This talk considers the Anthropocene from the perspective of artists working within areas devastated by the War on Terror. While the popularization of the concept of the Anthropocene dates to the early 2000s–the very moment of the declaration of the War on Terror–the two modes of imagining the geopolitics of the present have yet to be considered together. Mameni coins the term “Terracene” as an entry point into considering the condition of the planet under terror. 

Sara Mameni is the director of Aesthetics and Politics program and faculty in the school of Critical Studies at California Institute of the Arts. She received her PhD in Art History from University of California San Diego in 2015 and was a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in Feminist Studies at UC Santa Cruz in 2016/2017. Her specialization is contemporary art in the Arab/Muslim world with a focus on queer of color theory. Her current research explores biopolitics, racial discourse in the Anthropocene, post-humanist aesthetics and the geo-ecological age of petroleum. 

Date/Time
October 16, 2019 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

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

This paper uncovers the forgotten history of the “affaire de l’école de droit,” an eight-year long local and international crisis over the languages of legal instruction in the years following the end of the French mandate in Lebanon. By reassembling the moment of transition, and recovering it from the grand, structural narratives of colonization and war that dominate scholarship on Lebanon, the affaire becomes crucial vista in an understanding of the diverse, contradictory and multi-layered experience of decolonization.

Elizabeth Marcus is a Mellon Fellow in the Scholars in the Humanities program at Stanford University and a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Leeds. She received her BA from the University of Oxford in Modern History and French, and completed her PhD in French and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in 2017. Elizabeth has taught in the Core Curriculum at Columbia University and at MIT as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Global Studies and Languages Department. Her research focuses on the literatures as well as the intellectual and cultural history of the Francophone and Arab world with a particular interest in the relationship between language and cultural politics, intellectual networks, and migration in the afterlife of the French Empire. Her current manuscript, Difference and Dissidence: Cultural Politics and the End of Empire in Lebanon, 1943-1975, uncovers the response of local actors to the unique period of transition Lebanon at the end of the French mandate to the beginning of the civil war in 1975. During her time as a British Academy Fellow, she will start her second project, Paris and the Global University: International Students and Cultural Internationalism at the Cité Universitaire, 1945-1975, which looks at how the Cité internationale Universitaire, a residential campus in the Parisian outskirts, became a crucible of left and right-wing transnational political and cultural activism during the Trente Glorieuses (1945-1975).

Date/Time
October 23, 2019 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

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

Under what conditions might fear become a saturating phenomenon of liberal democracy and extreme violence cease to be even a moral crime? Is this silent war on the body and idea of the citizen on the constitutional theorist and moral philosopher B. R. Ambedkar’s mind when, in his revolutionary classic Annihilation of Caste (1936), he coins the phrase “armed neutrality?” In this lecture, building on a new constellation of thinkers in political theory, Kumar develops the fundamental insight that Ambedkar, Hannah Arendt, and Judith Shklar, in conceptually different ways and with radically different moral psychological consequences, offer on today’s insoluble democratic impasse: that the most catastrophic effect of social inequality is not merely a betrayal of our constitutional compact to justice but a weaponization of a new form of political cruelty. What is this new cruelty? And what kind of constitutional courage– a re-articulation of dignity–  might today be necessary to retrieve our freedom?

Aishwary Kumar is an intellectual historian and political theorist with interests in South Asian, European, and American political thought. His work spans a wide spectrum of issues in moral and political philosophy, constitutional theory and political justice, war and ethics, empire and liberalism, and the history of democratic thought and rights. Kumar’s first book, Radical Equality: Ambedkar, Gandhi, and the Risk of Democracy (Stanford, 2015; Delhi, 2019), was listed by The Indian Express among the fifteen most important works on politics, morality, and law to be published anywhere that year. His essays have appeared, among other places, in Modern Intellectual History, Contemporary South Asia, Social History, Indian Economic and Social History Review, and Public Culture. He has also been featured on the radio shows Entitled Opinions and Philosophy Talk. Kumar is currently working on two related book-length studies. The first, titled “The Sovereign Void: Ambedkar’s Critique of Violence,” examines the genealogies of political freedom and war in Southern and Atlantic political thought, and their relation to notions of “force” across epistemological, theological, and secular traditions. The second, titled “The Gravity of Truth: Disenchantment, Disappointment, Democracy,” takes the Obama Presidency as its starting point to explore the place of moral and political judgment in the global constitutional imagination.

Date/Time
October 30, 2019 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

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

Church sanctuary is not legal in any state in Europe, but the cultural and religious sense of church space as sacred, and the collective memory of this practice as an alternative form of justice, still has a powerful legacy. In citing past sanctuary ideals and practices, from medieval asylum law to recent sanctuary movements on behalf of refugees, faith-based actors draw on these memories to reactivate older traditions of insurgent citizenship. In this talk, Mitchell explores the critical role of space, collective memory and non-secular webs of belief in these current challenges to orthodox assumptions of state sovereignty.

Katharyne Mitchell is Dean of the Social Sciences and Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Current research explores various aspects of migration and religion. Recent books include Making Workers: Radical Geographies of Education (Pluto Press, 2018), and the co-edited Handbook on Critical Geographies of Migration (Edward Elgar, 2019). Mitchell is the author of over 100 articles and book chapters and the recipient of grants from the MacArthur Foundation, Spencer Foundation, and National Science Foundation. The research for this talk was made possible by a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Date/Time
November 6, 2019 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

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

Until recent conflicts over islands in the South China Sea, Vietnam’s history was described in terrestrial terms. Vietnam’s nationalist struggles, we were told, involved epic battles with American and other troops in highland jungles and city streets; and the nation’s territorial expansion from Hanoi happened in two directions: southward and uphill. The sea, as so many history books taught, was a nothing space where foreign invasions began. Vietnam’s geo-body was tied to a Westphalian notion of sovereignty reified in so many books and maps. Real sovereignty in Vietnam, however, was and still is relational. Topologies of trade, commerce, migration and communication have for centuries defined where “Vietnam” begins and so many other cultures and ecologies taper off. Rather than assume a closed model, this talk reimagines Vietnam as an archipelago, a more permeable nation-system of nodes linked by flows of energy, food, people and technology moving from the sea to the mountains and spaces beyond. Drawing from his recently published book, Footprints of War: Militarized Landscapes in Vietnam (Washington, 2018), environmental historian David Biggs conducts an archipelagic history tour along Vietnam’s central coast with stops in the ancient, early modern, colonial and post-colonial past.

David Biggs is a Professor of History at the University of California, Riverside, specializing in twentieth century environmental history with an area focus on Vietnam and Southeast Asia. His first book, Quagmire: Nation-Building and Nature, won the 2011 George Perkins Marsh Prize in Environmental History; and his essays have appeared in such venues as the Journal of Asian Studies, Technology and Culture and the New York Times. He is currently working on a trans-Pacific history of the mid-twentieth century.

Date/Time
November 13, 2019 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

Venue/Location
In solidarity with the UC-wide AFSCME strike November 13, David Biggs’ colloquium talk will be held off campus. Please R.S.V.P. by noon on Tuesday, November 12 to receive the address.

Co-sponsored by the Center for Southeast Asian Coastal Interactions

This talk engages a ‘small’ history of sexuality and slavery in Portuguese India. At stake are three questions: How do we call attention to the displacement of slave pasts within histories of sexuality that are themselves routinely displaced?  How do we locate those displacements in itinerant archives of profit and pleasure, than in archives of loss and trauma? How do we open a dialogue between the interdisciplinary fields of area studies and sexuality studies with an eye to understanding how histories of slavery can reshape, even devastate, these very field-formations? 

Anjali Arondekar is Associate Professor of Feminist Studies, UCSC. Her research engages the poetics and politics of sexuality, colonialism and historiography, with a focus on South Asia. She is the author of For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (Duke University Press, 2009, Orient Blackswan, India, 2010), winner of the Alan Bray Memorial Book Award for best book in lesbian, gay, or queer studies in literature and cultural studies, Modern Language Association (MLA), 2010. She is co-editor (with Geeta Patel) of “Area Impossible: The Geopolitics of Queer Studies,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (2016). Her talk is an excerpt from her forthcoming book, Abundance: On Sexuality and Historiography.

Date/Time
November 20, 2019 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

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

“The Quotidian Lucy and Other Constructions” explores some recent site-specific and studio performances (written/visual/sonic) that serve as interventions between theory and practice.  Discussing new works on paper, video, and in performance, Wilson seeks to inhabit and engage with questions of memory, genre, form, and discipline as strategies through which to examine race, sex, and desire in concert with what vocabularies emerge and accrete in rendering multiple drafts of the self through poetic persona, character, and movement. 

Ronaldo V. Wilson, PhD is the author of four collections: Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man, Poems of the Black Object, Farther Traveler: Poetry, Prose, Other, and Lucy 72. The recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Ford Foundation, Kundiman, MacDowell, the National Research Council, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the Center for Art and Thought, and Yaddo, Wilson is an interdisciplinary artist, who has performed in multiple venues, including the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, UC Riverside’s Artsblock, Louisiana State University’s Digital Media Center Theater, Georgetown’s Lannan Center, Southern Exposure Gallery, and Casa Victoria Ocampo in Buenos Aires. He is Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at U.C. Santa Cruz.

Date/Time
December 4, 2019 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

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