Colloquium Series
In fall 2004, 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 (Except October 27) ARE IN THE OAKES MURAL ROOM
October 6
Angela Davis
(History of Consciousness, UCSC)
Legacies of Women of Color Feminisms
October 13
Alexei Lalo
(Philosophy and Culture Studies, European Humanities University,
Minsk, Belarus)
In the Noose of National Idiosyncrasies: Resisting Globalization and Inventing Other Modernities in the Postcommunist Western New Independent States
October 20
Candace Vogler
(Philosophy, University of Chicago)
The Element of Surprise October 27
(in Oakes 109)
Christina Jimenez
(History, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs)
The Performed City: Consumers, Sellers, and Spectators in Urban Mexico, 1880-1930
November 3
Eugene Holland
(French and Comparative Studies, The Ohio State University)
The Death State
November 10
Tony Crowley
(English Language and Literature, University of Manchester,UK)
Writing the Demotic: The Politics of Language in Contemporary British Fiction
November 17
Irene Gustafson
(Film and Digital Media, UCSC)
The Space of the Screen /Test
Participants
ANGELA DAVIS is an internationally prominent scholar, writer, and activist. Her works, and books about her and her work, have appeared in many languages. Professor Davis’s most recent books include Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (Vintage, 1999) and Are Prisons Obsolete? (Open Media, 2003).
ALEXEI LALO, Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Culture Studies at the European Humanities University in Minsk, Belarus, is the author of Thomas Pynchon and His America: Enigmas, Parallels, and Cultural Contexts(Minsk: RIVSH BGU, 2001) and co-editor of Deviance in Society, Culture and Literature (UNIPAK, 2004), both published in Russian. His project, “Globalization, Russification, and ‘Double Translation’ in the Borderland Regions of the Western Newly Independent States of the Ex-USSR,” looks at contemporary Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, Russia, and the Baltic States, as they enter a period of transition between one imperial legacy—the Czarist and Soviet eras—and an emergent U.S.-based globalization. Professor Lalo is interested in how these questions are being answered in the social and cultural fields, as well as in the theoretical models that regional scholars can bring to an analysis of these problems. His work focuses on a “translation” of postcolonial theory into an analysis of regional political culture.
CANDACE VOGLER is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Co-Director of the Master of Arts Program in the Humanities at the University of Chicago. She is the author of a book on practical reason entitled Reasonably Vicious(Harvard, 2002); John Stuart Mill’s Deliberative Landscape (Routledge, 2001); and essays on such topics as intimacy, Rousseau and contemporary social contract theory, philosophy and literature, feminism, and sexuality studies. Her research interests center upon the strengths and limits of liberal humanism in ethics, moral psychology, social and political philosophy, gender studies, and cultural studies. Her talk is part of a philosophical examination of happiness.
CHRISTINA JIMENEZ is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, and a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow. She is completing a book manuscript entitled Buying Into the Nation: Negotiating Citizenship and Modernity in Urban Mexico, 1880-1930. Based on thousands of letters and petitions to municipal and state governments, as well as legal codes and governmental memos, her work explores how urban residents were able to secure concessions and protection from the Mexican government by demanding fulfillment of their rights under the Mexican Constitution of 1857. She locates the roots of the informal economy, urban consumer culture, populist state employment, and collective petitioning in the pre-revolutionary late nineteenth century.
EUGENE HOLLAND is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Studies at The Ohio State University. He is the author of Baudelaire and Schizoanalysis:
The Sociopoetics of Modernism(Cambridge, 1993) and Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to Schizoanalysis (Routledge, 1999). His project, “Realizing Global Democracy: Nomad Citizenship and Other Studies in Applied Nomadology,” elaborates a concept of nomad citizenship based on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. His colloquium talk mobilizes schizoanalysis for a socioeconomic analysis of consumerism and its connection to the U.S.A.’s repression of the death instinct.
TONY CROWLEY is Professor of English Literature and Language at the University of Manchester, UK. His works include The Politics of Language: The Standard Language Question in Cultural Debates(Palgrave, 2003); Proper English? Readings in Language, History and Cultural Identity (Routledge, 1991); and the forthcoming Wars of Words: The Politics of Language in Ireland 1534-2003(Oxford, 2004). His current project, “Language and Cultural Identity in Contemporary British Writing,” argues that in the twentieth century the sense that language was constitutive of identity became popular and commonplace. He explores the experimentation and innovation of writers who have represented Black British, Asian Scottish, Welsh, Liverpudlian, London and working-class (often unemployed) experiences in modes of language adequate to those experiences.
IRENE GUSTAFSON teaches production as well as film and video criticism and theory. Her video productions include Velvets (1999) and Screen Test No. 1, No. 2, No. 3. (1998-2002), which have been screened at many galleries and festivals worldwide, including Neo-Queer: Shorts from the Queer Frontier (Center on Contemporary Art, Seattle, 2003), and the Impakt Festival (Utrecht, Netherlands, 2001). Her talk is from her current research project, centering on the form of the screen test and the spaces it both occupies and produces—short form film, industry by-product, experiment. This research takes the form of critical writing, film/video work, and curation.