–CANCELED–

Dr. Marcus’ talk will be rescheduled to a later date. 

Elizabeth Marcus is a Mellon Fellow in the Scholars in the Humanities program for 2017-2019. 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. Her research and teaching focus on the francophone and Arab worlds, with a particular interest in knowledge production, cultural imperialism, and the histories of religious and minority groups. In her current book project, Difference and Dissidence: Cultural Politics and the End of Empire in Lebanon, she uses post-independence Lebanon as a case study of multilingualism and decolonization from below.

She is developing a second project on global intellectual history, international students and radical politics in post-war France. Recovering the history of the Cité internationale universitaire, an international university campus set on the outskirts of Paris, she looks at how it became a key physical and symbolic space for students, writers and intellectuals from the Middle East, Africa and Europe. 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.

Date/Time

April 10, 2019 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

Venue/Location

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

This talk explores the emergence of modern offshore tax havens as a way to reopen the history of the decades ca. 1920s-1980s. During these decades an archipelago of distinct legal spaces appeared in a world otherwise increasingly dominated by more sizable nation-states. Tax havens were particularly important among these spaces, reaching from the Channel Islands, Monaco, and Luxembourg to the Bahamas, Panama, and Singapore, among many others. The talk asks why tax havens in particular expanded significantly between 1945 and 1965, and points to decolonization and colonial systems of taxation as one answer. It thus sheds light on a crucial period during which much of today’s tax avoidance industry got off the ground, with lasting implications for the rise of inequality in Europe and North America.

Vanessa Ogle is Associate Professor of modern European History at the University of California – Berkeley. She received her doctorate at Harvard in 2011.

Date/Time

April 17, 2019 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

Venue/Location

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

Discourses of urban knowledge professionals (architects, PR professionals, etc.) on the Arab Gulf city have framed this city as an “laboratory,” a “sci-fi” space, and generally have disconnected the space from its social and historical contexts. In this paper I argue that a Marxist or class struggle perspective can best highlight how such discourses promote imperial and capitalist class power in the Gulf. Through combining this framework with a postcolonial discursive critique and feminist scholarship on social reproduction, a class struggle perspective both moves us beyond victimization discourses of Gulf labor and highlights global patterns of capitalist accumulation. In turn, the paper shows how the Gulf is an unexceptional zone of capital accumulation with labor exploitation and social reproduction regimes continuous with, and shaped by, similar such regimes in the Global North.

Ahmed Kanna is associate professor of anthropology at University of the Pacific. He is the author of Dubai: The City as Corporation (2011, University of Minnesota Press), De-Exceptionalizing the Field (with Amelie Le Renard and Neha Vora, forthcoming, Cornell University Press), and articles in Cultural Anthropology, City, and Arab Studies Journal among others.

Date/Time

April 24, 2019 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

Venue/Location

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

Sailing vessels or dhows have long connected different parts of the western Indian Ocean, transporting goods, and people across South Asia, the Middle East and East Africa. These dhows now function as an economy of arbitrage, servicing minor ports in times of conflict. This talk focuses on the contemporary dhow trade, centered in port cities such as Dubai and Sharjah that have “free trade” policies. I argue that these notions of free trade are entangled with war, conflict, and broader geopolitical concerns across the Indian Ocean region.

Nidhi Mahajan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at UCSC. She is also principal faculty in the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Program. Her work examines how vernacular Indian Ocean trade networks articulate with regional and global circuits of capital.

Date/Time

May 1, 2019 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

Venue/Location

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

This paper analyzes Althusser’s proposal for an aleatory materialism through his engagement with historical materialism, and particularly with Marx on “primitive accumulation.” It identifies two different legacies of Marx’s reflections on the origins of capitalism and discusses how Althusser attempted to rework Marx to reach a non-teleological conception of history. At the same time, taking both thinkers to task on their approach to colonialism, and especially settler colonialism, the paper moves toward decolonizing the aleatory materialist imaginary.

Banu Bargu is associate professor of History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is a political theorist, with a focus on modern and contemporary political thought and critical theory. Bargu is the author of Starve and Immolate: The Politics of Human Weapons (Columbia UP, 2014), which received APSA’s First Book Prize given by the Foundations of Political Theory section and was named an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice. She is the editor of Turkey’s Necropolitical Laboratory: Democracy, Violence, and Resistance (Edinburgh UP, forthcoming in 2019) and co-editor of Feminism, Capitalism, and Critique (Palgrave, 2017). Her next book, Friends of the Earth: Althusser and the Critique of Teleological Reason, is forthcoming from Columbia University Press in 2020.

Date/Time

May 8, 2019 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

Venue/Location

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

In this paper, Kazanjian examines a legal case involving an enslaved Afro-diasporan named Juan Patricio and a Mayan woman named Fabiana Pech from turn-of-the-eighteenth-century Yucatán. The case challenges a fundamental presupposition of many contemporary theories of dispossession: namely, that the dispossessed had prior possession over that which was stolen from them by their dispossessors. Like a number of other such cases Kazanjian has been examining from the 17th and 18th centuries, in this case those who were dispossessed do not make claims about prior possession. Rather, both Juan Patricio and Fabiana Pech seem to have lived dispossession outside the terms of possession as such, critiquing and countering their dispossession in ways that call for a revision of contemporary understandings of dispossession. Kazanjian suggests we read the archive of a case like this for alternative theories of dispossession as well as as-yet-unrealized anti-dispossessive politics.

David Kazanjian is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his PhD from the Rhetoric Department at the University of California, Berkeley, his M.A. in Critical Theory from the University of Sussex, and his B.A. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University. His areas of specialization are transnational American literary and historical studies through the nineteenth century, Latin American studies (especially eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico), political philosophy, continental philosophy, colonial discourse studies, and Armenian diaspora studies. He is a member of the organizing collectives of the journal Social Text and of the Tepoztlán Institute for Transnational History of the Americas, and is co-director of the Tepoztlán Institute from 2017-2019. He is the author of The Colonizing Trick: National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early America (Minnesota) and The Brink of Freedom: Improvising Life in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World (Duke). He has co-edited (with David L. Eng) Loss: The Politics of Mourning (California), as well as (with Shay Brawn, Bonnie Dow, Lisa Maria Hogeland, Mary Klages, Deb Meem, and Rhonda Pettit) The Aunt Lute Anthology of U.S. Women Writers, Volume One: Seventeenth through Nineteenth Centuries (Aunt Lute Books). He is currently at work on two monographs. The first sets radical aesthetics in the contemporary Armenian diaspora against the diaspora’s melancholically nationalist understandings of genocide. The second finds anti-foundationalist critiques of dispossession in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century Afro-Indigenous Atlantic.

Date/Time

May 15, 2019 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

Venue/Location

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

Co-sponsored by the Departments of Feminist Studies, History, Literature, Politics, the Program in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, the Research Center for the Americas, and Associate Professor Gina Dent. 

The modern Arab reader cannot be indifferent when reading a novel like Don Quixote. Through its geography, historical context, characters and language, the novel evokes to the modern reader one of the Arabs’ most splendorous historical episodes: Al Andalus. This talk traces the Arab and Andalusian presence in Cervantes’ Don Quixote from 1605, and how this presence was later translated into modern Arabic during the 20th century. The talk will also discuss the reception of Don Quixote in varios Arabic speaking contexts.

Shadi Rohana is a Mexico City-based literary translator, translating between Arabic, Spanish and English. He has introduced and translated a number of Latin American authors from Spanish to Arabic, as well as speeches and declarations from the EZLN in Chiapas. He pursued Latin American Studies in the United States (Swarthmore College) and Mexico (UNAM), and is currently a full-time faculty member at the Center for Asian and African Studies at El Colegio de México, where he teaches Arabic language and literature. The Arabic translation of José Emilio Pacheco’s Las batallas en el desierto (Palestine, 2016) was his first novel-length work.

Date/Time

May 22, 2019 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

Venue/Location

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

Co-sponsored by the Humanities Institute