Colloquium Series
In fall 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 ROOMOctober 3
Yugin Yaguchi
(Center for Pacific and American Studies, University of Tokyo)
American Objects, Japanese Memory: American Architecture in Sapporo, Japan
October 10
Bruce Levine
(History, UC Santa Cruz)
Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free Slaves During the Civil War
October 17
Pamela Perry
(Community Studies, UC Santa Cruz)
Doing Identity in Style: Youth Cultures and the Everyday Construction of Racial Meanings
October 24
Lynn Westerkamp
(History, UC Santa Cruz)
Prophets and Preachers, Heretics and Whores: Engendering Puritan Religious Culture in Old and New England
October 31
Mary Orgel
(Center for Cultural Studies, UC Santa Cruz)
Loitering With Intent: Anarchists, Anthropologists, and Other Shady Characters in a Spanish Village
November 7
Robert Kaufman
(English, Stanford University)
Aura, Still: Lyric Mechanical Reproduction After Brecht, Benjamin, and Adorno
November 14
David Crane
(Film and Digital Media, UC Santa Cruz )
Embodied Convergence: Dark Angel’s Race for the Future of Television
November 21
Barbara Epstein
(History of Consciousness)
Allies Underground: The Minsk Ghetto Resistance and Solidarity between Jews and Non-Jews, 1941-1943
Participants
Yugin Yaguchi is Associate Professor at the center for Pacific and American Studies at the university of Tokyo, Japan. His broad area aof research is the intercultural history of the U.S. and Japan. His publications include “Hollowing of Industrial Ideology: Japanese Corporate Familialism in America: (with Tomoko Hamada, 1994) and “The Politics of the Picture Bride” (Rikkyo Universit American Studies, 2000). While at the Center, he will work on his book “The Ainu in U.S.-Japan Relations.” He writes that his colloquium talk focuses on how American-designed buildings in Sapporo, Hokkaido “conditioned the ways in which the Ainu became marginalized not only materially but also symbolically, enabling the Japanese to establish a particular vision of the Hokkaido’s past and future.”
Bruce Levine is Professor of Hisoty at UCSC, and works on U.S. labor history, U.S. slavery, and the Civil War. His books include The Spirit of 1848: German Immigrants, Labor Conflict, and the Coming of the Civil War (University of Illinois, 1992) and Half Slave and Half free: the Roots of Civil War (Hill & Wang, 1992). His colloquium talk is from a forthcoming book on a Confederate policy to arm slaves to fight against Union troops and to reward those who did so with their freedom, a policy with many impolications, including the need “to re-think our view of how southern white values and priorities evolved over the course of the war.”
Pamela Perry is Assistant Professor of Community Studies at UCSC. her research is on schooling, youth cultures, and racial identity formation. Her articles include “White Means Never Having to Say You’re Ethnic: White Youth and the Construction of ‘Cultureless’ Identities” (Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Feb. 2001). Her colloquium talk centers on a chapter from her forthcoming book, Shades of White: Youth and Racial Identity in a Multicltural World (Duke 2002). The work is based on comparative ethnographic research in two high schools, one predominantly white and the other multiracial and minority white. She argues that different types and proximities of association with racialized othes result in very different constructions of white identity.
Lynn Westerkamp is Professor of History at UCSC. She is widely known in the filed for her pioneering work in the gendering of early American religious history. Her most recent book is Women and Religion in Early America, 1600-1850: the Puritan and Evangelical Tradition (Routledge 1999). Her talk is drawn from Ann Hutchinson, Sectarian Mysticism, and Puritan Pariarchy, her in-progress biography of Hutchinson, 1590-1643. At the core of Hutchinson’s challenge was neither political activism nor an anti-clerical agenda, but this religiosity, both mystical and female, that placed her beyond control of magistrates, ministers, even common law and custom.”
Mary Orgel‘s doctoral dissertation, “Sueno Nuestro: Anarchism and Anthropology in a Spanish Village,” was completed this year at the University of Massachusetts. While at the Center, she will work on a book manuscript based on this work, a local oral/ethnohistory of the Spanish anarchist movement that focuses on its 1930s heyday, the negotiation of its historical legacy during the Spanish fascist era and the country’s return to democratic government, and its contemporary relevance. In her colloquium talk she “will discuss some of the affinities and oppositions, both political and intellectual, between the theories and practices of Spanish anarchism and the discipline of anthroplogy.
Robert Kaufman is Assistant Professor of English at Stanford University. His numerous articles include the very influential “Red Kant, or The Persistance of the Third Critique in Adorno and Jameson” (Critical Inquiry, 2000). His colloquium talk is excerpted from two longer projects, “Negative Romanticism, Almost Modernity: Keats, Shelley, and Adornian Critical Aesthetics” and “Experiments in Construction: Frankfurt School Aesthetics and Contemporary Poetry.” In both of these works, Kaufman finds in forceful new readings of Adorno and Benjamin a means to articulate “the notion of poetry, art, and aesthetic experience is to stimulate those modes of critical thought that have the potential to challenge the ideologicaly given.”
David Crane is Assistant Professor of Film and Digital Media at UCSC. He works on film and media theory and history, narrative and psychoanalytic theory, technocriticism, and avant-garde movements. His publications include “In Medias Race; Filmic Representation, Networked Communication, and Racial Intermediation” (in Race in Cyberspace. ed. Beth E. Kolko, et al. Routledge, 2000). His colloquium presentation uses the TV show Dark Angel to address technological and industrial changes in television (namely, the shift to digital production), connecting these transformations to the issues of race and ethnicity that are raised in the show.
Barbara Epstein is Professor of HIstory of Consciousness at UCSC. Her many publications include studies of social movements, histories of protest, feminist theory and sociology, cultural politics, and academic culture. She is the author of three books, including Political Protest and Cultural Revolution: Nonviolent Direct Action in the Seventies and Eighties (University of California, 1991). Her colloquium presentation is based on fieldwork and oral history collection in Minsk, Belarus, a site of anti-Nazi resistance notable for the strength of the Jewish/non-Jewish alliance. It is drawn from her bok in progress titled Mobilization Against Fascism: The Jewish Youth Movements of the 30s and the World War Two Ghetto Undergrounds in Lithuania, Poland, and Belarus.