City of Culver City City Council / West Los Angeles College Liaison Committee Update

 

 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

DATE:              May 2, 2013

CONTACT:        Michelle Long-Coffee, Dir. PR & Advertising

                        (310) 287-4597 | longcofm@wlac.edu

                        9000 Overland Ave. - Culver City, CA 90230

 

 

 

Distinguished Speakers at WLAC Include

STATE CONTROLLER, JAPAN CONSULATE GENERAL

AND PALESTINIAN MEDIA COMMENTATOR / AUTHOR

WEDNESDAY, MAY 15 @ 7:00 – 9:30PM

 

ASIAN AMERICAN PACIFIC ISLANDER HERITAGE MONTH
	GUEST SPEAKERS: John Chiang - California State Controller Kuniko Nakamura - Consulate General of Japan in LA Mike Eng - LACCD Trustee-Elect & Former Assemblyman   TOPICS:        About AAPIH Month; Why World History Matters   LOCATION: General Classroom Building (GC), Room 160                        WLAC | 9000 Overland Ave | Culver City, CA 90230   PARKING:     Lot #5 - $2.00
GLOBAL INDIGENOUS CULTURES AND HISTORY: NORTH AMERICA & PALESTINE
	GUEST SPEAKERS: Dr. Saree Makdisi - UCLA Professor, Author of Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation with articles & interviews in the LA Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, Al-akhbar, the BBC World Service, and PBS, among others. Alan Tafoya - is an accomplished actor, musician and martial artist who is a member of the Jicarilla Apache Nation and a descendant of Apache Chief Mangus Colorado, a renowned knife fighter. TOPIC:          Global Indigenous Cultures and History:                        North America & Palestine PERFORMANCE BY: The Elliott Caine Jazz Ensemble LOCATION: Aviation Technology Complex (AT-A), Lecture Hall                      WLAC | 9000 Overland Ave | Culver City, CA 90230   PARKING:     Lot #5 - $2.00

 

West Los Angeles College is an accredited community college offering university transfer and career training programs.

  

 

ASIAN AMERICAN PACIFIC ISLANDER HERITAGE MONTH
	CALIFORNIA STATE CONTROLLER John Chiang   California State Controller John Chiang has been serving as California’s Chief Fiscal Officer since 2007. Upon taking office, he took immediate action to weed out waste, fraud and abuse of public funds and make the State’s finances more transparent and accountable to the public. He has proposed reforms to the State’s public pension systems, helped local governments during difficult economic times, protected California’s environment, and launched California Strong financial and tax assistance seminars for families, seniors, small businesses and non-profit organizations. As the son of immigrant parents, Chiang strongly believes that every child deserves a quality education and their success is key to California’s future. Chiang received a B.A. with Honors in finance from the University of South Florida and a J.D. from Georgetown University. Chiang and his wife, Terry Chi, live in Torrance, California.
	CONSULATE GENERAL OF JAPAN Consul Kuniko Nakamura   Kuniko Nakamura covers cultural and political affairs as a consul at the Consulate General of Japan in Los Angeles. She is also responsible for the JET (Japan Exchange Teaching) Program in the California/Arizona area, which recruits young college graduates to assist with language instruction in Japanese schools, with the additional purpose of fostering internationalization. Previously, she served at the Embassy of Japan in Pakistan and at the Consulate in Honolulu. She obtained a B.A. in Political Science from Waseda University and her Master’s in International Public Policy at the Paul H. Nietze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins. She speaks Japanese, English, German, Indonesian and some Urdu.
	LACCD TRUSTEE-ELECT & FORMER ASSEMBLYMAN  Mike Eng   On March 5, Mike Eng was elected to the Board of Trustees, of the LACCD, the largest community college district in the U.S. spread out over 800 square miles serving over 250,000 students from 40 cities populated by 5 million residents. Mike previously served 6 years in the State Assembly during which time he chaired 3 of the Legislature’s important policy committees and was a member of the Education committee for 3 terms. Prior to that, Mike served as Mayor and Councilman for the City of Monterey Park, and the City Library Board of Trustees for 10 years. Mike Eng has taught labor studies, immigration and civil rights at LA Trade Technical College, UCLA, and University of the West.  He earned his Law Degree at UCLA and founded the immigration law firm of Eng and Nishimura.  He also earned his B.A. in political science and M.A. in American Studies from the University of Hawaii.

 

 

GLOBAL INDIGENOUS CULTURES AND HISTORY: NORTH AMERICA & PALESTINE

 

 

DR. SAREE MAKDISI is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at UCLA whose scholarship focuses on the culture of modernity and empire in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain as well as the consequences and afterlives of modernity and empire in the contemporary Arab world, especially Lebanon and Palestine.

 

He is the author of Romantic Imperialism, William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s, Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation, and Making England Western: Occidentalism, Race and Imperial Culture. The later explores the cultural and political processes through which England turned itself into a recognizably Western country in the nineteenth century, and includes chapters on Wordsworth, Austen, Byron, Southey, Macaulay, and Dickens as well a reading of the “civilization” of London through the nineteenth century.

 

He is also the co-editor of the volume The Arabian Nights in Historical Context, and of Marxism Beyond Marxism and the co-editor of the Journal Nineteenth-Century Literature, published by the University of California Press. His articles have appeared in the Los Angeles Time, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Nation, Salon, The London Review of Books and the Beirut newspaper al-akhbar. He has appeared on, among others, the BBC World Service, National Public Radio, al-Jazeera, PBS, South African Broadcasting Corporation’s SAFM, and Radio National in Australia.

Makdisi earned his Ph.D. in Literature at Duke University and completed his undergraduate degree at Wesleyan University.

 

ALAN TAFOYA is a member of the Jicarilla Apache Nation. He is a descendant of Apache Chief Mangus Colorado, known as Red Sleeves, a knife fighter who wore long sleeves to cover the scars on his arms. Alan’s grandmother was Red Sleeve’s granddaughter. Because of his ancestry, Alan feels that he has inherited an instinctual skill as a knife fighter. Although Tafoya has been perfecting his martial arts skills since the age of 11, he feels that his expertise in knife fighting is rooted in instinct. Tafoya speaks of martial arts as an art form, not as a tool for violence. ”It is an art of self-discovery. It is a combative art; it is the warrior’s way of art.” His incredible skill was evidenced by his wins at both the 1999 & 2000 Soldier of Fortune Combat Knife Fighting Tournaments. The film, Dancing on the Edge, documents his experiences preparing for and winning the tournaments. He remains undefeated as champion.

 

The versatile Tafoya is now working with production companies to attract more films to his home state of New Mexico. As an actor, Tafoya has appeared in Unspeakable, as a prison guard; Arrest and Trial, as a DEA agent; and in Groom Lake, Maniacts and The Ghost of Mars.

 

ELLIOTT CAINE As a trumpet player, composer, bandleader and sideman, he has been involved, through performance and/or recording with artists such as, Teddy Edwards, Ernie Andrews, Larance Marable, Barbara Morrison, Tierra, Bobby Matos, Jump with Joey and Roland Alphonso. He is a jazz festival favorite and has performed at The Playboy Festival, Jazz at Drew Festival, Idyllwild Jazz Festival, Temecula International Jazz Festival, Equinoxe Jazz Festival (Corsica, Fr.), Atlas Music Festival (Istanbul, Turkey), LA County Museums of Art, and others. His quintet/sextet has recorded and released 3 CD's, all of which have gotten national and international airplay and enthusiastic reviews from prominent media sources. Many of his compositions have been used for film and television.

 

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