Fall 1998 Colloquium Series

Colloquium Series

In fall 1998, 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. 

 

ScheduleOctober 14
Alice Yang Murray
(History, UC Santa Cruz )
From Relocation Center to Concentration Camp: Historianc and Reinterpretations of Internment
Cowell Provost House

October 21
Shirley Samuels
(English and American Studies, Women’s Studies, Cornell University)
Whitman and the Face of the Nation 
Oakes Mural Room

October 28
Noriko Aso
(History, UC Santa Cruz)
The “New Japan” on Display: Nationalism, Internationalism, and Commerce in Postwar Art Exhibits 
Cowell Conference Room

November 4
Yvette Huginnie
(American Studies, UC Santa Cruz)
Towards a Multi-Referent Understanding of Race
Oakes Mural Room

November 11 
Stephen Best
(English, UC Berkeley)
The Fugitive’s Properties 
Cowell Conference Room

November 18
Victor Burgin
(History of Consciousness, UC Santa Cruz)
Jenni’s Room

December 2
Jonathan Beller
(Cultural Studies, UC Santa Cruz)
Visual Culture and Philippine Modernity
Oakes Mural Room

 

Participants

Alice Yang Murray is Assistant Professor of History at UCSC. Her work explores constructions of historical memory: how they reflect and facilitate political, social, and cultural change. Her book-in-progress, Better Americans in a Greater America: Japanese American Internment, Redress, and Historical Memory, 1942-1998, analyzes how changing representations of internment history by government officials, scholars, and activists affected the Japanese American redress movement. Her other published work explores how Asian American organizations have addressed issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality; the advantages and disadvantages of using oral history sources; and the challenge to traditional views of “feminist” agency and consciousness posed by the history of Korean immigrant women in America.

Shirley Samuels is Professor of English and American Studies and Director of the Women�s Studies Program at Cornell University. She is the author of Romances of the Republic: Women, the Family, and Violence in the Literature of the Early American Nation(Oxford University Press, 1996) and editor of The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America(Oxford University Press, 1992). Her time at the Center will be devoted to another book project, National Gender: American Iconography and the Civil War, in which Samuels will “explore the charged emphasis on gender and the use of both men and women to highlight political iconography in the sensation fiction and historical novels written about the Civil War, and …address how gender appears in the political cartoons and broadsides that were used to promote or attack slavery.”
Noriko Aso is Visiting Assistant Professor of History at UCSC; she has also taught at Portland State University and Ohio State University. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1997, with a dissertation entitled New Illusions: The Emergence of a Discourse on Traditional Japanese Arts and Crafts, 1868-1945. Her talk will focus on the importance accorded refashioning Japan as a bunka kokka (cultural nation) in the postwar period, exploring the strategies deployed in representing a Japanese aesthetic heritage in three cases: early postwar department store exhibits, an exhibit commemorating the signing of the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty, and the 1964 Tokyo Olympics arts festival.

Yvette Huginnie is an Assist-ant Professor in American Studies at UCSC, where she teaches courses on the U.S. West, U.S. Labor History, and Race and Ethnicity in the U.S.. Her current research project is a book manuscript, tentatively titled Mexicans in a White Man�s Town, , which explores the intersections of racial categorization, class formation, and imperialism in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries.

Stephen Best is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of California-Berkeley, where he teaches classes in American and African-American Literature, as well as Film Studies. His talk is drawn from a book-in-progress which explores genealogies of possession in the law, with a particular emphasis on the late nineteenth-century debate surrounding mechanical reproduction and intellectual property�a debate marred by the dual fears of dubious fiduciary motive (i.e., theft, trespass, piracy, plagiary, usurpation), and the law�s grudging return to the problem of the injurious commodification of persons and personhood. Professor Best contends that, as these debates surrounding technology and property unfold, the law animates subterranean affiliations, both rhetorical and logical, between purloined intellectual properties (stolen voices, stolen images) and the expropriated and unremunerated labor and personhood (that is, the property) of slavery�an exchange and commodification rationalized by means of legal algorithms of the fugitive slave (as indebted, obligated, culpable, responsible). Professor Best�s talk will map the correspondences between Harriet Beecher Stowe�s novel Uncle Tom�s Cabin, and later film versions of the same, paying particular attention to issues of translation and adaptation when novel and film appear in the text of intellectual property law; appearances which often entail the rescripting of Uncle Tom as fugitive slave.

Victor Burgin is Professor of History of Consciousness at UCSC. His books include In/Different Spaces: Place and Memory in Visual Culture (University of California, 1997), Some Cities (University of California and Reaktion Books, 1996), and The End of Art Theory: Criticism and Postmodernity(MacMillan, 1986). About his talk on “Jenni�s Room” he writes, “Shortly before her twenty-first birthday Jennifer Ringley attached a video camera to her computer and began to upload images of her college dormitory room to the Internet. Since then, at any time of day or night, anyone who logs onto her �JenniCam� web site may look into Jenni�s room. Interviews with Ringley and articles about her have tended to treat her as an exhibitionist. Everyday language has taken the word �exhibitionist� from psychiatry and psychoanalysis. In this talk I draw upon psychoanalytic theory to suggest other ways of thinking about Jenni�s room.”

Jonathan Beller was awarded a J. Paul Getty Postdoctoral Fellow in Art History and the Humanities for his research project Visual Transformations and Philippine Modernity. He is the author of PMLA in the Philippines?(1998), Capital/Cinema, in Deleuze and Guattari: New Mappings in Politics/Philoso-phy/Culture (1998), and The Spectatorship of the Proletariat (1995). Beller writes that “this work is concerned with the qualitative changes in visuality wrought by culture and technology accompanying and enabling economic �development.� The Philippines is a particularly interesting scene of visual encounter given its status as an American colony: subject to U.S. media of all types, yet producing its own counter-visions. And finally, the case for the inclusion of Philippine painting among the art that counts as art history is a matter of aesthetics. The Filipino artists in whom I am interested exhibit as profound an accommodation to and analysis of the shifting conditions of visuality which they helped to bring into being as any of the Western innovators, despite the fact that their creativity has been radically under-mediated.”

Posted in Cultural Studies Events, Uncategorized.