Colloquium Series
In Winter 2002, 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 ROOMJanuary 16
(English, The Ohio State University)
“Zones of Privacy: Privacy in American Law and Memoirs, 1850 to the Present”
January 23
Dimitris Papadopoulos
(Psychology, Free University, Berlin)
“Bombing as Usual: Subjectivity, Liberalism, and Technostructural Violence”
January 30
Gary Lease
(History of Consciousness, UC Santa Cruz)
“The Agony of the German-Jew: Hans-Joachim Schoeps, Cultural Identification, and Disintegration in 20th-Century Europe”
February 6
Wendy Chapkis
(Sociology and Women’s Sutides, University of Southern Maine)
“Protecting Innocents, Punishing Immigrants: Trafficking, Migration, and the Law”
February 13
Richard Rodríguez
(Chicano Studies, California State University at Los Angeles)
“Serial Kinship: Representing the Family in Early Chicano Publications”
February 20
Paul Ortiz
(Community Studies, UC Santa Cruz)
“Rethinking Resistance in the Jim Crow South”
February 27
Daniel Selden
(Literature, UC Santa Cruz)
“Tributary Economies: Literature and Ideology'”
March 6
Catherine Ramírez
(American Studies, UC Santa Cruz)
“Talking (Back): Mexican American Women and Caló”
Participants
Wendy Chapkis is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies at the University of Southern Maine. Chapkis, who is the author of the award-winning book, Live Sex Acts: Women Performing Erotic Labor (Routledge 1997), received her Ph.D. in Sociology from UCSC in 1995. She is currently a visit-ing scholar in the Department of Women’s Studies. Of her collo-quium talk she writes, “In the fall of 2000, the U.S. House and Senate joined together to unanimously pass legislation (HR 3244) providing legal residency and welfare benefits to undocumented workers and prostitutes. Not surprisingly, not all undocumented workers qualified, only those understood to have been forced to violate U.S. borders and laws as victims of ‘severe forms of trafficking.’ This presentation examines whether HR 3244 is a departure from — or conversely of a piece with — other recent U.S. immigration legislation notable primarily for its hostility to immigrants and to the poor.”
Leigh Gillmore is Associate Professor in the English Department at the Ohio State University and Research Scholar at the Center for Cultural Studies. Her research has largely centered on feminist theory and autobiography. Her most recent book is The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony (Cornell, 2001). In recent years, Professor Gillmore has been working on representations of sexuality in America, drawing on and connecting obscenity, privacy law, and experimental narrative. Her currentproject, she writes, “begins in an effort to understand the crafting of a legal subject in the United States endowed with privacy but not liberty…. The ironic legacy of privacy in the U.S. is that it can be extended to citizens in such a way as to reduce their liberty even as it appears to expand it…. I anticipate that legal texts will reveal places where privacy’s promise was curtailed, where privacy was welded to unfreedom to produce partial citizenship, where the problem is not privacy per se, but privacy in the absence of power.”
Gary Lease is currently Professor and Chair of History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz, where his work has focused primarily on the theory of religion and contemporary efforts to disengage the academic study of religion from various religious claims and community practices. At the same time, Lease also works in German studies, concentrating on the phenomenon of German Judaism as well as the institutional and cultural history of Germany over the past two centuries. He is the author of “Odd Fellows” in the Politics of Religion: Modernism, National Socialism, and German Judaism (Berlin 1995), and of “The History of ‘Religious’ Consciousness and the Diffusion of Culture: Strategies for Surviving Dissolution”, Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques 20 (1994). colloquium talk is based on a forthcoming biography of Hans-Joachim Schoeps.
Paul Ortiz is Assistant Professor in the Department of Community Studies at UC Santa Cruz, where he teaches courses on Theory and Practice of Resistance and Social Movements, the African Diaspora, and C.L.R. James. He is co-editor of Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life In The Segregated South (New York: New Press, 2001). Ortiz is completing a manuscript entitled “Invincible Against All Forms of Injustice and Oppression”: The African American Freedom Struggle in Florida, 1877-1920. His new project is a history of the Oilfield Workers’ Trade Union of Trinidad and Tobago, and the role it played in anti-colonialism, politics, and transnational unionism from 1936 to1989.
Dimitris Papadopoulosis Assistant Professor of Devel-opmental and Theoretical Psychology at the Free University in Berlin, Germany, and a Resident Scholar at the Center for Cultural Studies. His publications include his 1998 doctoral dissertation, a study of Russian psychologist L.S. Vygotsky, a co-edited volume on the culture concept in psychology (2001), and numerous articles, in English and German, on subjectivity, critical psychology, and activity theory. While at the Center, he is writing a book on the sociohistorical foundations of developmental rationality: an analysis of the historical and cultural situated-ness of developmentalism against the background of the neo-liberal, transnational, and biotechnological reorganization of social space. His colloquium talk is based on a project tracing the interdependences between theory construction in the social sciences and the social and technoscientific transformations in the post-World War II period. It focuses on the concatenation of neo-liberal governmentality, new forms of violence in the nineties, and the concept of subjectivity as utilized in the social sciences.
Catherine S. Ramirez is a Research Fellow in the Depart ment of American Studies at UC Santa Cruz. Her research inter-ests include Chicana/o literature, history, and culture; gender stu-dies and feminist theory; cultural studies; and comparative ethnic studies. She is the author of “Crimes of Fashion: The Pachuca and Chicana Style Politics” in Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 2:2 (forthcoming, March 2002), and is col-laborating with Eric Porter on a project on black and brown sci-ence fiction and popular science. Her talk explores the performance and performativity of gender, race, and class via women’s use of taboo languages, including caló (the “pachuco patois”), in the Sleepy Lagoon trial of 1942 and Chicana literature from the 1970s and 1980s. It is excerpted from a book project on the par-ticipation of Mexican American women in the zoot subculture of the early 1940s and the mean-ings that Chicana and Chicano writers and artists have ascribed to the figures of the pachuco and pachuca and the World War II period.
Richard T. Rodriguezrecently received his Ph.D. in the History of Consciousness from UC Santa Cruz, and is Assistant Professor of Chicano Studies at California State University, Los Angeles. He is currently revising a manuscript on the symbolic function of the family in relation to nationalism and masculinity in Chicano/a literary, visual, and popular culture, as well as projects which explore the connections between Chicano/a studies and cultural studies and Chicano/a working-class identities and community formations. He recently co-curated the exhibition “Gender, Genealogy, and Counter Memory: Remembering Latino/a Cultural Histories” at MACLA in San Jose.
Daniel Selden is Associate Professor of Literature at UC Santa Cruz, where he teaches courses in Greek and Latin liter-atures, Hellenistic culture, the classical tradition, history of criticism, and literary theory. He has just returned from two years at the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, where he worked with the faculty there on Afro-Asiatic languages, literatures, and cultures. His most recent publications and lectures have dealt with the classical Egyptian backgrounds to Hellenistic Greek poetry. His current research involves the structure of tributary empires in the ancient world (Persian, Roman, Byzantine, Islamic) and the interplay between economy, philosophy, and literature.