Colloquium Series
In spring 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 ROOMApril 16
Warren Sack
(Film and Digital media, UCSC)
Discourse Architecture: Online Public Space and Public Discourse
April 23
David Anthony
(History, UCSC)
The Isle of Cloves in the Gaze of the World: The Fifth Zanzibar International Film Festival
April 30
Pal Ahluwalia
(Politics, University of Adelaide and University of London)
Out of Africa: Post-Structuralism’s Colonial Roots
May 7
Elizabeth Castle
(Postdoctoral Fellow, Women’s Studies, UCSC)
Women Were the Backbone: American Indian Women’s Activism in the Red Power Movement
May 14
Eleanor Kaufman
(English, University of Virginia)
Rocks, Sardine Cans, and Cut Fruit: Solid Objects and the Dialectic in French Phenomenology
May 21
Stacy Kamehiro
(History of Art and VisualCulture, UCSC)
Temple-Palaces and the Art of Kingship in Late Nineteenth-Century Hawai`i
May 28
Jonathan Beecher
(History, UCSC)
French Socialism in Lenin’s Moscow: David Riazanov and the French Archive of the Marx-Engels Institute
Participants
Warren Sack, Assistant Professor of Film and Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz, is a media theorist and software designer. He was previously an assistant professor at UC Berkeley, a research scientist at the MIT Media Laboratory, and a research collaborator in the Interrogative Design Group at the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies. His work concerns theories and designs for online public space and public discourse. Currently he is collaborating with artist/ designer Sawad Brooks on the “Translation Map,” a net art project commissioned by Gallery 9/Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. His colloquium talk will be on this and other recent art and research projects. To view or experience the Translation Map, please see http://translationmap.walkerart.org
David Anthony, Associate Professor of History at UC Santa Cruz, is completing a critical biography entitled The Lives of Max Yergan. Anthony is one of the compilers and editors of African-American Linkages with South Africa, a two-volume documentary text. This talk is an outgrowth of his research on the social and cultural history of Tanzania. Since its inception six years ago, the Zanzibar festival has evolved from a primarily East African phenomenon to a global showcase for Zanzibar, for African and Indian Ocean diaspora cinema, and ultimately for the maritime civilizations of Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and their overseas migratory extensions. Anthony’s talk engages larger questions of how Zanzibar and some Zanzibaris position themselves with respect to globalization.
Pal Ahluwalia teaches Politics at the University of Adelaide and will take up the Foundation Chair of Politics at Goldsmiths College, University of London, in July 2003. He has written extensively on Africa and post-colonial theory. His recent books include Politics and Post-Colonial Theory(Routledge, 2001) and Edward Said(Routledge, 2001). About his talk, Ahluwalia writes,”An examination of French post-structuralist theorists reveals several constellations of identities. There are theorists from what could be called the Jewish diaspora. There are many who, although they made their careers in the metropolitan centers, are ‘outsiders.’ This project seeks to understand why the most important theoretical elaboration of French postmodernists occurs in the work of theorists whose early experience or later political life are informed, inflected by or implicated in the disruptions of French colonialism.”
Elizabeth Castle is a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Santa Cruz. She received her Ph.D. in History from Cambridge University. She has studied radical activism by women of color in post-WWII social movements, oral history methodology, and the history of anti-racist activism. In 1997-1998 she worked as a policy associate for the President’s Initiative on Race in the Clinton White House. Her talk will examine American Indian women’s leadership and participation in the red power movement of the late 1960s and 1970s from the vantage point of native epistemology. Castle also will discuss the ethics of research in Indian country today.
Eleanor Kaufman, Assistant Professor of English at the University of Virginia, is a Resident Scholar at the Center for Cultural Studies in May and June 2003. She is author of The Delirium of Praise: Bataille, Blanchot, Deleuze, Foucault, and Klossowski (Johns Hopkins, 2001) and coeditor of Deleuze and Guattari: New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy, and Culture (Minnesota, 1998). Kaufman is currently working on two projects. The first considers the recurring fascination for solid objects in the French phenomenological tradition, connecting phenomenology to a slightly later and more resoundingly anti-humanist moment in French thought (that of Deleuze, Lacan, and Foucault). Her second project, “The Jewry of the Plain,” explores the memoirs left by Western and Great Plains Jewish settlers at the turn of the twentieth century. The project draws on the work of Jacques Derrida and other French thinkers, connecting in unexpected ways to her interest in modern French thought.
Stacy Kamerhiro is Assistant Professor of the History of Art and Visual Culture at UC Santa Cruz; she has also taught at the University of Redlands. Kamehiro’s talk explores architectural patronage through King David Kalakaua’s (r. 1874-91) building project, the ‘Iolani Palace (Honolulu, O`ahu) (1880-1882). This instance of art patronage can be understood within the context of nationalist responses to escalating colonial pressures, combined with Kalakaua’s individual vision of himself as both an internationally recognized ruler and exalted Hawai`ian chief. The function and location of the Palace were designed to project Hawai`i’s selfdeclaration as a modern independent nation. At the same time, the Palace was to function as a sacred structure that allowed Kalakaua to present himself as a legitimate political and religious authority in “traditional” Hawai`ian terms.
Jonathan Beecher is Professor of History at UC Santa Cruz. He is the author of Victor Considerant and the Rise and Fall of French Romantic Socialism (U. of California, 2001) and Charles Fourier: The Visionary and His World (U. of California, 1987). Beecher’s talk draws on his recent work in an important archive of manuscript material on the French Revolution and the history of nineteenth-century French socialism. This archive, which was assembled in the 1920s and eventually became part of the Central Archives of the Communist Party, was opened to western scholars after the fall of the Soviet Union. In this archive Beecher has located the world’s largest collection of Babeuf manuscripts and hundreds of letters of Auguste Blanqui, Louis Blanc and P. J. Proudhon. His talk will tell the story of the archive and its creator, David Riazanov, a learned and scrupulous scholar and one of the most engaging and fiercely independent figures in early Soviet history.