“Foreign Babes”/ Rachel DeWoskin
“The stereotypes in Beijing do not originate in the Chinese imagination. Those stereotypes are our exports. … The idea that Western women are loose. Where those ideas come from—they come from here.”
—Rachel DeWoskin, actress who played an American home-wrecking seductress in a popular Chinese TV series and author of Foreign Babes in Beijing, in a lecture on campus Nov. 10.

Black Slave-Owners/ Edward Jones
“In the 1980s, I was very struck by the insidiousness of all these black conservatives. I’ve always been struck by this lack of consciousness on the part of black movie stars, singers and rap stars. … I said to myself, if slavery were legal, these are the kind of people who would own slaves.”
—Author Edward Jones, who won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his debut novel The Known World, a story of a former slave who becomes a slave owner, on campus Oct. 5.

Politics as Sports/ Susan Estrich
“We cover politics these days pretty much the same way the press covers sports. It’s not a coincidence that the new head of CBS news is the former head of CBS sports, because the analogy is pretty apt. It’s more about the two sides than it is about the truth.”
—Susan Estrich, lawyer, author and analyst on Fox News, spoke on “Perspective and Bias: The Political Scene and How the Media Covers It” on campus Nov. 1.

Happy Endings/ Jamaica Kincaid
“I hope to have a happy ending in life. But in art, I still don’t appreciate it so much. … I’ve lived long enough to appreciate it in life, not yet in art. So I don’t want a happy ending, but a just ending. The presentations of justice always make people a little unhappy, or not unhappy, but a little unsettled, because justice is tough. … There’s a difference between happiness and justice.”
—Author Jamaica Kincaid whose works of short fiction, novels and essays explore the tenuous relationship between mother and daughter as well as themes of anti-colonialism, on campus Sept. 1.