In fall 2003, the Center for Cultural Studies will continue to host a Wednesday colloquium series, which features current cultural studies work by campus faculty and visitors. The sessions are informal, normally consisting of a 30-40 minute presentation followed by discussion. We gather at noon, with presentations beginning at 12:15. Participants are encouraged to bring their own lunches; the Center will provide coffee, tea, and cookies.


Teresa de Lauretis is Professor in the History of Consciousness department, and is internationally recognized for her work in semiotics, psychoanalytic theory, literature, science fiction, film, film theory, and queer and feminist theory. She is author of over a dozen books, which have appeared in many languages, including the canonical Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Indiana, 1984). Her talk is an introduction to and a section of her current book project on Freud’s theory of the drives in relation to the body and subject formation, and the relevance of Freud’s theory for the history of the present.

Alain-Marc Rieu is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Lyon, and is currently Visiting Professor of Humanities at UCSC. He has published widely on the philosophy of knowledge, on contemporary Europe, and on knowledge societies in Japan and elsewhere. About his talk, he writes, "the objective is to build a concept of modernization strong enough to analyze, compare and evaluate various modernization trajectories. The goal is to establish an epistemological ground to develop comparative studies of societies."

Lisa Rofel is Associate Professor of Anthropology at UCSC. She works on issues of gender, sexuality, and modernity in China and elsewhere. She is the author of Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China After Socialism (California, 1998). She is currently working on a manuscript about desire and globalization in contemporary China, and on a book of essays about contemporary Zionism. Her talk is about recent legal cases and legalistic debates in China and the way they construct neo-liberal subjects of desire.

Jeremy Prestholdt, Rockefeller Fellow for Fall, 2003, works in world history. He received his Ph.D. this year from Northwestern University, having done his doctoral research in East Africa, and he has recently joined the History faculty at Northeastern University. About his talk, he writes, "the project highlights the roles of seemingly peripheral people in the fashioning of global systems by considering the repercussions of African consumer desire on patterns of global integration. In its focus on how pre-colonial East African consumerism shaped global relationships from Bombay to Boston, the project excavates alternative visions of globality and develops a narrative of interrelation focused on local and social contingencies."

L.S. Kim, Assistant Professor in Film and Digital Media at UCSC, joined the faculty in 2002. Her essays, largely in television studies, include "‘Serving’ a New Orientalism: Discursive Racial Identity in the Television Text" (forthcoming in the Journal of Film and Video), and "‘Sex and the Single Girl’ in Postfeminism: The F-word on Television" (Television and New Media, November, 2001). Her talk will be from her current book project on the cultural significance of the racialized female domestic—the maid.

Herman Gray is Professor of Sociology at UCSC, and is a prominent scholar in media and cultural studies. His books include Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for "Blackness" (Minnesota, 1995). His talk is taken from his current book project, Cultural Moves, which examines black cultural politics of the last decade from the perspective of struggles over representation in American network television, the institutional seizure and subsequent battles over the canonization of jazz at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, and the relationship between identity and new information technologies in the case of experimental music.

Elizbeth DeLoughrey, Assistant Professor of English at Cornell University, is a Rockefeller Fellow for 2003-2004. She has completed one book manuscript, Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures, and her talk is from her work in progress, "Island Transplantations: Literary Seeds of Culture." Tracing the centuries-long history of commodity crop transfer around the world, she argues that human and plant diasporas facilitated a sense of modernity centuries before what we now term "globalization." She further examines the literary use of plants as metaphors for diaspora and the cultivation of historically bound island identities.

Rosa Linda Fregoso is Professor of Latin American/Latino Studies at UCSC. Her books include The Bronze Screen: Chicana and Chicano Film Culture (Minnesota, 1993). Her talk will be an introduction to her forthcoming book, meXicana Encounters: The Making of Social Identities on the Borderlands (California, December 2003), a formally innovative self reflexive approach to cultural politics, blending cultural history, testimonial, memory, autobiography, film criticism, critical race studies, and transnational feminist theories. It includes discussion of the recent murders and disappearances of women in Ciudad Juárez, John Sayles’s film Lone Star, and the significance of la familia to the identity of Chicanas/os.