Thursday, November 19 | 4:00 pm | Kresge 159
In recent years, Teresa Ebert has emerged as as one of the most prominent Marxist critics of “post-al” theory in the academy. Arguing for a “red feminism” and a “red cultural studies” in the context of academic professionalization and the corporatization of the university, Professor Ebert has insisted on the necessity of critical thought in the university, and on the need to critique those currents of intellectual work which impede genuine critical- “critique-al” in her usage-analysis. Her talk at UCSC will center on a critique of the ways in which theories of the body-the local, the “concrete” and the “delectable”-have become the foundation for anti-foundationalist knowledges and practices. Through a brief re-reading of Marx’s Grundrisse, Professor Ebert proposes to make a historical materialist and dialectical analysis of the “concrete” as a basis for “global” revolutionary theory and praxis.
Professor Ebert’s writing and teaching focus on critical theory, Marxism, feminism, and cultural studies. Her publications include Ludic Feminism and After: Post-modernism, Desire, and Labor in Late Capitalism (1996) and Postality: Marxism and Post-modernism (in the Transformation series on “Marxist Boundary Work in Theory, Economics, Politics and Culture”; co-edited, 1995). Her extended text, “Quango-ing the University: The End(s) of Critique-al Humanities” has appeared in the electronic journal Cultural Logic. Her many essays have been published in such journals as Cultural Critique, College English, Rethinking Marxism, Genders, Against the Current, and Poetics Today.
Professor Ebert has been a faculty member in English and Women’s Studies at the State University of New York at Albany since 1991.