No RSVP required | All are welcome | Free Snacks

Join Dr. Patience Moll for a conversation with special guest Dr. Lydie Moudileno, Marion Frances Chevalier Professor of French and Professor of French and American Studies and Ethnicity at USC.

In a multicultural world, it's risky to assume that people will "get" your Halloween costume, and even riskier to assume it won't offend. Roland Barthes's theory of modern myths can help us understand why, and how we can deal with the challenges of "living together" in the 21st century. In his 1956 book Mythologies, Barthes showed how everyday objects and icons--including food, toys, and phrases--are socially encoded with arbitrary meanings, even though we tend to think of their significance as natural, necessary, or self-evident. Everyday objects are not harmless: They also have to potential to become sites of violence, and the same "reality" can be seen differently by different individuals, depending on their personal history and their social identity.  For many of us, the more “insignificant" an object or phrase, the more devastating this violence can be--the more "micro" the aggressions, the more powerfully they function. Race is one of these ideas which play a significant role in national and cultural discourses, and also persists in both visible and invisible ways. By helping us to decolonize everyday objects, Barthes's semiology enables us to navigate a calendar on which nearly every national holiday seems to express a questionable “racialized" myth.

For more information about Barthe, see this brief introductory video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GCzq8we-bI.
And here is a link to his book Mythologies: https://soundenvironments.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/roland-barthes-mythologies.pdf

Sponsored by the Thematic Option Honors Program & the McCarthy Honors Residential College