Department of History, UC Santa Barbara

Public History Colloquium Event–”Abina and the Important Men: Graphic History as Public History”
2021-03-05 12:00 - 13:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Zoom, CA
Join the History Department’s Colloquium in Public History on Friday, March 5 at noon for a Zoom talk by Trevor R. Getz (San Francisco State University).
Abina and the Important Men began as an attempt to address a classroom problem: how to teach students about the dual responsibilities of the historian to historical subjects and contemporary audiences. These goals both drove its development as a graphic history. Fortuitously, its publication caught the leading edge of the rehabilitation of that medium as a serious scholarly mode of communication. This great graphic shift is part of a wider realignment of both the history discipline and popular culture, and it provides both opportunities and pitfalls for the scholar who wishes to share their work with a broader public while retaining its authenticity and maintaining its accuracy. This is a discussion by the author of Abina and the Important Men about what he has learned since its publication in first edition in 2012, with some arguments about the future of the graphic history genre. The graphic novel can be obtained through the Oxford University Press website, or the community-built 2-D animated video version can be watched here (Password: [REDACTED]
Register for this Zoom event at http://bit.ly/abina-webinar.
Recommended video/reading/short links:
• “How to Design a Comix Page” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dQEfL2BfUM
• Julia Alekseyeva, “Form, Function, and Style in the Graphic Essay,” Sequentials Journal, 1.4 (May 2020).
https://www.sequentialsjournal.net/issues/issue1.4/alekseyeva.html?fbclid=IwAR0_bxgktwVoNr6TEcWjSeVogcZjM_U36FhvB6GpHXs8mhSfMKSc9PgTz0k
Rocky Cotard and Laurent Dubois, “The Slave Revolution That Gave Birth to Haiti,” The Nib (Feb. 5, 2018).
https://thenib.com/haitian-revolution/
• Nick Sousanis, “No Sides,” Spin, Weave & Cut (blog), http://spinweaveandcut.com/no-sides/
• Charis Loke & Max Loh, “The Word for World is Image,” Singpowrimo, 20.2:
https://www.singpowrimo.com/features/wordimage?fbclid=IwAR2WSiuLQKWT3EkbJvtBPdC7UmLWquXuduKUGLibIi9sA5jby-sCf1cLqLg
Other recommended readings:
• Trevor R. Getz, “Getting Serious about Comic Histories”, American Historical Review, 2018, 123, 1596-1597.
• Barbara Tversky, “Visualizing Thought”, Topics in Cognitive Science, 3 (2011), 499-535.
• Neil Cohn, “In defense of a ‘grammar’ in the visual language of comics”, Journal of Pragmatics, 127 (2018), 1-19.

History Associates: Luke Roberts, "A Samurai Wife Divorces her Lout of a Husband"
2021-03-06 16:00
Join the History Associates for an engaging presentation from UCSB History Professor Luke Roberts on a specific case that influenced gender roles in 19th-century Japan.
Zoom link: ucsb.zoom.us/j/6855143149
Mori Nao, a young samurai wife in Japan, desired a divorce from her abusive husband in 1824. Legally a man could divorce his wife but a wife could not divorce her husband. Nevertheless, she persisted in the face of his adamant refusal to divorce her. Soon her relatives mobilized their social networks to convince his relatives to pressure him to give her a divorce, but he still refused. Eventually most samurai in her lord’s domain in southwestern Japan were working to get her a divorce and even the lord became involved in supporting what she had no legal right to demand, and threatened the well-being of the husband’s kin group.
Finally, the husband divorced her. His angry kin put him in a cage in his backyard where he was forced to live for some months. No formal record survives, but a detailed diary of the process made by one relative of his house who played an important role in the negotiations reveals much about gender roles, family networks and common disjunctures between law-as-written and law-as-it-operated.

IHC Talk: Utathya Chattopadhyaya, "Cannabis and South Asia"
2021-03-09 16:00 - 18:00
The IHC‘s Asian/American Studies Collective welcomes UCSB History professor Utathya Chattopadhyaya for a talk on the role of cannabis in South Asian experiences of empire.
Historical scholarship now conceives empire as a webbed uneven field of power relations and a multispecies enterprise. In other words, the anxious and breathless struggle of European imperialism to sustain itself subjected human, plant, animal, and insect bodies to its ambition to govern through logics of colonial difference. This paper argues that the cannabis plant in South Asia, in the nineteenth century, while being a subject of British revenue systems transformed into a race-d and gendered mode of explaining anticolonial insurgency by South Asian rebels. The intoxicating substance of the plant, in the discursive logic of empire, was seen to vitiate Asian bodies against European power. Cannabis also animated other imperial operations like the delegitimization of Indian sovereignty. Using the expansive reach of imperial periodical culture in the nineteenth century, this paper highlights the Asian and global contexts within which cannabis became an alibi for rebellion or violence against empire.
Utathya Chattopadhyaya is Assistant Professor of History at the UC Santa Barbara. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois and studies the history of modern South Asia, British imperialism, and agrarian commodities. His work has appeared in the South African Historical Journal, Historical Reflections, and Animalia: An Anti-Imperial Bestiary for our Times. He is currently writing a monograph on cannabis and empire in British India.
This event will be held on Zoom at https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/81976204749?pwd=[REDACTED]

8th Annual Van Gelderen Lecture: Sasha Coles, “The Great Silk Experiment: Silkworms, Mulberry Trees, and Women Workers in Mormon Country, 1850s-1910s”
2021-03-14 16:00
UCSB History Associates presents the eighth annual Van Gelderen Graduate Student Lecture, this year given by Dr. Sasha Coles.
From the 1850s to the early 1900s, Latter-Day Saint (or Mormon) women in both rural and urban Great Basin settlements planted mulberry trees, raised silkworms, and attempted to produce silk cocoons, thread, and cloth of a high-enough quality to use and sell. By most measurements, they failed. Homegrown silk was time-consuming, onerous, and practically impossible to profit from, primarily due to superior imported goods from Europe and Asia. Even so, this talk will show how the homegrown silk industry provided Mormon women with a venue to make their own money, shape transnational labor and commodity markets, and understand ever-changing environmental conditions. In these and other ways, Mormon women used silk production and consumption to resolve tensions between economic cooperation and competition, market isolation and integration, and religious exceptionalism and American citizenship.
Our speaker, Sasha Coles, defended her UCSB Ph.D. dissertation successfully in February 2021. She received her M.A. from UCSB in 2015 and her B.A. from Arizona State University in 2013. Her publications include two articles in historical journals, and she has developed a website on the Walt Disney theme parks.
The Zoom link for this year’s Van Gelderen Lecture is https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/6855143149.
