The Book Club of California is offering in-person and online programs and activities. Hybrid events with in-person attendance and a streaming element are also held.
In-person programs without a virtual component may be recorded for online viewing on our YouTube Channel after the event.
Unless otherwise noted, all events are free and open to the public and take place at the Book Club of California located at 312 Sutter Street, Suite 500 in San Francisco.
Please refer to the description under each event.
Email programs@bccbooks.org for any questions, or call (415) 781-7532 ext. 2. Many of our staff will be working remotely so please contact them by email or phone. Staff contact information can be found on our website.
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5:30 PM Pacific – Reception
6:00 PM Pacific – Program
An essential piece in California Studies, Redemptive Dreams: Engaging Kevin Starr’s California offers the first critical engagement with the vision of California’s most ambitious interpreter. While Starr’s multifaceted and polymathic vision of California offered a unique gaze—synthesizing central features, big themes, and incredible problems with the propitious golden dream—his eight-volume California Dream series, along with several other books and thousands of published articles and essays, often puzzled historians and other scholars. Historians in the contemporary school of critical historiography often found Starr’s narrative approach—seeking to tell the internal drama of the California story—to be less attuned to the most important work happening in the field. Such a perspective fails to acknowledge key developments in historical subfields like Black and African American Studies, Chicana/o/x Studies, Asian Studies, Native Studies, and others that draw from the narrative in their critical work and how this relates to Starr’s contribution. Along with being a major figure in California institutional life, with literary output spanning genres, it is through the lens of his lived experience as a devout Catholic that this critical sociological perspective sheds new light on his project. With contributions from sociology, history, and theology, akin to investigations appearing in Theology and California: Theological Refractions on California’s Culture (Routledge), Redemptive Dreams offers interdisciplinary perspectives that highlight key features inherent in interdisciplinary theological reflection on place and illuminates these diverse disciplinary discourses as they appear in Starr’s articulation of the California Dream.
An in-person and virtual presentation by Jason S. Sexton, author and professor of sociology at University of California, Los Angeles
Click here to REGISTER to attend in-person at The Book Club of California
6:30 PM Pacific – Program
ArtCenter College of Design | South Campus, 1111 South Arroyo Parkway | 5th Floor Lobby | Pasadena, California 91105
Join guest librarian Alex Balgiu (Designing Writing), alongside Rachel Julius and Bob Dirig (ArtCenter Library) for an immersive and tactile happening where attendees will interact directly with the diverse array of books and printed materials on display.
** Co-presented by Hoffmitz Milken Center for Typography and ArtCenter Graphic Design
5:00 PM Pacific – Program
A central theme of Making a Modern U.S. West by Sarah Deutsch is the question of what would constitute a modern U.S. and whose vision would define the West and the nation. Modernity for some meant corporate consolidation, capital intensive agriculture, white supremacy, male-headed families and private individual land-holding. For others, modernity could include racial mixing, transnational mobility, economic democracy, and collective ownership of land. Californians ran the full spectrum of these ideas—they fought over redwoods and irrigation, they speculated on land and oil, they fought over the border and who belonged on which side, and even over who should get a say in all those things—and in doing so, they helped define modernity for the region and the nation.
This presentation will address some of those issues as well as how the author tried to corral these unwieldy decades into a single volume.
A virtual presentation by Sarah Deutsch, author and professor of history, Duke University
5:00 PM Pacific – Program
An archive survives to be revived. The archive as a limit, a thing in a box, is always also an opening. It opens on losses sustained, harms inflicted, the tenacity of survival, and on the persistence of lineages both proud and shameful. But what is it to approach an archive, to unlock the cabinet, lift the top off the box, to begin to read? It is to invite a haunting, which nevertheless begins long before we open any books. And to invite the ghosts into the open, one must be ready to hear what they teach.
Reading from her new book, Mud, Blood, and Ghosts, and screening a short film by Carolina Ebeid that engages archival images, Julie Carr will tell the story of her great-grandfather, Omer Madison Kem, a settler in Nebraska, a founding member of the Populist Party, a three-term Congressman, a practicing spiritualist, and an avid eugenicist. Kem’s final years were spent in Oregon where he owned a power company and became a passionate advocate for the forced sterilization of all those he came to believe were “unfit” to breed. This talk will focus on the ties between the American eugenics movement, American populism, and the American West.
A virtual presentation by Julie Carr, author and professor of English, University of Colorado, Boulder
California, a Slave State
Monday, April 29, 2024, 5-6:15 PM (Pacific)
| Virtual Presentation
5:00 PM Pacific – Program
California owes its origins and sunny prosperity to slavery. Spanish invaders captured Indigenous people to build the chain of Catholic missions. Russian otter hunters shipped Alaska Natives—the first slaves transported into California—and launched a Pacific slave triangle to China. Plantation slaves were marched across the plains for the Gold Rush. San Quentin Prison incubated California’s carceral state. Kidnapped Chinese girls were sold in caged brothels in early San Francisco. Indian boarding schools supplied new farms and hotels with unfree child workers.
By looking west to California, Jean Pfaelzer upends our understanding of slavery as a North-South struggle and reveals how the enslaved in California fought, fled, and resisted human bondage. In unyielding research and vivid interviews, Pfaelzer exposes how California gorged on slavery, an appetite that persists today in a global trade in human beings lured by promises of jobs but who instead are imprisoned in sweatshops and remote marijuana grows, or sold as nannies and sex workers.
A virtual presentation by Jean Pfaelzer, author and professor emerita of English and American Studies, University of Delaware
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