Colloquium Series
In fall 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 ROOMOctober 2
Jerome Neu
(Philosohy, UCSC)
An Ethics of Fantasy?
October 9
Chris Berry
(Film Studies, UC Berkeley)
Where Do You Draw the Line? Ethnicity in Chinese Cinemas
October 16
Vanita Seth
(Politics, UCSC)
The Timing of Race: or What Made Race Classification Possible?
October 23
Flora Veit-Wild
(Dept. of African Studies, Humboldt University, Berlin)
Borderlines of the Body in African Literature
October 30
Brian Catlos
(History, UCSC)
Infidels and Allies: A Reappraisal of the Ethno-Religious Element in Western Mediterranean Politics in the Era of the Crusades
November 6
David Kim
(Philosophy, Univ. of San Francisco)
Black Atlanticism: Africana Studies and Pacific Empires
November 13
Audrey Jaffe
(Center for Cultural Studies, UCSC)
Measurement Without Numbers: Figures of Nineteenth-Century Statistics
November 20
Brett Ashley Crawford
(Performing Arts, American University)
The Arts Audiences in the 21st Century—Community, Consumer, or Tourist
Participants
Jerome Neu is Professor of Philosophy at UC Santa Cruz. He is the author of Emotion, Thought, and Therapy (University of California, 1977), and A Tear Is an Intellectual Thing: The Meanings of Emotion (Oxford University Press, 2000), and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Freud, (Cambridge, 1991). His book in progress is entitled Sticks and Stones: the Philosophy of Insults. About this talk he writes, “Is there, in addition to the ethics of action, an ethics of fantasy? Are there fantasies one ought not to have? Do the problems such fantasies raise depend on their links to desire and action?” Taking up pornographic and sexual fantasies, the talk emphasizes psycho-analytic and legal aspects of the issues.
Chris Berry is Associate Professor of Film Studies at UC Berkeley. He is currently completing a book co-authored with Mary Farquhar and entitled Cinema And Nation: China On Screen (Cambridge, forthcoming). His new research, a project investigating “the look” in Chinese cinema, attempts a de-Westernization of film theory. He is also working on the translation of Lu Fei-i’s history of the cinema in Taiwan. In this talk, Chris Berry argues for re-thinking the scope and conceptualization of ethnicity in Chinese cinemas. Illustrated with clips from films such as Wedding Banquet(1993), Serfs (1963), Horse Thief (1986), and City of Sadness (1989), this talk explores new models of ethnic relations.
Vanita Seth is Assistant Professor of Political Science at UC Santa Cruz. She is currently working on a project entitled “Genealogies of Difference: European Representations of the Amerindians and Indians,” focusing on the period from the 15th to the 19th century. Central to this work is an understanding of how European constructions of difference changed historically. She argues that race as a form of classification and racism as a form of discrimination are ways of seeing difference that are peculiar to the modern, crucially formed in the 19th century. “What made such classification possible,” she writes, “is not simply the emergence of medical and anthropological discourses but a radically new conceptualization of time.”
Flora Veit-Wild has been Professor of African Literatures and Cultures at the Department of African Studies, Humboldt University, Berlin, since 1994. From 1983-93, she lived in Harare, Zimbabwe, where she researched and published widely on the history and developments of Zimbabwean literature. Her works include Teachers, Preachers, Non-Believers: A Social History of Zimbabwean Literature and, co-authored with Anthony Chennels, Dambudzo Marechera: A Source Book on his Life and Work (both 1992). Veit-Wild’s colloquium talk is drawn from her current project on “Borderlines of the Body in African Literature.” Her earlier work in this field includes studies of pain, authorship, the female body, and madness in African literature.
Brian Catlos is Assistant Professor of History at UC Santa Cruz. He is editing the final draft of a forthcoming book, The Victors and the Vanquished: Christians and Muslims in Catalonia and Aragon, 1050–1300 (Cambridge), while conducting archival research on Muslims and Jews living under Christian rule in medieval Iberia, and exploring larger questions regarding the nature of the political, economic, and social interaction of ethno-religious communities. He writes, “The Middle Ages is traditionally portrayed as an era of ‘conquest’ and Crusade in Iberia and the Maghrib. This paper takes the career of a Muslim mercenary in thirteenth-century Christian Aragon as the departure point for a reassessment of the role of ethno-religious identity and ideology in the politics and society of that age.”
David Kim is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Director of Asian American Studies at the University of San Francisco, where he holds the NEH Chair for 2002-3. His essays include “The Color Line in the Era of Pacific Empires” in David Theo Goldberg and Tommy Lott, eds., The Color Line: Du Bois on Race and Culture (Blackwell Press, forthcoming). His book-in-progress, tentatively entitled The Black Pacific, investigates a largely hidden but rich tradition of black liberatory thought on Asia, from the late 19th century through the Cold War era. His talk will highlight various strands of this tradition, notably the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, and C.L.R. James, and their significance for two important works in Africana studies, Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic and Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism.
Audrey Jaffe is the author of a book on Dickens, Vanishing Points: Dickens, Narrative, and the Subject of Omniscience(University of California, 1991), and more recently of Scenes of Sympathy: Identity and Representation in Victorian Fiction(Cornell, 2000). She has taught at NYU, the University of Toronto, and
Ohio State University, where she was until recently an Associate Professor of English. When not visiting UC Santa Cruz she can be found in Berkeley, where, at the moment, she teaches a nineteenth-century-novel course for UC Extension and thinks about the graph. Her talk, part of a project about the genealogy of and meanings attached to the image of the graph in modern culture, will address representations of identity in statistical history, focusing especially on the work of nineteenth-century theorists such as Quetelet, Galton, and Jevons.
Brett Ashley Crawford is Assistant Professor in the Department of Performing Arts at American University. She received a Ph.D. in theatre history and criticism and a graduate certificate in women’s studies from the University of Maryland, College Park and an M.F.A. in arts administration from Texas Tech University. Her current projects include research on and conceptualization of the future of audiences in America and the practice of audience development in arts organizations; gender, race, and management in the creative and administrative arenas of the arts; women and leadership; and the use of technology in arts and education. Her research on audience development investigates the complex intersections between race, gender, ethnicity and class in an increasingly competitive, niche-driven cultural marketplace.