Raising Awareness Through the Arts: Sulong Theatre Collective and Migrant Filipina Workers in Canada
Speaker: Professor Eleanor Ty, Fulbright Canada Visiting Research Chair at UC Santa Barbara, Professor of English & Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario
Thursday, March 7, 2019
4:45-5:50pm
Kinsey Pavillion 1240B
RSVP required: jjchun@asianam.ucla.edu
Abstract
Launched by playwright and novelist Catherine Hernandez, Sulong Theatre Collective produced a play called Future Folk for the Carlos Bulosan Theatre in Toronto for its 2009/10 season. The performance uses indigenous Filipino music, dance, interviews with live-in caregivers, humor, poetry, and melodrama to depict the difficulties experienced by migrant domestic workers from the Philippines in Canada. Its aim was to entertain, but also, more importantly, to make people aware of the economic, social, familial and emotional costs to the Filipinas who participate in what Rhacel Parreñas calls the “global exportation of care” (Force of Domesticity 50). This lecture looks at the affective power of art to engage with and raise awareness of the complexity of transnational mothering performed by Filipina domestic workers in Canada through the Live-in Caregivers Program.
Speaker bio
Eleanor Ty is Professor of English & Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario. She is the Fulbright Canada Visiting Research Chair 2018-2019 at the University of California Santa Barbara where she is teaching a course on Asian American Graphic Novels. She has published books on cultural memory, Asian North American, and on 18th Century literature. Her most recent book, Asianfail: Narratives of Disenchantment and the Model Minority (U of Illinois P, 2017) won the APALA (Asian Pacific American Librarians Association) Adult Non-Fiction award for 2017.
Organized for AASD M119, Asian American and Pacific Islander Labor Issues
Sponsors: Asian American Studies Department, Asian American Studies Center
