarchies.

Elda María Román is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at the University of Southern California. As a scholar in literary and cultural studies, she researches race and class, examining their effects across ethnic groups and through scholarship across disciplines. She is the author of Race and Upward Mobility (Stanford UP, 2017) and has published articles on Latinx and African American cultural production. Her current project examines contemporary narratives about fears of changing demographics. An awardee of CSRE Teaching and Dissertation fellowships, she received her PhD in English from Stanford in 2013.