Amid discussions about universal rights, contestations over land, and debates over the morality of chattel slavery, eighteenth-century Europeans increasingly sought to codify social hierarchy in observable physical differences. This project depended upon and spurred the production of circulatable pictures of bodies in the form of prints. At the same time, recent encounters between European and Pacific Islanders disrupted previously accepted human divisions based on a four-continent model. This talk will analyze prints made after European voyages in Oceania to consider how these works give form to interactions between different visual practices and ways of knowing. Though images made during the so-called “voyages of discovery” are often treated as mere illustrations, this talk will indicate how they do not simply replicate European racialist theories but rather reveal uncertainties and shifts in the visual epistemologies of race.

Kailani Polzak is an Assistant Professor in the History of Art and Visual Culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She specializes in early-modern European visual culture, focusing on questions of intercultural contact, race, and colonialism in representations of the Pacific. Polzak’s current book project examines the graphic and printed works created about the circumnavigatory expeditions conducted by Britain, France, and Russia in Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, and Hawaiʻi in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and traces how these pictures were mobilized in constructions of racial difference and geographical space. Her current research and publications emphasize the methodological questions raised by writing about and curating colonial histories from multiple perspectives.

Date | Time
February 28, 2024 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]
Free and open to the public

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

Is it possible to historicize higher education without taking its basic categories for granted? In this talk, I aim to provide a historical and theoretical framework for the emergence of mass higher education in the twentieth century U.S. framed by the problem of surpluses—population, labor, and governance capacity. Faced with the prospect of mass unemployment in the wake of the second world war, U.S. state-making found in the university a means of putting wartime budget surpluses to work in an effort to absorb demobilized population and labor surpluses. The category of the college student emerges in this period as a means of anticipating and managing the potential crises attendant to modern warfare. But as it develops, it does not remain there. The university as a site for the absorption of surplus emerges as a site for the struggle over how and toward what ends surplus time—time free of and freed from the wage—might be used.

Nick Mitchell (she/her) works in the Department of Feminist Studies and the Department of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at UC Santa Cruz. As a researcher, Mitchell is principally engaged with higher education in the U.S. as a problem for historical and theoretical inquiry. As a writer, Mitchell aims to make better sense of university life-worlds by developing scales, vocabularies, and categories to reframe and rethink its rhythms and textures. These research and writing efforts can be found in essays published in Feminist Studies, Critical Ethnic Studies, The New Inquiry, and Spectre, as well as in two forthcoming books: Discipline and Surplus: Black Studies, Women’s Studies, and the Dawn of Neoliberalism (under contract with Duke University Press) and The University, in Theory: Essays on Institutionalized Knowledge.

Date | Time
October 11, 2023 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]
Free and open to the public

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

Can seeing the Amazon from above bring about new perspectives on the forest at a critical time? This talk proposes that the documentary Helena Sarayaku manta (dir. Eriberto Gualinga, 2021) rethinks the aerial view by pushing against its historical associations with omniscience and a desire for mastery and by reframing it instead around the vitality of the forest in a site that resists exploitation: the Indigenous territory of Sarayaku in the Ecuadorian Amazon. As I examine the role of trees in the film’s production, I argue that Helena Sarayaku manta achieves this new aerial grammar through an attunement to the arboreal.

Martina Broner’s research sits at the intersection of Latin American cinema and media studies and the environmental humanities. Her book manuscript, Forest Formats: Media and Environment in the Amazon, examines new media formats that emerge from entanglements between human and other living entities in the transnational Amazon rainforest. She is assistant professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Dartmouth.

Date | Time
October 18, 2023 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]
Free and open to the public

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

Image by Eriberto Gualinga

A genocide in Palestine is unraveling in front of our eyes. This teach-in will provide a feminist framework and people-centered analysis that centers power and Palestinian experiential knowledge. This teach-in will situate what is happening now in Palestine, historicize the current moment, and attend to the disproportionality and selective humanity that has dominated the mainstream. The racialized, anti-Palestinian discursive tropes of mainstream media, which the UC has engaged, has resulted in material losses, including of life both here and abroad. This teach-in will address these themes and hopes to enable a conversation around action in the face of injustice.

Jennifer Mogannam is an Assistant Professor of Critical Race & Ethnic Studies and an affiliate of the Center for the Middle East & North Africa at UC Santa Cruz. Prior to UC Santa Cruz, she was a UC President’s postdoctoral fellow at UC Davis and, through the program, was selected as a 2023-24 Mellon Foundation/UC-HSI Humanities Initiative Faculty Fellow. She earned her PhD in Ethnic Studies from UC San Diego and her MA in Arab and Middle Eastern Studies from the American University of Beirut. Her scholarship is cross-disciplinary – centering oral history, ethnography, archives, and cultural criticism – and broadly examines 20th and 21st century Palestinian and Arab transnational movements and third world solidarities, with an eye for analyzing movement praxis for liberated futures. Her work intervenes in the critical study of refugees, borders, colonialism and imperialism, global scales of race and indigeneity, and resistance. Her current book project frames and analyzes the coalitional relationship forged between Palestinian and Lebanese revolutionary fronts during Civil War Lebanon.

Date | Time
November 1, 2023 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]
Free and open to the public

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

Cosponsored by the Center for South Asian Studies

In this talk, Dr. Hafsa Kanjwal discusses her new book Colonizing Kashmir: State-Building Under Indian Occupation. The book interrogates how Kashmir was made “integral” to India through a study of the decade long rule (1953-1963) of Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad, the second Prime Minister of the State of Jammu and Kashmir. Drawing upon a wide array of bureaucratic documents, propaganda materials, memoirs, literary sources, and oral interviews in English, Urdu, and Kashmiri, Kanjwal examines the intentions, tensions, and unintended consequences of Bakshi’s state-building policies in the context of India’s colonial occupation. She reveals how the Kashmir government tailored its policies to integrate Kashmir’s Muslims while also showing how these policies were marked by inter-religious tension, corruption, and political repression. Challenging the binaries of colonial and postcolonial, Kanjwal historicizes India’s occupation of Kashmir through processes of emotional integration, development, normalization, and empowerment to highlight the new hierarchies of power and domination that emerged in the aftermath of decolonization. In doing so, she urges us to question triumphalist narratives of India’s state-formation, as well as the sovereignty claims of the modern nation-state.

Hafsa Kanjwal is an assistant professor of South Asian History in the Department of History at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, where she teaches courses on the history of the modern world, South Asian history, and Islam in the Modern World. As a historian of modern Kashmir, she is the author of Colonizing Kashmir: State-building Under Indian Occupation (Stanford University Press, 2023), which examines how the Indian and Kashmir governments utilized state-building to entrench India’s colonial occupation of Kashmir in the aftermath of Partition. 

 Hafsa has written and spoken on her research for a variety of news outlets including The Washington Post, Al Jazeera English, and the BBC. She received her Ph.D. in History and Women’s Studies from the University of Michigan and a Bachelors in Regional Studies of the Muslim World from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.

Date | Time
November 8, 2023 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]
Free and open to the public

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

Zoom Registration Link: https://bit.ly/45QVLw0