Colloquium Series
In Winter 2000, 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 and tea.
ScheduleJanuary 12 OAKES MURAL ROOM
Manuela Ribeiro Sanches
(German Studies, University of Lisbon)
Color of Skin, Shape of the Body: “Race” Difference and the Nature of “Man” in 18th-Century Germany
January 19 COWELL PROVOST HOUSE
Peter Euben (Politics, UCSC)
The Polis, Globalization and the Politics of Place
January 26 OAKES MURAL ROOM
Helene Moglen (Literature, UCSC)
The Trauma of Gender: Psychosexuality and the Bimodal Novel
February 2 COWELL PROVOST HOUSE
Barry D. Adam
(Sociology, University of Windsor)
Globalization/Mobilization: Gay and Lesbian Movements
February 9 OAKES MURAL ROOM
Amelie Hastie
(Film and Digital Media, UCSC)
The Cam�ra Stylo: Intermedial Authorship and Film History
February 16 OAKES MURAL ROOM
Susan Gillman (Literature, UCSC)
The Occult History of Du Bois
February 23 OAKES MURAL ROOM
Dana Takagi (Sociology, UCSC)
Native Nationalisms and Incommensurability; or, Why We Would Rather Not Talk About God
March 1 COWELL PROVOST HOUSE
Kerwin Klein (History, UC Berkeley)
The Culture Concept and Historical Discourse, or What Was the New Cultural History?
Presenters
Manuela Ribeiro Sanches is Assistant Professor in the Department of German Studies at the University of Lisbon, Portugal. She has published extensively on Georg Forster, a naturalist who participated in Cook’s second voyage and who was to die in exile in Paris in 1794. This talk, part of her work in progress in German anthropology in the 18th century, reflects on the debates about “race” and difference that opposed Forster to Immanuel Kant, a major figure in German anthropology. She places this debate in the contexts of European colonialism, the abolitionist movement, and the appeal to universal human rights, as well as the French Revolution and the way it affected an emergent German anthropology. How were questions of difference approached and interpreted by an academic discourse apparently removed from the colonial centers? How was difference perceived, narrated, classified? How was “race” represented and constructed? How did it relate to cultural difference? And how are these issues to be read from a postcolonial perspective?
Helene Moglen is Professor of Literature at UC Santa Cruz. She has published extensively on the English novel- including books on Laurence Sterne and Charlotte Bronte- and has written on issues relevant to feminist theory, psycho-analysis and education. In her forthcoming book, The Trauma of Gender: A Feminist Theory of the English Novel, she offers an innovative theory of the novel’s form and function. Her book seeks to move beyond long-dominant accounts that have focused almost exclusively on the realist tradition of the novel and the class interests which that tradition serves. Instead, she insists that the modern novel has been essentially bimodal, and that its bimodaliity has functioned to manage the strains and contradictions of the sex-gender system. Further, she suggests that the principal theoretical models through which the novel has been studied are themselves structured by competing narrative modes: the same modes that have shaped the novel and exposed its ambivalent attitudes about sexuality and gender. In her paper, she will set out the theoretical argument of her book, and will ask others to join her in considering its applicability to diverse national literatures, from the 18th through the 20th centuries, and to other disciplinary discourses.
Peter Euben is Professor of Politics at UC Santa Cruz. He is the author of The Tragedy of Political Theory: The Road Not Taken (1990), Corrupting Youth: Political Education and Democratic Culture (1997) and the forthcoming Platonic Noise: Essays on the Modernity of Classical Political Thought (2000). He also co-edited Athenian Democratic Thought and the Reconstitution of American Democracy. His current work focuses on the necessity of utopia and the idea of ironic politics. His colloquium talk asks whether there is an illuminating analogy to be drawn between the experience of political dislocation and the theoretical struggles to understand it that accompanied the eclipse of the classical polis, and our experience of globalization and attempts to understand it theoretically. It explores two oppositions: that between the classical polis and the moral critique leveled at it by Cynics and Stoics, and between neo-Stoic cosmopolitanism of Martha Nussbaum and political critics of her moral universalism.
Barry D. Adam is Professor of Sociology at the University of Windsor. He is author or co-editor of The Survival of Domination, The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement, Experiencing HIV, and The Global Emergence of Gay and Lesbian Politics, as well as articles on new social movement theory, neighborhood mobilization in Sandinista Nicaragua, HIV transmission, and gay and lesbian studies. A central theme of his work is the subjectivity of inferiorized peoples, that is, the ways in which people build identity, community, and a sense of efficacy in highly adverse social conditions. This talk seeks to sort through the thickets of globalization discourse to better understand how social movements develop on a transnational basis. Using gay and lesbian movements as an example, the talk will address ways in which globalizing forces articulate with movement formation.
Amelie Hastie is Assistant Professor of Film and Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz. An assistant editor of Camera Obscura, she is the author of “Fashion, Femininity, and Historical Design: The Visual Texture of Three Hong Kong Films” Post Script (Fall 1999), and “A Fabricated Space: Assimilating the Individual on Star Trek: The Next Generation” in the edited volume Enterprise Zones: Liminal Positions on Star Trek. Her work in progress “examines the role of writing in the construction of cinematic histories, theories, and even images, especially as such writings point toward the multiple roles women have played as ‘authors’ within the production of films and the production of our knowledge about them.” She reconnects the visual and written forms through an exploration of writings by three primary figures who worked in the silent film industry and later took up writing in an attempt to secure their places in film history: early film director Alice Guy-Blach� and silent film stars Louise Brooks and Colleen Moore. Hastie considers how each woman is configured in a complex intertextual system of narrative films, documentaries, their own writings and writings about them, and other diverse objects they have collected and/or produced.
Susan Gillman, Professor of Literature at UC Santa Cruz, has long been interested in how popular genres give voice to racial and national affinities and conflicts. Her previous work on Mark Twain, including Dark Twins: Imposture and Identity in Mark Twain’s America (Chicago, 1989) and an essay collection, co-edited with Forrest Robinson, Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson: Race, Conflict, and Culture (Duke, 1990), focuses on Twain’s uses of the discourses of detective and fantasy fiction (legal, scientific, medical, psychological) in his ongoing exploration of race as a “fiction of law and custom.” The point of departure for her new book, American Race Melodramas, 1877-1915, is a pattern of derogatory references to a wide variety of late 19th-century race writing as “melodramatic.” American race melodrama was a malleable cultural mode that cut across periods, genres and ideologies. Responding to the historically specific situation of post-Reconstruction U.S. nationalism and global internationalism, when the discipline of American history was both politicized and popularized, late 19th-century race melodramas emerge as an explicitly historiographic mode. Gillman’s talk explores W. E. B. Du Bois’s philosophy of history as a project combining his lifelong engagements with science and mysticism, providing Du Bois with a bridge between objectivity and activism, politics and poetry, as well as a means of uncovering the mystical history of race consciousness itself.
Dana Takagi is Associate Professor of Sociology at UC Santa Cruz. Her research interests center on Asian Americans, rights discourses of minority and indigenous peoples, and contemporary nationalism in the age of globalization. She is author of The Retreat from Race: Asian American Admissions and Racial Politics (1993), which won the Gustavus-Myer Center for Human Rights Outstanding Book Award and the National Book Award of the Association of Asian American Studies. She also co-edits the UC Press book series “American Crossroads.” Her most recent article is “Forget Postcolonialism: Self Determination and Sovereignty in Hawaii” (Colorlines, Winter 1999). This talk is drawn from her research on Hawaiian nationalism(s), multiculturalism and various kinds of “rights” discourses in the Pacific, and the expression of nationalist precepts in the odd venues of popular culture, especially card games and collectibles such as Magic and Poke �mon. Professor Takagi�s presentation is also offered as part of the Sociology Department�s colloquium series.
Kerwin Klein is Assistant Professor of History at UC Berkeley. He is the author of Frontiers of Historical Imagination: Narrating the European Conquest of Native America, 1890-1990(University of California, 1997) and “The Emergence of ‘Memory’ in Historical Discourse,” (Representations, forthcoming). Klein is a member of the editorial boards of Representations and the Pacific Historical Review. He is at work on two books: Frontier Tales, which explores the relationship between decolonization and philosophy of history in the Americas, and Charles Manson and the Meaning of History, an account of California and philosophy of history in pop culture.