Harvard Club of Georgia

Annual Dinner

with Caroline Light

Senior Lecturer on Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality

Topic: "Gender, Race, and Consumption in the United States (or Consumer Culture)" 

Our consumer culture bombards us with images, logos, icons; and this bombardment can shape and even manufacture desires and attitudes in ways that are quite subtle and difficult to notice, let alone to guard against. Have you ever wondered, for example, why ideas about human difference – like race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, to name a few – are so critical to the marketing of certain commodities? Consider for example the smiling Native American woman on a package of butter, or “Aunt Jemima” on a bottle of pancake syrup. What does it mean that so many of our most cherished commodities and cultural symbols – from fashion apparel and vacation getaways to “ethnic” food and sports mascots – derive their resonance from ideas of human exoticism? This talk will explore some of the histories hidden under contemporary appeals to “natural difference” as we consider our embeddedness, and our complicity, in the production of “difference for sale.”

Caroline Light is the Director of Undergraduate Studies at Harvard’s Program in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She earned her doctorate in history, and her work explores the ways in which race, gender, and region shape collective memory and archival silence. Based on research on the Hebrew Orphans Home of Atlanta, Light's first book, That Pride of Race and Character: the Roots of Jewish Benevolence in the Jim Crow South (NYU Press, 2014) explores how gendered and racialized performances of elite, white cultural capital served as a critical mode of survival for a racially liminal community of southerners. Her recent book, Stand Your Ground: A History of America’s Love Affair with Lethal Self-Defense (Beacon Press, 2017) tracks the history of our nation’s troubling relationship to lethal self-defense, from the duty to retreat to the “shoot first, ask questions later” ethos that prevails in many jurisdictions today.

The Harvard Club of Georgia welcomes all alumni, current students, and their families to attend this year's annual dinner featuring guest speaker Caroline Light at Maggiano's Buckhead.

Tickets include a three-course dinner + wine. There will also be a cash bar for beer and cocktails.

$25 for current students, new and recent graduate members

$45 for members

$55 for non-members

6:00pm: Cocktail hour

7:00pm: Dinner

8:00pm: Speaker Caroline Light