Saad Khan is a New York–based filmmaker and archivist, and the founder of Khajistan, an archive dedicated to rescuing and digitizing neglected histories from the Greater Middle East. He is also the director of Showgirls of Pakistan (2020).

The screening will be followed by a Q&A with filmmaker Saad Khan, moderated by Professor Usha Iyer.

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Co-sponsored by Film & Media Studies, Center for South Asia, Asian American Studies, The Clayman Institute for Gender Research, Stanford Arts Institute, Performance Studies, Stanford Cinematheque, the Berkeley-Stanford Transpacific/Asian American Art History Working Group, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and the Asian American Activities Center.

VISITOR INFORMATION
Oshman Hall is located within the McMurtry Building on Stanford campus at 355 Roth Way. Visitor parking is available in designated areas and is free after 4pm on weekdays. Alternatively, take the Caltrain to Palo Alto Transit Center and hop on the free Stanford Marguerite Shuttle. If you need a disability-related accommodation or wheelchair access information, please contact Julianne White at jgwhite@stanford.edu. This event is open to Stanford affiliates and the general public. Admission is free with RSVP.

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An undocumented activist and a social scientist come together to tally of the structural costs of undocumented life.

An inhumane math pervades this country: even as our government extracts labor and often taxes from undocumented workers, it excludes these same workers from its social safety net. As a result, these essential workers struggle to get their own basic needs met, from healthcare to education, from freedom of association to the ability to drive to work without looking for ICE in the rearview mirror.

When Alix Dick’s family found themselves in the crosshairs of cartel violence in Sinaloa, Mexico, she and her siblings were forced to flee to the U.S. Many of the scenes that she shares are difficult and unforgettable: escaping from a relationship in which her partner threatened to report her to immigration; getting root canals done in an underground dental clinic. But there are moments of triumph, too: founding her own nonprofit; working on films that tell important stories; and working with her co-author Dr. Garcia to tell her story in a framework that lays bare the realities of structural oppression.

As Alix and Antero tally the costs of undocumented life, they present a final bill of what is owed to the immigrant community. In this way, their book flips the traditional narrative about the economics of immigration on its head.

Sponsored by the Research Institute of CCSRE.

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The backlash was swift when the NFL announced Bad Bunny would perform at Super Bowl LX. The global superstar’s status as a Spanish-speaking Latino and his statements about ICE made him a natural target for conservative outrage; some online commenters called for Bad Bunny’s deportation before the February game. (As a Puerto Rican, Bad Bunny is a U.S. citizen.) One week before the Halftime Show, Bad Bunny made history by becoming the first-ever Spanish-language artist to win the Grammy for Album of the Year, for his latest album, DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS. Global superstar Bad Bunny’s record-breaking success is due in large part to his unapologetic championing of his homeland and the intimate connections he maintains in Puerto Rico.

Born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, Bad Bunny has lived a life marked by public crises—blackouts, hurricanes, political corruption and oppression—that have exposed the ongoing impacts of colonialism in Puerto Rico. Offering a portrait of the past and future of Puerto Rican resistance through one of its loudest and proudest voices, P FKN R draws on ethnographic research and interviews with journalists, politicians, and the pop star’s close collaborators to set Bad Bunny and Puerto Rican resistance in a historical, political, and cultural context. Authors Vanessa Díaz and Petra Rivera-Rideau—creators of the “Bad Bunny Syllabus”—situate Bad Bunny in the long tradition of infusing joy and protest into music.

P FKN R honors the many, evolving forms of daily resistance to oppression and colonialism that are part of Puerto Rican life.

VANESSA DÍAZ is Associate Professor of Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies at Loyola Marymount University and the author of Manufacturing Celebrity: Latino Paparazzi and Women Reporters in Hollywood.

PETRA R. RIVERA - RIDEAU is Associate Professor of American Studies at Wellesley College and the author of Remixing Reggaetón: The Cultural Politics of Race in Puerto Rico and Fitness Fiesta!: Selling Latinx Culture through Zumba.

The authors have written about Bad Bunny for the Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, Washington Post, and elsewhere. Their “Bad Bunny Syllabus” has been covered by the New York Times, Boston Globe, NPR, Vanity Fair, and The Tonight Show.

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About Junot Diaz:

Junot Díaz was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey. He is the author of Drown, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize, and This Is How You Lose Her. Díaz has been awarded a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, the 2002 PEN/Malamud Award and the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Díaz is a MacArthur fellow and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Lecture Abstract:

In our anti-democratic socially mediated conjuncture where the act of listening has eroded to the point of near-extinction, what is learned when those of us living under conditions of Pattersonian social death attempt to super-listen to the actual dead through the (undead) medium of literature — a super-listening that evokes Donald Davidson’s concept of radical interpretation. What is made possible with such deep dead communions, and what is not?

Book signing:

Thursday April 23: 3.30-4.30pm, Stanford Humanities Center

St. Clair Drake Memorial Lecture:

The St. Clair Drake Memorial Lectures are dedicated to the memory of Professor St.Clair Drake, renowned African American anthropologist and educator, and the founding Director of the Program in African & African American Studies at Stanford University.

St. Clair Drake Memorial Lecture presented by the Department of African & African American Studies (DAAAS). Visit our website at aaas.stanford.edu for more information about the department.

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Dr. Milthlo will be joined in conversation with ​Professor Jennifer DeVere Brody (Theater and Performance Studies and African and African American Studies at Stanford University; Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts Research; recent curator of Edmonia Lewis: Indelible Impressions at Cantor Arts Center).

Books will be for sale at the Stanford Campus Bookstore and through the publisher, the University of Nebraska Press. Please preorder a copy and bring it to the event. Dr. Mithlo will be available for book signing at the end of the event.

All public programs at the Cantor Arts Center are always free! Space for this program is limited; advance registration is recommended. Those who have registered will have priority for seating.

RSVP here.

This program is co-sponsored by the Native American Studies, Cantor Arts Center, Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and Native American Cultural Center​.

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Parking

Free visitor parking is available along Lomita Drive as well as on the first floor of the Roth Way Garage Structure, located at the corner of Campus Drive West and Roth Way at 345 Campus Drive, Stanford, CA 94305. From the Palo Alto Caltrain station, the Cantor Arts Center is about a 20-minute walk or the free Marguerite shuttle will bring you to campus via the Y or X lines.

Disability parking is located along Lomita Drive near the main entrance of the Cantor Arts Center. Additional disability parking is located on Museum Way and in Parking Structure 1 (Roth Way & Campus Drive). Please click here to view the disability parking and access points.

Accessibility Information or Requests

Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University is committed to ensuring our programs are accessible to everyone. To request access information and/or accommodations for this event, please complete this form at least one week prior to the event: museum.stanford.edu/access.

For questions, please contact disability.access@stanford.edu or Oswaldo Rosales, orosal@stanford.edu.

Connect with the Cantor Arts Center! Subscribe to our mailing list and follow us on Instagram.

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Book Cover Image by Shelley Niro. The Show Off, digital image, 2017. Courtesy of the Artist. Photo of Nancy Marie Mithlo by Marc Hausman​.

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Austin Anderson Ph.D is a Provostial Fellow at Stanford University and director of the Stanford Critical Game Studies Lab. He specializes in game studies and African American literature, with a particular focus on the burgeoning field critical race game studies. He is especially interested in how games are enmeshed with race, gender, identity, and class while also examining the liberatory potentials of gameworlds. His research and teaching interests also include African American literature, contemporary American fiction, media and comic studies, and Japanese popular culture ranging from manga to anime to video games.

His first book, Racial Recursivity: A Methodology for Critical Race Game Studies, uses the concepts of repetition and recursion to develop a formalist methodology for analyzing videogames as racial-cultural projects. It offers racial recursivity as a method to explore the underlying racial ideology within videogames, surfaces how these ideologies are manifested in game aesthetics, describes how these aesthetics connect to historical ideas of and around race, and argues that this process creates a self-referential feedback loop by its repetitious reoccurrence.

Chelsey Clark (Psychology)

Dr. Chelsey S. Clark is a Provostial Fellow and Lecturer in the Department of Psychology at Stanford University. She earned her Ph.D. in Psychology and Social Policy from Princeton University and her B.S. in Psychology from Yale University. Her work has been published in leading journals such as Nature Human Behaviour and Annual Review of Psychology. In addition to her academic work, she is the founder of The Terrace Café, a project that reflects her interest in entrepreneurship and community development.

Clark’s research examines how institutions—such as courts, corporations, and other social systems—shape public attitudes, social norms, and behavior. Using experimental methods, she studies how institutional decisions send signals that influence how people perceive what others believe, and how those perceptions drive individual and collective action. Her work spans topics including prejudice reduction, social norms, public opinion, and policy-relevant behavior change, with a focus on generating insights that advance both psychological theory and real-world impact.

Ángel Ross (Sociology)

Dr. Ángel Mendiola Ross is a Provostial Fellow in the Department of Sociology at Stanford University. He earned his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley, with a designated emphasis in Global Metropolitan Studies. His research sits at the intersection of urban and suburban sociology, race and inequality, housing, and policing. Prior to his doctoral work, he was a senior research associate at PolicyLink and holds a Master of City Planning from UC Berkeley and bachelor’s degrees in sociology and economics from the University of Southern California.

Ross’s research examines how structural forces—particularly housing policy, policing practices, and carceral systems—shape racial and economic inequality across metropolitan regions. Using computational and quantitative methods, their work focuses on suburbanization, segregation, and displacement, with particular attention to how institutions such as prisons and eviction systems contribute to spatial inequality in the post–civil rights era. Their projects explore issues like gentrification, renter vulnerability, and the role of land use and law enforcement in reinforcing segregation, with the goal of informing more equitable policy solutions.

Sponsored by the Research Institute of CCSRE.

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Sponsored by the Research Institute of CCSRE.

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