Book Talks

Prof. Currah and orange wall

April 14 – Paisley Currah – This Anti-Trans Moment: Resisting the Right and the Center

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The current assault on transgender people in the United States seems relatively new, but in fact governments have been regulating the lives of transgender people for decades—from contradictory rules for sex classification to bans on Medicaid coverage to rules about gender-appropriate comportment. In this talk, Currah situates these legislative attacks within a longer history of (trans)gender governance.

Paisley Currah is a Professor of Political Science and Women’s Gender Studies at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.  He is the co-founder of the leading journal in transgender studies, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. Currah’s book, Sex Is as Sex Does: Governing Transgender Identity, published last year by New York University Press, reveals the hidden logics that have governed sex classification policies in the United States in the past and shows what the regulation of transgender identity can tell us about society’s approach to sex and gender writ large.

Date | Time
April 14, 2023 | 12 – 2 PM [PST]
Free and open to the public

Venue | Location 
Humanities Building 1, Room 210
University of California, Santa Cruz

Please note: this is a hybrid event. To receive a link, please RSVP by 11 AM on the day of the talk, and you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM.

Prof Challand

May 25 – Benoit Challand – Violence and Representation in the Arab Uprisings

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This event is sponsored by the Vernacular Cluster and CMENA and co-sponsored by the Department of Sociology

Providing a longue durée perspective on the Arab uprisings of 2011, Benoît Challand narrates the transformation of citizenship in the Arab Middle East, from a condition of latent citizenship in the colonial and post-independence era to the revolutionary dynamics that stimulated democratic participation in the region in 2011. Considering the parallel histories of citizenship and marginalization in Yemen and Tunisia, Challand develops innovative theories of violence and representation. He argues that a new collective imaginary, or the collective force of the people, emerged as a force, representing itself as the sovereign power that could decide when violence ought to be used to protect all citizens from corrupt power. Shedding light upon uprisings in Yemen, Tunisia, but also elsewhere in the Middle East, this book offers deeper insights into conceptions of violence, representation, and democracy. It compares the post-2011 efforts to build a decentralized political order in Tunisia with the calls for federalism in Yemen, and the shared demands for democratic accountability over the means of coercion.

Benoit Challand is Associate Professor of Sociology at The New School for Social Research, New York. He is author of the books Violence and Representation in the Arab Uprisings (Cambridge University Press, 2023), and Palestinian Civil Society: Foreign Donors and the Power to Promote and Exclude (Routledge, 2009). His work has been translated into Arabic and he has numerous co-authored publications such as The Arab Uprisings and Foreign Assistance (co-edited with F. Bicchi and S. Heydemann, Routledge 2016), and Imagining Europe: Myth, Memory and Identity, co-authored with Chiara Bottici (Cambridge University Press 2013). He is also interested in democratic theory, Western European Marxism, and settler colonialism.

Date | Time
May 25, 2023 | 3 – 4:30 PM [PST]
Free and open to the public

Venue | Location 
Humanities Building 1, Room 520
University of California, Santa Cruz

October 15, 2019 – David L. Eng: “Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation”

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Poster with text details about David Eng's October 15 book talk.

 

In Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation literary critic David L. Eng and psychotherapist Shinhee Han draw on case histories from the mid-1990s to the present to explore the social and psychic predicaments of Asian American young adults from Generation X to Generation Y. Combining critical race theory with several strands of psychoanalytic thought, they develop the concepts of racial melancholia and racial dissociation to investigate changing processes of loss associated with immigration, displacement, diaspora, and assimilation.

Date/Time
October 15, 2019 | 4:00 – 6:00 PM
Free and open to the public

Venue
Humanities 1, Room 202
University of California, Santa Cruz

May 4, 2016 – Donna Haraway: “Manifestly Haraway”

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Haraway Wolfe Poster image

Manifestly Haraway brings together Donna Haraway’s seminal “Cyborg Manifesto” and “Companion Species Manifesto.” Manifestly Haraway also includes a wide-ranging conversation between Haraway and Cary Wolfe on the history and meaning of the manifestos in the context of biopolitics, feminism, Marxism, human-nonhuman relationships, making kin, material semiotics, the negative way of knowing, secular Catholicism, and more.

Donna J. Haraway is distinguished professor emerita in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of, among other works, “Primate Visions,” “Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium,” and “When Species Meet.”

Cary Wolfe is Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Professor of English at Rice University, where he is also founding director of 3CT (Center for Critical and Cultural Theory). He is the author of “Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal and What Is Posthumanism?”

Date/Time
May 4, 2016 | 6:00-8:00 PM
Free and open to the public

Venue
Humanities 1, Room 210
University of California, Santa Cruz

April 6, 2016 – Sherene Seikaly: “Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine”

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SEIKALY Poster

Men of Capital examines British-ruled Palestine in the 1930s and 1940s through a focus on economy. In a departure from the expected histories of Palestine, this book illuminates dynamic class constructions that aimed to shape a pan-Arab utopia in terms of free trade, profit accumulation, and private property. And in so doing, it positions Palestine and Palestinians in the larger world of Arab thought and social life, moving attention away from the limiting debates of Zionist-Palestinian conflict.

Professor Sherene Seikaly is a historian of capitalism, consumption, and development in the modern Middle East. She is Assistant Professor of History at UC Santa Barbara. She previously taught at the American University in Cairo. She is Co-founder and Co-editor of the important journal Jadaliyaa.

UC Santa Cruz’s Center for Emerging Worlds and the Center for Cultural Studies present this new series, Book Talks, which invites authors to read from their books and engage in discussion. Please visit the Center for Emerging Worlds’ website for more information on their work.

Date/Time
April 6, 2016 | 6:00-7:30 PM
Free and open to the public

Venue
Humanities Building 2, Room 259
University of California, Santa Cruz

March 9, 2016 – Anna Tsing: “The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins”

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TSING PosterA tale of diversity within our damaged landscapes, The Mushroom at the end of the World follows one of the strangest commodity chains of our times to explore the unexpected corners of capitalism. In all its contradictions, the matsutake mushroom offers insights into areas far beyond just mushrooms and addresses a crucial question: what manages to live in the ruins we have made? By investigating one of the world’s most sought-after fungi, The Mushroom at the End of the World presents an original examination in to the relation between capitalist destruction and collaborative survival within multispecies landscapes, the prerequisite for continuing life on earth.

Anna Tsing is Professor of Anthropology at UCSC and a Neils Bohr Professor at Aarhus University in Denmark, where she codirects Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene (AURA). She is author of “Friction” and “In the Realm of the Diamond Queen.”

UC Santa Cruz’s Center for Emerging Worlds and the Center for Cultural Studies present this new series, Book Talks, which invites authors to read from their books and engage in discussion. Please visit the Center for Emerging Worlds’ website for more information on their work.

Date/Time
March 9, 2016 | 6:00-7:30 PM
Free and open to the public

Venue
Humanities Building 2, Room 259
University of California, Santa Cruz

February 24, 2016 – Gil Anidjar: “Blood: A Critique of Christianity”

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ANIDJAR poster revised

 

Blood, according to Gil Anidjar, maps the singular history of Christianity. As a category for historical analysis, blood can be seen through its literal and metaphorical uses as determining, sometimes even defining Western Culture, politics, and social practice and their wide-ranging incarnations in nationalism, capitalism, and the law. Flowing across multiple boundaries, infusing them with violent precepts that we must address, blood undoes the presumed oppositions between religion and politics, economy and theology, and kinship and race.

Dr. Anidjar is professor of Religion, Comparative Literature, and Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. His books include The Jew, The Arab: A History of the Enemy and Semites: Race, Religion, Literature.

UC Santa Cruz’s Center for Emerging Worlds and the Center for Cultural Studies present this new series, Book Talks, which invites authors to read from their books and engage in discussion. Please visit the Center for Emerging Worlds’ website for more information on their work.

Date/Time
February 24, 2016 | 6:00-7:30 PM
Free and open to the public

Venue
Humanities Building 2, Room 359
University of California, Santa Cruz