Colloquium Series

In spring 2008, the Center for Cultural Studies will continue to host a Wednesday colloquium series, which features current cultural studies work by campus faculty and visitors. The sessions are informal, normally consisting of a 30-40 minute presentation followed by discussion. We gather at noon, with presentations beginning at 12:15. Participants are encouraged to bring their own lunches; the Center will provide coffee, tea, and cookies.

ParticipantsALL COLLOQUIA ARE IN HUMANITIES 1, ROOM 210

April 9
Giuseppe Martella
(Center for Cultural Studies, UC Santa Cruz)
Science, Culture, Media

April 16
Miriam Leonard
(Greek and Latin, University College London)
Socrates and the Jews

April 23
Mark Pettigrew
(Center for Cultural Studies, UC Santa Cruz)
Peacock Angel, Devil, King: Heterodoxy and the Play of Meaning in a Medieval Islamic Grimoire

May 7
Mel Chen
(Gender and Women’s Studies, UC Berkeley)
Yellow Scares, Queer Animalities, and Contemporary Panics

May 14
Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti
(Center for Cultural Studies, UC Santa Cruz)
Mediterranean Crossings: Interrupting Modernity

May 21
Jennifer González
(History of Art and Visual Culture, UC Santa Cruz)
The Face and The Public: Race, Secrecy, and Digital Art PracticeMay 28
Juan Poblete
(Literature, UC Santa Cruz)
U.S. Latino Studies in a Global Context: Social Imagination and the Production of In/visibility

GIUSEPPE MARTELLA is Associate Professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures at the Faculty of Foreign Languages, University of Urbino. His present research concerns philosophic hermeneutics, the relation between science and the humanities, and between literature and digital media. His current research belongs to the ETNP project ACUME2 (“Interfacing science, literature and Humanities, ”http://www2.lingue.unibo.it/acume2/networkdata/italy.htm). He is interested in technique as an area of mediation between science and the humanities and carrying out a study of types, functions and implications of digital interfaces and hypertexts, considered as both dominant features of current techno-science and powerful cultural agents.

MIRIAM LEONARD teaches in the Department of Greek and Latin at University College London, and is currently a fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center. She is author of Athens in Paris (OUP, 2005) and co-editor of Laughing with Medusa: Classical Myth and Feminist Thought (OUP, 2006). Her most recent book, How to Read Ancient Philosophy, will be published by Granta in 2008. The present work investigates how an opposition between Hebraism and Hellenism was central to the engagement with the past in post-Enlightenment Europe. With a specific focus on Germany, it argues that this antithesis played a crucial role in the development of Classics as a discipline, and reveals how the figures of the “Greek” and the “Jew” have been integral to the construction of modernity.

MARK PETTIGREW is currently Assistant Professor of Arabic Language and Literature at Queens College, CUNY. He specializes in Classical Arabic Literature with an emphasis on aspects of popular culture in the late Middle Ages. His current research focuses on syncretism and heterodoxy in Arabic ritual magic texts from the late Middle Ages. The composite nature of these texts, referencing earlier cultural traditions, resists simple categorization and defies the sort of hierarchies imposed by contemporary orthodox Muslim scholars. The present case study will explore a particularly striking example of indeterminacy in a 14th or 15th-century grimoire entitled Shumus al-anwar (“The Solar Luminaries”).

MEL CHEN is Assistant Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley and an affiliate of the Center for Race and Gender and the Institute for Cognitive and Behavioral Sciences. She works on queer animality and race, language, and embodiment. Her current project traces the ethical contours of a queer of color approach to animality through a consideration of gender and sexuality in the U.S. as it appears in “multiracial dramas,” visiting early political cartoons, mid-20th century Fu Manchu films, and contemporary figures and moments such as the Cat Man, Michael Jackson, and queer vernaculars.

IAIN CHAMBERS teaches Cultural and Postcolonial Studies in the context of the Mediterranean at the University of Naples, “L’Orientale.” Among his recent publications are Culture after Humanism (Routledge, 2001), Mediterranean Crossings. The Politics of an Interrupted Modernity (Duke, 2008), and the essay
“Philosophy and the Postcolonial” (forthcoming). He is also editor of Esercizi di Potere. Gramsci, Said e il postcoloniale (Meltemi, 2006). He is currently working on critical reassessments of the Mediterranean in the light of postcolonial critical thought and the fall-out of subsequent analyses on current understandings of Europe, occidental humanism, and modernity.

LIDIA CURTI teaches Women’s and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Naples “L’Orientale” and is a member of the editorial board of Anglistica, Feminist Review, and New Formations. She is the author of Female Stories, Female Bodies (Macmillan, 1998; repr. NYU, 1999), and co-editor of The Postcolonial Question (Routledge, 1996) and La nuova Shahrazad (Liguori, 2004). After finishing her most recent book, La voce della subalterna. Scritture ibride tra femminismo e postcolonialità (Meltemi, 2006), she has begun to study women’s literature of migration in Italy, while continuing her work on Indian cinema and literature and the poetics and politics of “another cinema.”

JENNIFER A. GONZALEZ is Associate Professor in the History of Art and Visual Culture department at UCSC. Her recently published book, Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art (MIT, 2008), examines how artists mimetically engage the rhetoric of display found in museums, the fine arts and popular culture to critique underlying discourses of race dominance. Her second area of research addresses how humans are visualized in digital art and artificial worlds online. Her talk will focus on the question of the use of “the face” as a trope for universal subjectivity in the writings of Giorgio Agamben and Mark Hansen, exploring the relation of “the face” to questions of “the public” in digital art practice.

JUAN POBLETE is Associate Professor of Latin/o American Literature and Cultural Studies at UCSC. He is author of Literatura chilena del siglo XIX: entre públicos lectores y figuras autoriales (Cuarto Propio, 2003) and editor of Critical Latin American and Latino Studies (Minnesota, 2003.) He focuses on two areas of study: nineteenth-century Latin America and contemporary Latino American (US-Latin America) culture.  The first concerns the study of literature as a disciplinary discourse of national subject formation, a set of social practices, and a product on the cultural market.  The second deals with Latin/o America in times of globalization.  He is currently working on forms of mediation between culture and the market in the context of the neoliberal transformation of Chilean culture.

Alain Badiou recently defined his entire philosophical project in terms of the attempt to account for the abandonment and betrayal of a revolutionary impetus in the 1970s. This paper will examine this suggestion by tracking the way the definitions of different anti-political or anti-emancipatory figures play a crucial role in the development of Badiou’s theory of political subjectivity. How are we to think subjects that oppose, betray or wish to neutralize egalitarian militancy, or what Badiou would call fidelity to a truth-procedure? The paper will combine an account of this little-explored aspect of Badiou’s theory of the subject with historical contextualization and periodization, touching on the importance of the theory of “revisionism,” the development of an account of reactive subjectivity, and the conditions for a repudiation and denunciation of revolutionary politics. These elements converge in Badiou’s portrait of the subjectivity proper to the moment following “les années rouges” of the 60s and 70s—what he calls the Restoration, and whose latest incarnation he has identified in the “transcendental Pétainism” of President Sarkozy.

Alberto Toscano is a lecturer in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is the author of The Theatre of Production: Philosophy and Individuation Between Kant and Deleuze (Palgrave, 2006), and the editor and translator of several books, including Alain Badiou’s The Century (Polity, 2007), his Theoretical Writings, with R. Brassier (Continuum, 2004), and Antonio Negri’s The Political Descartes, with M. Mandarini (Verso, 2007). He is an editor of Historical Materialism.

Nina Power is a lecturer in Philosophy at Roehampton University, London. She is the author of several articles on Feuerbach, contemporary French thought and theories of the subject, and the co-editor, with A. Toscano, of Alain Badiou’s On Beckett (Clinamen, 2003).

Date/Time

April 2, 2008 | 12:15 pm
Free and open to the public

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

Colloquium Series

In winter 2008, the Center for Cultural Studies will continue to host a Wednesday colloquium series, which features current cultural studies work by campus faculty and visitors. The sessions are informal, normally consisting of a 30-40 minute presentation followed by discussion. We gather at noon, with presentations beginning at 12:15. Participants are encouraged to bring their own lunches; the Center will provide coffee, tea, and cookies.

ScheduleALL COLLOQUIA ARE IN HUMANITIES 1, ROOM 210

January 16
B. Ruby Rich
(Community Studies, UC Santa Cruz)
From ID to IQ: Looking Back at the New Queer Cinema Movement

January 23
Roland Greene
(English and Comparative Literature, Stanford University)
Piracy and Early Modern Globalization: Limahong in Luzon, 1574

January 30
Wendy Brown
(Political Science, UC Berkeley)
Porous Sovereignty, Walled Democracy

February 6
Jelani Mahiri
(University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, UC Santa Cruz)
Of Oxen, Slaves, Cowboys and Indians: Analyzing the Legend of Bumba-meuboi, a Brazilian Musical Drama

February 13
Ian Hacking
(Visiting Professor, Philosophy, UC Santa Cruz)
Will You Be Known by Your Genes or The Company You Keep?

February 20
Sarika Chandra
(Center for Cultural Studies, UC Santa Cruz)
From Fictional Capital to Capital as Fiction: Globalization and the Intellectual
Convergence of Business and the Humanities

February 27
Eric Porter
(American Studies, UC Santa Cruz)
Race Music and Reconstruction in Post-Katrina New Orleans

March 5
Christopher Connery
(Literature, UC Santa Cruz)
Political Tourism in a Problem Country: Teaching Moby Dickin Cyprus

Participants

B. RUBY RICHis Professor of Community Studies at UCSC. She is the author of Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement (Duke, 1998). Her current project, for which she just completed a residency at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France, is a new volume tentatively titled: The Rise and Fall of the New Queer Cinema, combining her early definitive essays in this field with new writing that reconsiders New Queer Cinema’s later development and looks beyond the Anglo-American models that defined its early years. This talk looks at current manifestations of the NQC energy and examines the extent to which it has moved beyond the big screen into the art world and the internet, and beyond early identity politics into less easily defined terrains as seen, for example, in the work of François Ozon, which she is now researching. In 2007, Professor Rich received Yale University’s James Brudner Award for outstanding contributions to gay and lesbian scholarship, and in 2006 she received an Honorary Life Membership Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.

ROLAND GREENE is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. His research and teaching are chiefly concerned with the early modern literatures of England, Latin Europe, and the transatlantic world. He has recently finished a book about the early modern cultural semantics of five words: blood, invention, language, resistance, and world. He is also interested in the literary and cultural expressions of contemporary Latinity, especially Chicano, Puerto Rican, and Cuban-American poetry and other writings, as well as their counterparts in Latin America; in modern and contemporary poetry, especially the experimental traditions of the Americas; and in the problems and opportunities of comparative literature.

WENDY BROWN is Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley, where she is also a member of the Critical Theory faculty. Her most recent books are Edgework: Essays on Knowledge and Politics(Princeton, 2005), Regulating Aversion: A Critique of Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire(Princeton, 2006), and Les Habits Neufs de la Politique Mondiale: Neoliberalisme et Neo-Conservatisme (Les Prairies Ordinaires, 2007). She is working on a project that refracts the newly ubiquitous phenomenon of nation-state walling through the theoretical problematic of sovereignty.

JELANI MAHIRI completed his Ph.D. at UC Berkeley in Sociocultural Anthropology and is currently a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in Anthropology at UCSC. His research is concerned with forms and ideologies of work, leisure, education, and expressive culture as ways to understand broader issues of social inequality, civic participation, identity, and creativity in the past and present. He is currently working on two book projects; the first, provisionally titled Laboring at the Interstices: Camelôs [Unlicensed Sidewalk Vendors] and The Struggle for a Space to Work in São Paulo, Brazil, expands upon informal economy studies and recent research on cities and citizenship to rethink the articulation of work and citizenship in the formation of modern subjectivities in contemporary Brazil. A second book project, tentatively titled Accenting Play, explores the bumba-meu-boi, or “oxdance,” an enormously popular, though underexplored, Brazilian musical drama. Linking the particulars of performances to issues of power and representation, the book will examine bumba-meu-boi celebrations as polysemous, multi-functional, and multi-sensory events: as brincadeira or “play” as participants refer to it, as religious devotion, as entertainment, as touristic destination, and as economic development opportunity.

IAN HACKING is teaching in the UCSC Philosophy Department this term. He recently retired from the Collège de France, where he was chair of Philosophy and History of Scientific Concepts. His most recent books include Mad Travellers: Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illness (Free Association Books, 1999), The Social Construction of What? (Harvard, 1999), An Introduction to Probability and Inductive Logic(Cambridge, 2001), and Historical Ontology(Harvard, 2002). A new edition of The Emergence of Probability (Cambridge) appeared in 2006. His talk for the colloquium is a follow-up on a piece published in Daedalus, Fall, 2006, whose intended title was “Biosocial Identity: Which Biology? Whose Society?” The essay is online at
http://www.amacad.org/publications/hackingWeb.pdf

SARIKA CHANDRA is Assistant Professor of English at Wayne State University. She works in the areas of globalization studies and contemporary American literary/cultural studies. She is currently completing a book manuscript titled Dislocalism: Re-Assessing Americanism in the Age of Globalizationthat examines the rhetoric of obsolescence and innovation in a contemporary global context, and analyzes how particular genres such as American travel, tourist, and immigration narratives adapt to the new reality of globalization. The book also analyzes the ways globalization both stands for real changes in the economy and yet serves the highly ideological function of representing such changes as politically and economically inevitable. Her second book project centers on the topic of globalization and food, dealing with issues of agribusiness, scarcity, politics, and culture. Her talk addresses the implications of (inter)disciplinary practices as literary/cultural studies turns to issues of economics, finance, and corporatization so as to understand globalization even as business and management theory turns to notions of culture and literary fiction for the same ends.

ERIC PORTER is Associate Professor of American Studies at UCSC. His research interests include black cultural and intellectual history, U.S. cultural history, critical race studies, and jazz studies. He is the author of What Is This Thing Called Jazz?(California, 2002), winner of an American Book Award, and is currently completing a book on W.E.B. Du Bois’s writings from the 1940s and 1950s. This talk draws from a new, collaborative project (with UCSC Art professor Lewis Watts) that examines the transformation of the New Orleans music scene after Hurricane Katrina and the complex racial politics of the mobilization of music to rebuild and repopulate the city.

CHRISTOPHER CONNERY is Professor of World Literature and Cultural Studies at UCSC. Trained in East Asian Studies, several articles and his first book, Empire of the Text: Writing and Authority in Early Imperial China (Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), were on early imperial Chinese literati culture. He has also published a number of pieces and edited journal issues from two on-going research projects, one on the ocean in capitalist thought, and one on the global 1960s. His co-edited volume with Rob Wilson, The Worlding Project: Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Globalization (New Pacific Press) appeared in autumn, 2007. His talk is based on his reading and experiences in Nicosia, Cyprus, where he went in the autumn of 2007 to teach in the English department and to consider questions of the political.

Colloquium Series

In fall 2007, the Center for Cultural Studies will continue to host a Wednesday colloquium series, which features current cultural studies work by campus faculty and visitors. The sessions are informal, normally consisting of a 30-40 minute presentation followed by discussion. We gather at noon, with presentations beginning at 12:15. Participants are encouraged to bring their own lunches; the Center will provide coffee, tea, and cookies. 

Schedule ALL COLLOQUIA ARE IN HUMANITIES 1, Rm. 210
October 10
Susan Gillman
(Literarture, UC Santa Cruz)
Otra Caliban/Encore Caliban: Adaptation, Translation, and Americas Studies

October 17
Lisa Rofel
(Anthropology, UC Santa Cruz)
The Traffic in Money Boys: Neoliberalism, Desire, and Normativity in China

October 24
Barbara Spackman
(Italian and Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley)
Hygiene in the Harem

October 31
Susan Harding
(Anthropology,
UC Santa Cruz)
Get Religion

November 7
Paul Roth
(Philosophy, UC Santa Cruz)
The Disappearance of the Empirical

November 14
Renee Tajima-Peña
(Community Studies, UC Santa Cruz)
Calavera Highway: Haunted Landscapes,
Contested Memory, and How to Cope with 3,000 Miles of In-laws and Learn to Love it

November 21
Harry Berger Jr.
(Emeritus, Literature & Art History, UC Santa Cruz)
On the Perverse Henrification of George Bush, or, Why Praising Bush as Shakespeare’s Henry V is Really Dumb
November 28
Angela Davis
(History of Consciousness, UC Santa Cruz)
The Prison: A Sign of U.S. Democracy?
Participants
SUSAN GILLMAN is Professor of Literature at UCSC. She is the author, most recently, of Blood Talk: American Race Melodrama and the Culture of the Occult (Chicago, 2003), and co-editor (with Alys Eve Weinbaum) of Next to the Color Line (Minnesota, 2007). Her new project (tentatively titled Incomparably Yours: Adaptation, Translation, Americas Studies) uses theories of adaptation to understand the field variously called hemispheric studies, post-nationalist American Studies, or comparative U.S. studies. The archive is drawn from works famous for their travels on stage and in film, the hypertext networks of the Uncle Tom’s Cabin/Cecilia Valdés/Ramona complex, the multiple editions of the slave narrative/testimonio complex, and contextual examples of specific situations in which some nations need other nations’ histories as models. This talk lays out the Fernández Retamar-Martí/Caliban-Ramona nexus of adaptation and translation to which the book as a whole is indebted.

LISA ROFELis Professor of Cultural Anthropology at UCSC. Her new book is Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality and Public Culture (Duke, 2007). She is currently at work on three projects: a forthcoming issue of positions: east asia cultures critique entitled Across the Strai(gh)ts: Transnationalism and Chinese Queer Politics, co-edited with Petrus Liu, which stages a dialogue on the divergent views of the question, what do “Chinese” and “Chinese politics” mean, and how do queer developments open up and shape this debate?; a project on independent documentary filmmaking in China: The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: For the Public Record (Minnesota), co-edited with Chris Berry and Lu Xinyu; and a collaborative project with Sylvia Yanagisako on The Twenty-First Century Silk Road, between Italy and China.

BARBARA SPACKMAN is Cecchetti Professor of Italian Studies and Professor of Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley, where she also chairs the Italian Studies Department. She is the author of Decadent Genealogies: The Rhetoric of Sickness from Baudelaire to D’Annunzio(Cornell, 1989) and Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy (Minnesota, 1996). She is currently working on a study entitled Detourism: Traveling Fictions from Italy to Islam, which looks at the Italian peninsula as a place traveled from, and reads the accounts of a handful of women, from early nineteenth-century travelers to post-Napoleonic Egypt and the Ottoman Empire, to an early twentieth-century Italian convert to Islam. The larger stakes of the project involve claims about the specificity of Italian Orientalism and the conditions of its production.

SUSAN HARDING is Professor of Anthropology at UCSC and author of The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics (Princeton 2000). During the 1980s and 1990s, American fundamentalists plumbed hitherto secular and liberal institutions and practices, not to be assimilated but to assimilate, to consume, digest, and convert the politics they encountered to their ends. Voices are now emerging that are turning the tables. The current project examines the voices of these other Christians, some of them liberal, lapsed, or ethnic, but most of them more moderate evangelical Christians, that are taking up the narrative and rhetorical forms of the religious right, performing them with a difference, and swerving them to other ends. This talk will take a look at green evangelicalism, the emerging church movement, and “Big Love.”

PAUL ROTH is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at UCSC, author of Meaning and Method in the Social Sciences: A Case for Methodological Pluralism (Cornell, 1987 and 1989) and editor, with Stephen P. Turner, of The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of the Social Sciences(Blackwell, 2003). His most recently published work concerns theories of historical explanation (to appear in the Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of History), disciplinary “border disputes” in science studies (to appear in the Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Science), explanations of genocide (to appear in the Oxford Handbook on Genocide), and “philosophical naturalism” (published in The Philosophy of Anthropology and Sociology, ed. Stephen Turner & Mark Risjord). 

RENEE TAJIMA-PEÑA is an Academy Award-nominated filmmaker and Associate Professor and founding faculty of the Social Documentation Program in the Community Studies Department at UCSC. She is completing the feature-length Calavera Highway, a road documentary that follows her husband Armando Peña and his brother Carlos as they carry their mother’s ashes back to South Texas and reunite with their brothers. Calavera Highwaywill be broadcast on the PBS documentary series “P.O.V.” in the fall of 2008. She is also executive producing Whatever It Takes, a documentary about a high school in the South Bronx that is a part of the “small schools” movement.

HARRY BERGER JR. is Professor Emeritus of Literature and Art History and the author, most recently, of Manhood, Marriage, and Mischief: Rembrandt’s “Night Watch” and other Dutch Group Portraits (Fordham, 2007) and Situated Utterances: Texts, Bodies, and Cultural Representations(Fordham, 2005). His current projects include Apprehension: Dialogical Warfare in Plato’s Writing, which argues that Platonic writing is a critique of the interlocutory events it dramatizes. The study targets the dominant practices and discourses of Athenian public life as language games shaped and encouraged by speech-centered institutions. Plato represents Socratic method or philosophy as a failed attempt to overcome the influence of those language games. Obliged to argue on the grounds provided by his interlocutors, Socrates is unable to free his method from the constraints of its rhetorical predicament.

ANGELA DAVIS is Professor in the History of Consciousness Department at UCSC. She is the author of eight books, and most recently Abolition Democracy(Seven Stories, 2005) and Are Prisons Obsolete? (Seven Stories, 2003). She is currently completing a book on Prisons and American History. A persistent theme of her work has been the range of social problems associated with incarceration and the generalized criminalization of those communities that are most affected by poverty and racial discrimination. She is especially concerned with the general tendency to devote more resources and attention to the prison system than to educational institutions. Having helped to popularize the notion of a “prison industrial complex,” she now urges her audiences to think seriously about the future possibility of a world without prisons and to help forge a 21st century abolitionist movement.

Colloquium Series

In spring 2007, the Center for Cultural Studies will continue to host a Wednesday colloquium series, which features current cultural studies work by campus faculty and visitors. The sessions are informal, normally consisting of a 30-40 minute presentation followed by discussion. We gather at noon, with presentations beginning at 12:15. Participants are encouraged to bring their own lunches; the Center will provide coffee, tea, and cookies.

Schedule
ALL COLLOQUIA ARE IN HUMANITIES 1, ROOM 210

April 11
Georges Van Den Abbeele
(Dean of Humanities, UC Santa Cruz)
Globalizing the Enlightenment

April 18
James Buzard
(Literature, Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Autoethnography, Narrative, Interruption

April 25
Daniel Laforest
(Center for Cultural Studies, UC Santa Cruz)
Rediscovering America: The Secret Link Between Alan Lomax’s Writings and Quebec’s Cinéma Direct Tradition

May 2
Seth Moglen
(English, American Studies, & Africana Studies, Lehigh University)
Mourning Modernity: Literary Modernism and the Injuries of American Capitalism

May 9
Eugene Holland
(French and Italian, Ohio State University)
Schizoanalysis, Nomadology, Fascism: Just How Close Have We Come?

May 16
Matthew O’Hara
(History, UC Santa Cruz)
Modernity Via the Whip: Self and Collective in the Holy Schools of Christ, New Spain

May 23
Kimberly Lau
(American Studies, UC Santa Cruz)
Body Language: Notes on Discourse, Ethnography, and Embodiment

May 30
María Puig de la Bellacasa Mejia
(Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow and the Center for Cultural Studies, UC Santa Cruz)
Matters of Care

Participants
GEORGES VAN DEN ABBEELE became Dean of Humanities at UC Santa Cruz in July 2006, coming from UC Davis, where his positions included Director of the Pacific Regional Humanities Center and Professor of Humanities. A renowned scholar of French literature and theory, world literature and cultural studies, and emergent global and transnational discourses, including studies of Vietnamese literature, Asian American writing, and Belgian literature, identity, and culture, Van Den Abbeele was also responsible, through numerous scholarly studies and translations, for introducing the work of Jean-François Lyotard to the English-speaking world. His numerous books include Travel as Metaphor: From Montaigne to Rousseau(Minnesota, 1992), French Civilization and its Discontents: Nationalism, Colonialism, Race (co-edited with Tyler Stovall, Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), and the forthcoming The Retreat of the French Intellectual. His talk investigates some recent attempts to think about the 18th century in a properly global way.

JAMES BUZARD is Professor and Chair of Literature at MIT. His work centers on British fiction, travel writing, and cultural institutions in a global context, with particular focus on the discourses of travel and tourism. In addition to articles on travel and tourism, autoethnographic authority, and Victorian ethnography, he is the author of The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to “Culture,” 1800-1918 (Oxford, 1993). His most recent book is Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of 19th-Century British Novels (Princeton, 2005). His reading of Dickens, Bronte, Eliot, et. al. as “metropolitan autoethnographies” not only filiates these texts to earlier versions of the autoethnographic mode, but also traces the influences these novels exerted on later instances of national ethnographic imaginings. His talk is from his current book project, which is an extension of the argument of Disorienting Fiction into the modernist era. 

DANIEL LAFOREST is a Resident Scholar at the Center for Cultural Studies. He received his Ph.D. in Literature from the Université de Québec at Montréal. His project at the Center is on the past, present, and possible futures of the notion of hinterland in North America. His talk is drawn from his forthcoming book,Le Pays Incertain de Caïn: Pierre Perrault et la Poétique du Territoire (Caïn’s Uncertain Country: Pierre Perrault and the Poetics of Territory). He writes, “I try to show how the crossing of U.S. internal and ideological boundaries in Lomax’s ‘discovery’ of the blues, as a subjective reconstruction of the hinterland, have informed and influenced Perrault’s groundbreaking conception of the ‘cinema direct’ (or ‘cinema-vérité’).”

SETH MOGLEN is Associate Professor in the English Department at Lehigh University, where he also teaches in the American Studies and Africana Studies Programs, and where he has recently been appointed Director of the Humanities Center. In 2006 he wrote an introduction for and edited a new edition of T. Thomas Fortune’s Black and White: Land, Labor, and Politics in the South, a neglected nineteenth-century masterpiece of the African-American radical political tradition (Simon and Schuster, 2006). His talk is drawn from his forthcoming book Mourning Modernity: Literary Modernism and the Injuries of American Capitalism(Stanford, 2007). Moglen contends that American literary modernism can be understood as a collective cultural effort to mourn for the destructive effects of modern capitalism. In developing this argument, he will offer both a revisionary account of the politics of American modernism and a psychoanalytic model for thinking more generally about what it means for societies to grieve over destructive social transformations.

EUGENE HOLLAND is Professor of French at the Ohio State University. He specializes in contemporary social theory; modern French history, literature, and culture; and postcolonial and transnational literature and politics. In addition to a number of articles on poststructuralist theory, and particularly the work of Gilles Deleuze, he is the author of Baudelaire and Schizoanalysis: The Sociopoetics of Modernism (Cambridge, 1993) and Introduction to Schizoanalysis (Routledge, 1999). He writes, “The aim of this paper is two-fold: (1) to improve the concept of fascism offered by Deleuze and Guattari by (a) resolving/mitigating the differences between divergent versions of the concept in their writings and by (b) bringing the concept into closer contact with what we know about real historical instances of fascism and fundamentalism in inter-war Europe and North America, respectively; and 2) to use this concept to better understand the senses in which the current Bush regime can be considered fascist.”

MATTHEW O’HARA is Assistant Professor of History at UC Santa Cruz, having previously taught at New Mexico State University. His work centers on race, religion, and ethnicity in colonial Mexico. In addition to many articles on these and related topics, his work includes the forthcoming A Flock Divided: Race, Religion, and Politics in Mexico, 1749-1857 (Duke) and Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America (co-edited with Andrew Fisher, Duke). He writes, “In the eighteenth century, Catholic sodalities called Holy Schools of Christ flourished in the cities of New Spain (Mexico). The Holy Schools were decidedly hybrid institutions: they promoted an intense regimen of physical mortification, but they combined it with internal or mental prayer. The talk addresses a number of questions regarding religious practice in New Spain, and the place of religion in a larger narrative of Latin American modernity.”

KIMBERLY LAU is Associate Professor of American Studies at UC Santa Cruz, having recently taught at the University of Utah. Trained in Folklore at the University of Pennsylvania, she is one of the important innovative voices in new folklore studies, extending its scope into areas of race, gender, political economy, and globalization. Her book New Age Capitalism: Making Money East of Eden (Pennsylvania, 2000) is an important study of the discourse and marketing of new age products and practices, including tai chi, aromatherapy, yoga, and macrobiotics. Her talk is on her ethnographic work with Sisters in Shape, a black women’s health and fitness project based in Philadelphia.

MARIA PUIG DE LA BELLACASA MEJIA is a postdoctoral fellow affiliated with the Center for Cultural Studies at UC Santa Cruz, having received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from the Université Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium) in 2004. Her work is at the intersection of feminist philosophy and science studies, and her articles and book chapters include “Building Standpoints” (with Sarah Bracke) in The Standpoint Reader (ed. Sandra Harding Routledge, 2004) and “Divergences Solidaires: Autour des Politiques Féministes des Savoirs Situés” (Divergences in Solidarity: On the Feminist Politics of Situated Knowledges, Multitudes, 12, 2003). She contextualizes her talk by noting that “feminists have reclaimed the work of caring, rethinking its significance in personal/private relationships, envisioning care as a generic relational experience with political, ethical and epistemological implications. Thinking of care politically remains an uneasy move in some circles, as it implies thinking through gendered boundaries dividing affects from reason, body from mind, and remunerated from unremunerated labor.”

Colloquium Series

In winter 2007, the Center for Cultural Studies will continue to host a Wednesday colloquium series, which features current cultural studies work by campus faculty and visitors. The sessions are informal, normally consisting of a 30-40 minute presentation followed by discussion. We gather at noon, with presentations beginning at 12:15. Participants are encouraged to bring their own lunches; the Center will provide coffee, tea, and cookies.

ScheduleALL COLLOQUIA ARE IN HUMANITIES 1, ROOM 210
*Please note new location*

January 17
Dana Frank
(History, UC Santa Cruz)
Local Girl Makes History: Investigating the Politics of History in Northern California

January 24
Wlad Godzich
(Literature, UC Santa Cruz)
Postmodern Allegory Revisited

January 31
Melissa L. Caldwell
(Anthropology, UC Santa Cruz)
Gardening for the Soul: Living Organically in the Russian Countryside

February 7
Jeannette Mageo
(Anthropology, Washington State University, and Center for Cultural Studies, UC Santa Cruz)
Dreaming Culture: U.S. Boyfriend and Girlfriend Dreams

February 14
Chiung-chi Chen
(Center for Cultural Studies, UC Santa Cruz)
The Mystery of Muted Singers: Ritual Opera in Contemporary Taiwan

February 21
Paul Bové
(English, University of Pittsburgh)
Poetry Against Torture

February 28
Kimberly Jannarone
(Theater Arts, UC Santa Cruz)
Antonin Artaud and the Age of the Crowd

March 7
Jody Greene
(Literature, UC Santa Cruz)
Hostis Humani Generis 

Participants
DANA FRANKis a historian specializing in labor, women, consumer culture, and twentieth-century trade politics in the U.S. and Central America. She is the author of Buy American: The Untold Story of Economic Nationalism (Beacon, 1999); Purchasing Power: Consumer Organizing, Gender, and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1919-1929 (Cambridge, 2004), Bananeras: Women Transforming the Banana Unions of Latin America (South End, 2005), and co-author of Three Strikes: Miners, Musicians, Salesgirls, and the Fighting Spirit of Labor’s Last Century (Beacon, 2001). Her talk is drawn from her forthcoming book, which explores the politics of U.S. cultural and social history through an examination of four semi-monuments from Santa Cruz to the San Francisco Peninsula: a redwood tree slice at Big Basin State Park, the Cave Train Ride at the Boardwalk, two stone cats by Highway 17 in Los Gatos, and the Pulgas Water Temple alongside Crystal Springs Reservoir.

WLAD GODZICH teaches Literature and Critical Studies at UCSC, and has most recently edited an issue of Concentric on “Who Speaks for the Human Today” with the participation of several graduate students at UCSC. His talk takes as its point of departure Fredric Jameson’s famous essay on “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” He writes, “I seek to determine Jameson’s debt to Benjamin, and what Benjamin was trying to do with his notion of allegory. Finally, I examine the so-called ‘postmodern coup’ of February 28, 1997 in Turkey and its ‘allegorical’ (?) rendition in Orhan Pamuk’s Snow. This work is part of a larger project on Literature and its New Contexts, in which I contend that globalization, the end of metaphysics, and the supplanting of the verbal by the image radically alter what we have understood by literature.”
MELISSA CALDWELL, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz, is the author of Not by Bread Alone: Social Support in the New Russia(California, 2004), and co-editor of The Cultural Politics of Food and Eating(Blackwell, 2005). Her talk is drawn from her current book project, “The Spirit in the Land: Russia’s Organic Economy,” which examines the significance of summer cottages, gardening, and nature for Russian experiences of community, civil society, and new forms of market capitalism. She writes, “Through the productive labor of turning the soil and harvesting its bounty, Russians create a ‘time out of time’ in which both the community and the nation are affirmed and enhanced.”

JEANNETTE MAGEO is a cultural anthropologist whose current work focuses on dreaming and its relationship to subjectivity, identity, and emotion. She has published on Samoan, Tahitian, and Balinese child development, Samoan sexuality, transvestism, spirit possession, and folklore, as well as Samoan and Rotuman colonial history. She consulted for and appeared in a documentary made for Channel 4 in Britain, Paradise Bent: Boys will be Girls in Samoa, which is framed by her historical interpretation of Samoan transvestism and which won a Silver Plaque in the “Documentary-Humanities” section of the Chicago International Television Awards. In this talk, Dr. Mageo investigates how contemporary U.S. undergraduates constitute gender identities through girlfriend and boyfriend relationships in dreams.

CHIUNG-CHI CHEN, is an ethnomusicologist. This talk, drawn from her book-in-progress, examines the transformation of performing practice, from singing to silence, in contemporary Taiwanese ritual opera. Ritual opera in the late 1970s took a turn to what Chen calls muted ritual opera. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Taiwan, this talk moves beyond purely textual analysis and examines the social premise of the change in ritual opera. By investigating the dialectical relationship and dynamic between sound and spectacle in contemporary Taiwanese ritual opera, Chen sheds light on issues concerning ritual form and meaning as they adapt to the modern urbanized context.
PAUL BOVÉ, Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, is editor of boundary 2, an international journal of literature and culture. His books include In the Wake of Theory (Wesleyan, 1992), Mastering Discourse: The Politics of Intellectual Culture (Duke, 1992), Intellectuals in Power: A Genealogy of Critical Humanism (Columbia, 1986), as well as the edited volume Edward Said and the Work of the Critic: Speaking Truth to Power (Duke, 2000). He writes, “I am writing three books at the present: first and foremost, a reading of Henry Adams; second, a barely started text on the movements from God to neo-conservatism (or, from Milton to Wolfowitz); and third, a collection of lectures entitled ‘Poetry Against Torture.’”

KIMBERLY JANNARONE is Assistant Professor of Theater Arts at UC Santa Cruz. She has published in Theatre Survey, Theater Journal, and New Theatre Quarterly on Antonin Artaud, Alfred Jarry, and Witold Gombrowicz, and won the 2005 Gerald Kahan Scholar’s Prize for her writing on Artaud. Her talk is drawn from her book project, “Artaud and His Doubles,” which places Artaud’s works in the context of theatrical and intellectual history of the 1920s and 1930s. Jannarone reads his call for a “theater of cruelty” in the light of the aftermath of World War I in Western Europe, especially the surge in irrationalism, vitalism, and mysticism that characterized much of the interwar era and found articulation in new performance practices that worked with notions of crowds rather than audiences.
JODY GREENE is Associate Professor of Literature at UC Santa Cruz and the author of The Trouble with Ownership: Literary Property and Authorial Liability in England, 1660-1730 (Pennsylvania, 2005). Of this talk she writes, “This new project is part of a longstanding interest in the figure of the pirate, particularly as that figure crops up in unlikely discursive registers: genre theory, the history of sexuality, or, as here, international law. I am interested in the way the pirate’s status as hostis humani generis, an enemy of humankind, precipitates crises of categorization with relation to nation, violence, commerce, law, empire, and humanity itself. The contemporary War on Terror makes use of the figure of the pirate as both analogy and precedent for the terrorist. In so doing, it perpetuates a productive instability at the heart of international law and the law of nations, which has been dependent from its inception on the existence of a category of persons deemed enemies of humanity itself.”

Colloquium Series

In fall 2006, the Center for Cultural Studies will continue to host a Wednesday colloquium series, which features current cultural studies work by campus faculty and visitors. The sessions are informal, normally consisting of a 30-40 minute presentation followed by discussion. We gather at noon, with presentations beginning at 12:15. Participants are encouraged to bring their own lunches; the Center will provide coffee, tea, and cookies. 

Schedule ALL COLLOQUIA ARE IN THE OAKES MURAL ROOM

October 4

Robin Blackburn
(Sociology, University of Essex and The New School)
The Haitian Revolution as an Episode in the History
of Philosophy

October 11
Sarah Jain
(Anthropology, Stanford University)
Life in Prognosis

October 18
Donna Jones
(English, UC Berkeley)
“The Rise of the Colored Masses”: The Place and Function of the Non-Western
World in Pessimistic Narratives of History

October 25
Yiman Wang
(Film and Digital Media,
UC Santa Cruz)
The Goddess, Hollywood “Before” and Hong Kong
“After”: The Disappearing Mother, Modernity, and
Coloniality in Triptych Melodrama

November 1
Mazyar Lotfalian
(Center for Cultural Studies, UC Santa Cruz)
Aesthetics and Politics in the Age of Islamism: The Transnational Circulation of Visual Culture

November 8
Noriko Aso
(History, UC Santa Cruz)
Reforming or Deforming the Public in Japanese
National Cultural Institutions

November 15
Martin Berger
(History of Art and Visual Culture, UC Santa Cruz)
Civil Rights Photography
and the Racial
Prerogatives of Whites

Participants

ROBIN BLACKBURN is Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex and Visiting Distinguished Professor at the New School in New York. Long associated with the New Left Review and related projects, he is one of our period’s most important scholars writing in the Marxist tradition, and one of the world’s foremost historians of new world slavery. He has also written on labor politics, student politics, welfare, finance, and the future of socialism; his collective work includes coauthored work with Perry Anderson, Alexander Cockburn, and others. His presentation 3) will argue that the great slave revolt in Saint Domingue in the 1790s led to the formulation of a far more radical rejection of racial slavery than had appeared in abolitionist thinking up to this point. “The success of the Haitian Revolution in 1804, and the frustration of Napoleon’s attempt to restore slavery,” Blackburn writes, “had large implications for the whole Atlantic world.”

SARAH JAIN is Assistant Professor in the Department of Cultural Anthropology at
Stanford University, and has recently published Injury: The Politics of Product Design and Safety in the United States (Princeton, 2006). A second book, Commodity Violence: The Politics of Automobility, is forthcoming from Duke in 2007. Her talk is from her manuscript-in-progress, A Cancer Elegy, which analyzes the ways that Americans are constituted in relation to, and then invited into, cultures of disease and risk. Jain’s talk, based on more than a year of ethnographic research, will examine how sense is made of time and statistics in cancer diagnosis.

DONNA JONES is Assistant Professor of English at UC Berkeley. Her talk is drawn from her book project, “The Promise of European Decline: Race and Historical Pessimism in the Era of the Great War.” She writes, “Europe imagined its own decline and the ascent of the ‘colored world’ in the paranoid visions of a global revenge… In the minds of the colonized, the weakening of Europe produced a sliver of opportunity in which the questions of their own agency could be raised…On the part of the colonized, the space of crisis allowed them to set loose fantasies of freedom, control and power. And on the part of the colonizer, crisis allowed the free rein to imagine European subjectivity free from the yoke of a rational and administered social sphere.”

YIMAN WANG, Assistant Professor of Film and Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz, is interested in issues of representability and translation as played out in border-crossing and cross-temporal contexts, including the cultural politics of border-crossing film remakes. Her talk examines Wu Yonggang’s 1934 silent film, Shen Nu (The Goddess), as well as its Hollywood “before” (Henry King’s 1925 Stella Dallas) and Hong Kong “after” (Wu Yonggang’s 1938 self-remake, Rouge Tears). The talk explores how filmmaking and remaking in Shanghai and Hong Kong strategically negotiated with each other and with Hollywood, and how issues of gender, class, modernity and coloniality played out in the reception and recoding of the mother/fallen-woman melodrama.

MAZYAR LOTFALIAN, an anthropologist trained at Rice University, has taught most recently at Yale University. His work explores notions of subjectivity and mediation among Muslims in the context of the transnational resurgence of Islam. His 2004 book, Islam, Technoscientific Identities, and the Culture of Curiosity (University Press of America), focused on the contemporary intellectual undertaking of Muslims to rethink how science and technology are practiced in the Islamic world. It argued that Islam is always already mediated through institutions, intellectual and artistic circles, aesthetic discourses, and technological devices. His project at the Center will turn to the consideration of artistic productions of transnational Muslim artists. He writes, “In recent years, Islamic visual language has entered the world of artistic production. Traditionally recognized religious art such as calligraphy, miniature, and theatre performance are being mixed up with contemporary icons of identity politics such as gender, veil, and ethnicity, on the one hand, and the politics of the state such as democratic rule, nuclear proliferation, and human rights, on the other. In addition, new technologies that allow both delocalization and entextualization of these traditional forms are used to transform their context and meaning. I will talk about the nature of the link between aesthetics and politics through examples that illustrate the contemporary production of art in transnational circuits.”

NORIKO ASO is Assistant Professor of History at UC Santa Cruz. Her book project, “Public Properties: Crafts, Museums and Nation in Modern Japan,” addresses the shifting line between conceptions of “public” and “private” as played out through the museum form from the late nineteenth century through the end of the Second World War. Her talk traces the eruption of these issues in the very recent past. She discusses a 2005 skirmish between Japanese intellectuals and a government official about the recent privatization of national cultural institutions as an instance of current struggles over who and what best represents the cultural heritage of the Japanese.

MARTIN BERGER Martin Berger is Associate Professor of the History of Art and Visual Culture at UC Santa Cruz, and the author of Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual Culture (California, 2005) and Man Made: Thomas Eakins and the Construction of Gilded Age Manhood (California, 2000). His talk examines a photographic essay published in Lifemagazine in May of 1963 devoted to the racial disturbances in Birmingham, arguing that the consistency with which Civil Rights photography captured white on black violence helped establish a violent-nonviolent binary as the test of white morality. By reducing historically specific struggles over segregationist policies, voting rights, and labor practices to white-on-black violence, Life decontextualized the struggle, encouraging its liberal readers to feel outrage at the violence, rather than to think through vexing issues posed by structural inequalities.