Colloquium Series
In winter 2003, 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 15
Gina Dent
(Women’s Studies, UCSC)
Who’s Laughing Now?
Bamboozled and Black Culture
January 22
John M. Doris
(Philosophy, UCSC)
War Crimes
January 29
Nadine Naber
(Women’s Studies, UCSC)
Arab American Femininities: Beyond Arab Virgin/American(ized) Whore
February 5
Takashi Fujitani
(History, UC San Diego)
Racism Under Fire:
Korean Japanese and Japanese Americans in WWII
February 12
David Hoy
(Philosophy, UCSC)
Heidegger and the History of Consciousness
February 19
Lila Abu-Lughod
(Anthropology, Columbia University)
Development Realism and the Problem of Feminism
February 26
Alain-Marc Rieu
(Philosophy, University of Lyon III, France)
Epistemics: How to Understand the Mutation of the Role and Conception of Knowledge in Advanced Industrial Societies
March 5
Lindsay Waters
(Executive Editor for the Humanities, Harvard University Press)
Enemies of Promise
Participants
Gina Dent is Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies at UC Santa Cruz, having previously taught at Princeton, Columbia, and UC Berkeley. She has published on African American literature and art, and also works on African American women and the prison-industrial complex. Her Anchored to the Real: Black Literature in the Wake of Anthropology is forthcoming from Duke. About her talk, she asks, given the current discourse on race, “can the definition of culture shift to enable a meaningful deployment of the term ‘black’? Spike Lee’s film Bamboozled provides an opportunity to interrogate the subjects of black culture—and the required object–making of the self—that ties representation to the logic of race.”
John M. Doris is Associate Professor of Philosophy at UC Santa Cruz. His work brings studies from the empirical social sciences to bear on ethical questions. Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior (Cornell, 2002) argues against the view, held since Aristotle, that moral character is a significant determinant of behavior. About his talk, he writes, “Given the social and material conditions of wars and the psychological characteristics of human beings who fight them, philosophical reflection on moral responsibility compels the conclusion that many, if not most, individuals who commit atrocities in warfare cannot be legitimately held responsible for these behaviors.”
Nadine Naber is a postdoctoral Researcher in Women’s Studies at UC Santa Cruz, having received her Ph.D. from UC Davis in 2002. She is also currently a recipient of a Russell Sage Grant for research on racialization among Arab and Muslim Americans in the San Francisco Bay Area after September 11th. Her talk is from a book in progress based on her dissertation “Arab San Francisco: On Gender, Cultural Citizenship, and Belonging.” In the study, she examines contemporary Arab identity in diaspora, at the intersection of U.S. multicultural nationalism and Arab “re-authenticity.”
Takashi Fujitani is Associate Professor of History at UC San Diego. He is spending this academic year as a fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center, and has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, which he will take in 2003-04. His Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan (California, 1996) was a widely reviewed and influential study of modern Japanese emperorship. His talk is from his current research on Koreans in the Japanese military and Japanese Americans in the U.S. military during WWII. “One of the main points of the project is that the U.S. and Japan became increasingly alike as they fought a total war against each other, not least of all in their treatment of domestic minorities and colonial subjects.”
David Hoy holds the UC Presidential Chair in Philosophy. In addition to essays on philosophers from Kant to Derrida, his publications include The Critical Circle: Literature, History, and Philosophical Hermeneutic (California, 1978) and Critical Theory (Blackwell, 1994). He has recently completed a book entitled Critical Resistance. His talk is based on the Heidegger chapter of a book in progress entitled A Critical History of Consciousness. He writes, “Heidegger wanted to bring the history of consciousness to an end by substituting a different philosophical vocabulary that avoids Cartesian terms like consciousness and subjectivity. However, the repressed terms return to haunt Heidegger in the form of persisting problems about idealism and realism.”
Lila Abu-Lughod is Professor of Anthropology and Women’s and Gender Studies at Columbia University. Her early work was on emotion, poetry, and gender ideology in a Bedouin community in Egypt. As an anthropologist of the Middle East, she began to think about ethnographic writing itself, contributing to the critique of the concept of culture. Interests in gender in the Arab world and in postcolonial theory led to work on the history and contemporary politics of Middle Eastern feminisms. Her books include Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society (California, 1993), which won the Victor Turner Prize of the American Anthropological Association. She is editor of Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East (Princeton, 1998) and co-editor of Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain(California, 2002). In the book manuscript she has just finished, The Melodrama of Nationhood: Cultural Politics and Egyptian Television, she explores issues of national pedagogy, class politics, religious identity, and modern subjectivities through analysis of the production and consumption, by socially marginal women, of popular Egyptian television soap operas. This project has led her to reflect on theoretical and methodological questions in the anthropology of media, especially in the context of the cultural production of nations. Her colloquium talk is drawn from The Melodrama of Nationhood.
Alain-Marc Rieu is Professor of Philosophy at theUniversity of Lyon III, and is currently a visiting professor in the History of Consciousness department. His seven books and many articles largely center on analyses of conditions shaping the formation and institutionalization of knowledge in contemporary industrial societies. Savoir et pouvoir dans la modernisation du Japon (Knowledge and Power in the Modernization of Japan, Presses Universitaires de France, 2001) uses the example of Japan’s modernization to suggest alternative configurations of knowledge and technology in post-industrial society. “Epistemics” suggests a new way to conceive of contemporary knowledge production, and suggests a central role for the humanities and the humanistic social sciences.
Lindsay Waters is Executive Editor for the Humanities at Harvard University Press. In addition to his editorial work, he has published widely in scholarly publications, and in more journalistic venues, on aesthetics, popular culture, and academic publishing, among other topics. His Meixue quanweizhuyi pipan (A Critique of Authoritarian Aesthetics) was translated and published by Beijing University Press in 2000. His talk this quarter has the alternate title “Cooking the Books: Why the Idea of Books for Tenure Has Gone Badly Wrong” and follows several widely referenced articles that Waters has published about the current state of academic publishing.