Black and white photo of five people playing soccer. In the background, the soccer field is bordered by a fence; beyond the fence are multiple industrial smokestacks.

October 17, 2018 – Sharad Chari: “Apartheid Remains”

“Apartheid Remains” explores how people subjected to life in a patchwork landscape of industry and residence in the Indian Ocean City of Durban, South Africa, have sought to contest their social and spatial subjection across the 20th century, particularly in the revolutionary 1970s and 1980s, and in today’s racial capitalism.

Sharad Chari is a geographer working at the interface of political economy, historical ethnography, Marxist geography, agrarian studies, Black and subaltern radical traditions and oceanic studies. He has spent time at the Michigan Society of Fellows and the ‘Anthrohistory’ program at Michigan, Geography at the LSE, and Anthropology at the University of the Witwatersrand, before returning to Berkeley Geography. Sharad is a scholar of agrarian transition and industrialization in South India (his first book, Fraternal Capital, 2004) and has been working on South Africa since 2002 (on the book project Apartheid Remains which he is speaking from.) He has also begun new work on an oceanic conception of capitalism, in relation to the fetishism of ‘the Ocean Economy’ in the Southern African Indian Ocean region, focusing on the South African and Mozambican Indian Ocean littorals, Réunion and Mauritius. At Berkeley, he is also part of Berkeley Black Geographies and the Submergent Archive, both collective projects in Geography Department, and at WiSER he is part of the project on the Oceanic Humanities in the Global South.

Date/Time

October 17, 2018 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

Venue/Location

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

Photo by Cedric Nunn

A photo of the Geneva UN building

October 24, 2018 – CANCELLED – Ashwini Tambe: “Tropical Exceptions: Racial Logics in Twentieth Century Intergovernmental Age of Consent Debates”

–CANCELLED–

–Dr. Tambe’s visit will be rescheduled for another date during the 2017-18 academic year–

This talk traces how intergovernmental efforts at setting common age standards for sexual consent and marriage occasioned elaborate posturing and coding of racial difference. In discussing the proceedings of two UN cases, Tambe demonstrates how seemingly neutral age categories became a means to express geopolitical hierarchies and undercut formal liberal relationships of equivalence.

Ashwini Tambe studies how societies regulate sexual practices, and why sexual practices are freighted with political meaning. Her previous work has engaged the history of sex trade regulation in Bombay. Her forthcoming book focuses on age standards for sexual consent and the legal paradoxes in defining girlhood in India. She is also writing a book on academic feminism and the #MeToo movement, and co-editing a volume on the history and future of transnational feminist theory. She is the editorial director of Feminist Studies, the oldest US journal of feminist interdisciplinary scholarship.

Date/Time

October 24, 2018 | 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 Center for Emerging Worlds & the Department of Feminist Studies

Headshot of Dr. Michel Feher

October 31, 2018 – Michel Feher: “Creditworthiness: The Political Stake of a Speculative Age”

Feher’s current research and forthcoming book, Rated Agency: Investee Politics in a Speculative Age (Zone Books) examines the extraordinary shift in conduct and orientation generated by financialization, particularly the new political resistances and aspirations that investees draw from their rated agency.

Michel Feher is a philosopher who has taught at the École Nationale Supérieure, Paris, and at the University of California, Berkeley, and was recently a Visiting Professor at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is the publisher and a founding editor of Zone Books, NY (in 1986) as well as the president and co-founder of Cette France-là, Paris (in 2008), a monitoring group on French immigration policy. He is the author of Powerless by Design: The Age of the International Community (2000) and, most recently, of Rated Agency: Investee Politics in a Speculative Age (2018); the co-author, with Cette France-là, of Xénophobie d’en haut: le choix d’une droite éhontée (2012) and Sans-papiers et préfets: la culture du résultat en portraits (2012) and the co-editor of Nongovernmental Politics (2007), with Gaëlle Krikorian and Yates McKee, and of Europe at a Crossroads/near Futures Online, with William Callison, Milad Odabaei and Aurélie Windels (2015).

Date/Time

October 31, 2018 | 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 Research Cluster, “After Neoliberalism”

A photo taken from the sky of a sunken ship partially submerged in the ocean

November 7, 2018 – Kevin Dawson: “History Below the Waterline: Enslaved Salvage Divers Harvesting Seaports’ Hinter-Seas, c.1540-1840”

Dawson’s scholarship demonstrates how enslaved Africans carried swimming, surfing, canoe-making, and canoeing skills to the Americas where they were exploited by slaveholders. This talk considers how enslaved Africans employed as salvage divers transformed shipwrecks, especially sunken Spanish treasure ships, into hinter-seas generating capital that financed terrestrial production throughout the English Empire.

Kevin Dawson grew up surfing, swimming, and free-diving in south Los Angeles County, all of which profoundly informed his scholarship. He received a BA from California State University, Fullerton and was awarded his PhD from the University of South Carolina in 2005, where his advisor was Dan Littlefield. Dawson’s scholarship and teaching focus on the African diaspora and Atlantic History from roughly 1444, when the Portuguese first sailed into Sub-Saharan Africa to 1888, when Brazil became the last country in the New World to abolish slavery. He has conducted research throughout the continental US, Hawai‘i, the Caribbean, and West Africa and has published articles in the Journal of American History and Journal of Social History, as well as several chapters in edited volumes. His book Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the Africa Diaspora was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2018.

Date/Time

November 7, 2018 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

Venue/Location

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

 

A photo of Dr. Julie Livingston with a bookshelf in the background.

November 14, 2018 – Julie Livingston: “Self-Devouring Growth: A Planetary Parable”

This talk, like the book from which it is drawn, calls into question the imperative of economic growth, tracing the unintended consequences of escalating consumption. Using a series of linked cases of successful economic growth (water, roads, and cattle in Botswana), it shows how insatiable growth, predicated on consumption, will inevitably overwhelm, a process Livingston terms self-devouring growth.

Julie Livingston is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at New York University. She is the author of the forthcoming Self-devouring growth: a planetary parable told from Southern Africa (Duke University Press), Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic (Duke University Press), Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana (Indiana University Press), and numerous articles and essays and edited volumes and special journal issues. Livingston is the recipient of the Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing, the Royal Anthropological Institute’s Wellcome Medal, and the American Association for the History of Medicine’s William Welch Medal. In 2013 she was named a MacArthur fellow.

Date/Time

November 14, 2018 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

Venue/Location

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

 

A photo of Dr. Peter Limbrick

November 28, 2018 – Peter Limbrick: “For a New Nahda: Moumen Smihi, World Cinema, and Arab Modernism”

Dr. Limbrick’s forthcoming book on Moumen Smihi connects the Moroccan filmmaker’s modernism to the Nahda or “Arab Renaissance” of the 19th-20th century, which re-energized Arab culture in dialogue with other languages and discourses. Offering new ways to think about world cinema and modernism in the region, Limbrick argues that Smihi’s radically beautiful films take up the Nahda’s challenge for a new age.

Peter Limbrick is Associate Professor of Film and Digital Media at UC-Santa Cruz. He is the author of Making Settler Cinemas: Film and Colonial Encounters in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand (Palgrave 2010) and has published on transnational cinema and postcolonial culture in Cinema Journal, Camera Obscura, Third Text, Framework, Visual Anthropology and other journals. He has received fellowships from National Endowment for the Humanities and the UC President’s Research program and is currently finishing a book about Moroccan filmmaker Moumen Smihi, a key figure in the “new Arab cinema” that emerged in the late 1960s across North Africa and the Middle East. In 2013, he curated a major retrospective of Smihi’s work that has screened at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, Block Cinema, in Chicago, and Tate Modern, in London.

Date/Time

November 28, 2018 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

Venue/Location

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

 

A black and white photo of men transporting goods in a shipping yard. A cargo ship is in the background.

December 5, 2018 – Muriam H. Davis: “Colonial Genealogies of Racial Neoliberalism: Governing for the Market in Algeria, 1958-1965”

Prof. Davis’s current work studies how French attempts to introduce a market economy during the Algerian War of Independence transformed the prevailing understandings of racial difference organized around Islam. It highlights the continuities with the post-colonial period, when Algerian socialism introduced new economic practices that were a locus for expressing revolutionary values and national identity.

Muriam Haleh Davis is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of California Santa Cruz. Her research interests focus on questions of political economy, racial classification, and post-colonial studies in Algeria. She recently co-edited an edited volume entitled North Africa and the Making of Europe: Governance, Institutions and Culture (Bloomsbury Press, 2018). Her recent articles have appeared in the Journal of European Integration History and Journal of Contemporary History.

Date/Time

December 5, 2018 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

Venue/Location

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

A map of Latin America, with pins, in it, is shown at a close angle.

April 11, 2018 – Amanda Smith: “Cartographic Delusion: When Maps Lie & People Believe Them”

Amanda M. Smith approaches literary expression as a point of entry into spatialities effaced from other official records. She proposes a reading practice of rigorous intertextuality to recover geographic textures smoothed by homogenizing processes of spatial integration. In this talk, she addresses the stakes of such a spatial reading by exploring the legacy of misreading in contemporary Amazonia.

Smith is Assistant Professor of Latin American Literature in the Department of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She specializes in 20th and 21st-century Latin American literatures and cultures, working across the fields of Indigenous studies and the spatial humanities, with emphasis on the Andean and Amazonian regions. Her current project, tentatively titled Novel Maps, examines how literature and cartography have both overlapped and clashed in transforming Amazonia into a landscape of extraction.

Date/Time

April 11, 2018 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

Venue/Location

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

A woman smiling, against a tin wall.

April 18, 2018 – Mayanthi Fernando: “SuperNatureCulture: Human/Nonhuman Entanglements Beyond the Secular”

Mayanthi Fernando works on Islam, secularism, and the politics of difference in the North Atlantic. Her current project tracks the secular genealogies of the recent posthumanist turn. Reading this scholarship alongside other traditions of nonhuman ontologies, including Islamic sciences of the unseen, she asks whether we might rethink “natureculture” as “supernatureculture.”

Mayanthi Fernando is an associate professor of Anthropology at UCSC, and the director of the Center For Emerging Worlds. Her current project attends to the nexus of sex and religion in the articulation of modern secularity, analyzing how the secular state’s project of regulating and transforming religious life is interwoven with its project of sexual normalization, i.e. the production of secular, sexually “normal” citizens. She is interested in how proper religion and proper sexuality are mutually constituted (often in opposition to each other) by secular rule.

Date/Time

April 18, 2018 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

Venue/Location

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

A man is shown from the waist up, pointing to a sign with Greek lettering.

April 25, 2018 – Yiannis Papadakis: “Here/There: Immigrants, Comparison & Critique”

Yiannis Papadakis published work on Cyprus has focused on ethnic conflict, borders, nationalism, memory, museums, historiography, history education and cinema. His recent work explores issues of migration and social democracy in Denmark, based on fieldwork with Greek and Greek Cypriot immigrants in Copenhagen.

Papadakis holds an appointment in the Department of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Cyprus, and is a visiting scholar at UCSC.

Date/Time

April 25, 2018 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

Venue/Location

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