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After 1898/1998: What Hemispheric Cultural Studies? May 22, 1999 Oakes Mural Room 10:00-5:30 pm New directions and new work have been emerging in comparative Americas studies in the wake of the many scholarly events around the 1898 centennial, which traced a passage from U.S. imperialism, through U.S. global hegemony in the post-W.W. II years, to the current period of transnational capital. This conference aims to continue to face the challenges of a global history that takes 1898 as a date of historical rupture or beginning. The conference seeks to sketch new frameworks for understanding these last hundred years within an opposition to the dual dominations of U.S./eurocentrism and global capital, as political-economic powers and as discursively privileged historical actors. The re-historicization of 1898 has shifted accepted grounds of theory and political action, just as it has recast traditional chronological and spatial framings. The specific histories of the ex-colonies of Spain-in-America offer alternatives to conventional chronologies in which imperialism gives way to transnationalism and globalism. Similarly, recent debates in Cultural Studies have questioned both the implied periodization of the post in postcolonial and the narrowly hierarchical perspective of colonialism, leading to a neglect of overlapping histories (of race relations, for example) and perspectives defined by relations other than the imperial. Revisiting the consequences of this centennial might be accomplished from a variety of peripheral perspectives. For this conference, we focus on three sets of popular cultural registers, organized in three panels: I. The Politics of Nation, Race, And Gender in Nineteenth-Century Popular Cultural Forms known for their hemispheric travel will be the focus of the first panel. Shelley Streeby (Literature, UCSD) focuses on the border crossings of the corrido, Joaquin Murieta, and the American 1848; Rosaura Sanchez and Beatrice Pita (Literature, UCSD) continue their work on nineteenth-century Californio narratives, focusing on Marâa Amparo Ruiz de Burton's historical writings on the Californios; Lisa Sanchez Gonzalez (English, UT Austin) will address the concept of the archive itself, the way we "use" history, and the neglect of diasporic theory within the central U.S.-Latino recovery project. Shelley Streeby has just completed a book on comparative popular cultures in the Americas entitled American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture. Rosaura Sanchez is the author of Telling Identities: The Californio Testimonios (1995), and with Beatrice Pita has edited two of Amparo Ruiz de Burton's novels. Lisa Sanchez Gonzalez has written on Luisa Capetillo's feminist labor organizing in Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage, vol. 2 (1997), and on the Puerto Rican roots of William Carlos Williams and Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, the latter a well-known historian and collector of African Americana. This panel will be moderated by Norma Klahn (Literature, UC Santa Cruz.) II. Cinema and Empire draws on recent work on mixed-race movies in the U.S. by Jane Gaines (Film and Video, Duke University); on representations of the inter-Americas in the Edison biograph films of the Spanish-American War by Catherine Benamou (Film and Video, American Cultures, Romance Languages, University of Michigan); and on Cuban cinema by Ann Marie Stock (Spanish, College of William and Mary). Jane Gaines has written extensively on the pioneering African American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux. Her book, Mixed-Blood Movies, on race and early American cinema, is forthcoming from Chicago University Press. Catherine Benamou works on hemispheric film and television. She is currently completing It's All True: Orson Welles at Work in Latin America. Ann Marie Stock is editor of Framing Latin American Cinema: Contemporary Critical Perspectives (Minnesota, 1997), and has a forthcoming book on deterritorialization, gender, and film, centered in Cuba and Costa Rica. This panel will be moderated by Shelley Stamp (Film and Video, UC Santa Cruz.) III. Hemispheric Urban Spaces will explore, in comparative nineteenth and twentieth-cenury contexts,æthe pressures and possibilities of the transnational city. Greater Havana is a re-mapping of two such spatial projects: Kirsten Silva Gruesz's (Literature, UCSC) work on nineteenth-century New Orleans and John Beverley's (Romance Languages, University of Pittsburgh) analysis of twentieth-century Miami. Kirsten Silva Gruesz works on cultural ambassadorship and nineteenth-century poetries in the U.S. and Latin America. Her Ambassadors of Culture: Transamerican Poetics and the Origins of Latino Identity 1823-1898 is forthcoming. John Beverley is author of Against Literature (1993) and numerous books or edited volumes on Latin American literature. This panel will be moderated by Juan Poblete (Literature, UC Santa Cruz.) The conference goal is to foster a collective conversation among scholars from Chicano/Latino, Latin American, and U.S. fields and to create a collaborative process of theorizing and historicizing the last hundred years. We aim to offer a space to create new oppositional historical imaginaries, rather than merely exchanging already-existing and independently made views. We foresee mutual benefit in the ongoing efforts to reconceptualize and forge new theories of local-global connections. Our conference could serve as an effective historical background for developments in curricular, thematic, and epistemological reorientation of area studies, particularly among those whoæseek to decenter concepts of U.S. hegemony in their fields. Co-sponsored by the Inter-Americas Research Cluster and the Chicano/Latino Research Center. |