Colloquium Series
In Spring 2001, 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.
ScheduleALL COLLOQUIA ARE IN THE OAKES MURAL ROOMApril 4
Radhika Mongia
(Women’s Studies, UC Santa Cruz )
Rethinking State Sovereignty or, Colonial Genealogies of the Modern State
April 11
Anjali Arondekar
(Women’s Studies, UC Santa Cruz)
The Story of an India-Rubber Dildo: Locations of Desiere in Colonial Pornography
April 18
Frazer Ward
(Art History, Maryland Institute, College of Art)
Notes on Approaching Marina Abramovic’s Rhythm
April 25
Caroline Streeter
(UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, Sociology and the Center for Cultural Studies, UC Santa Cruz)
“I’m thinking if that Oprah got her a gun…”: African American Celebrity and Popular Culture in Gayl Jones’s ‘Mosquito and The Healing'”
May 2
John Dean
(American Literature and Cultural Studies, University of Versailles St. Quentin en Yvelines)
How Twentieth Century American Subcultures Have Contributed to the Nation’s Pantheon of Popular Heroes
May 9
Bettina Aptheker
Memoir, Memory, and the Collective (De)Construction of Women’s History
May 16
Bob White
(Anthropology, UC Santa Cruz )
Cuban ‘Rumba’ and Other Cosmopolitanisms in the Belgian Congo (1949-1999)
May 23
Christopher Breu
(English, Illinois State University)
Come Fly With Me: Frank Sinatra and the Short American Century
Participants
Radhika Mongia is Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies, UCSC. She is currently working on a book-length project, titled Genealogies of Globalization: Migration, Colonialism, and the State. The project focuses on the emergence of state technologies for controlling international migration examining, in particular, how the distinction between ‘legal’ and’illegal’ migration is historically produced. “Race, Natonality, Mobility: A History of the Passport,” a portion of this research, appeared in Public Culture, in Public Culture in 1999.
Anjali Arondekar is Assistant Professor in Women’s Studies at UCSC, having recently arrived from Smith College where she was the Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow (1999-2001). Her research interests include queer studies, Victorian studies, critical race studies and post-colonial theory. She has published variously in the Journal of Asian Studies,Symploke, Post-Modern Culture and The Village Voice. Her most recent article, “Lingering Pleasures, Perverted Texts,” is forthcoming in collection entitled Queer Texts/Colonial Texts(University of Minnesota Press, 2002). She is currently co-editing a collection, Queer Postcolonialities: Borders, Limits and Margins, with Professor Geeta Patel, and also working on a book manuscript titled A Perverse Empire: Victorian Sexuality and the Indian Colony.
Frazer Ward is Assistant Professor of Art History at the Maryland Institute, College of Art, and currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History at Stanford University. He is working on a project dealing with Vietnam-era performance art, examining the ethical implications of the ways in which publics constitute themselves around violence and its representations. He has recently written an essay surveying Vito Acconci’s career, an essay on Chris Burden’s Shoot for the journal October, and guest-edited an issue of the journal Documents on the topic of privacy.
Caroline Streeter is a UC President�s Postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Cultural Studies and the Department of Sociology at UC Santa Cruz. She received her Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender and Sexuality from UC Berkeley in 2000. Her postdoctoral research investigates how cultural work by black women negotiates the complex terrain of consumption in mass commercial culture. Shehas been active in the area of mixed-race scholarship, and her areas of research interest include narratives of race mixing in African American literature, film, and visual art, along with the politicized emergence of mixed-race identities i the post-Civil Right era. She is published in The Multiracial Experience (Sage, 1996) and has an essay in the forthcoming New Faces in a Changing America: Multiracial Identity in the 21st Century.
John Dean is on the faculty of the University of Versailles St. Quentin en Yvelines, where he teaches American literature and cultural studies. He has held research positions at the University of Strasbourg and the Kennedy Institute for American Studies in Berlin. His publications include European Readings of American Popular Culture (1996) and Restless Wanderers: Shakespeare and the Pattern of Romance(1979), several volumes on the United States published in French, a large number of articles on French and English language science fiction, as well as poetry, fiction, scholarly articles, and journalism on a wide range of topics. While at the Center this spring, he will work on several projects, among them a book on the hero and heroine in American popular culture.
Bettina Aptheker is Professor and Chair of Women’s Studies. Her books include: The Morning Breaks: The Trial of Angela Davis, second edition, Cornell University Press, 1999; Tapestries of Life: Women’s Work, Women’s Consciousness and the Meaning of Daily Experience, University of Massachusetts Press, 1989; Woman’s Legacy: Essays on Race, Sex and Class in American History, University of Massachusetts Press, 1982. She is near completion of work on a memoir.
Bob White, Assistant Professor in Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz, specializes in popular culture and politics in francophone Africa. His primary research examines the production and meaning of popular dance music in Congo-Zaire (now Democratic Republic of the Congo), where he conducted fieldwork and worked as a musician in a local band from 1995-1996. He has published several articles on this subject: “Modernity’s Trickster: ‘Dipping’ and ‘Throwing’ in Congolese Popular Dance Music” (forthcoming in Research in African Literatures, special issue on performance), and “Soukouss or Sell-Out? Congolese Popular Dance Music on the World Market,” in Commodities and Globalization: Anthropological Perspectives, Angelique Haugerud, M. Priscilla Stone, and Peter D. Little (eds.), forthcoming.
Christopher Breu is an Assistant Professor of English at Illinois State University, where he teaches courses in twentieth-century American literature, popular culture, and critical theory. He is currently completing work on a book manuscript entitled Hard-Boiled Masculinities: Fantasizing Gender in American Literature and Popular Culture, 1920-45. In addition, he has published on a diverse array of subjects including Maryse Cond�’s _I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem and contemporary techno and indie-rock. His current work on Frank Sinatra represents the beginning of a larger project on internal struggles over politics and culture in the United States and their relationship to the emergence of the U.S. as a global hegemon in the middle years of the twentieth century.