Colloquium Series

In spring 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

April 5
Mary John
(Women’s Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University)
Sexing the Foetus: Feminist Politics and Method across Cultures

April 12
Rebecca Herzig
(Women and Gender Studies, Bates College, and Resident Scholar, Center for Cultural Studies)
The Burqa, The Brazilian, and Practices of Freedom

April 19
Nacira Guénif-Souilamas
(Sociology, University of Paris)
Bio-politics in Postcolonial France: After the Riots, A New Frenchness

April 26
Eugene McLaughlin
(Sociology, City University, London)
Who is Entitled to Speak for the Nation?

May 3
Ian Wedde
(Writer, Scholar, Curator)
Impure Narratives: Cross-disciplinary Research and the Culture of Tolerance

May 10
Jennifer Reardon
(Sociology, UC Santa Cruz)
Decoding Democracy: Genomes, Ethics, Publics

May 17
Matthew Lasar
(HIstory, UC Santa Cruz)
Why Pacifica Radio’s Civil War Really Matters

May 24
Hairong Yan
(Anthropology, University of Illinois)
Chinese Postsocialism and the Master/Servant Allegory

May 31
Sianne Ngai
(English, Stanford University)
“Interesting” vs. “Curious”

Participants

MARY E. JOHN is Associate Professor and Deputy Director of the Women’s Studies Programme, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her publications include Discrepant Dislocations: Feminism, Theory and Postcolonial Histories (California, 1996) and the co-edited volumes A Question of Silence? The Sexual Economies of Modern India (Kali for Women, 1998, and Zed Press, 2000), French Feminism: An Indian Anthology(Sage, 2002) and Contested Transformations: Changing Economies and Identities in Contemporary India (Tulika, 2006). Her current research interests include women and political power, the adverse child sex ratio in India, and problems of feminism, with a special focus on Asia.

REBECCA HERZIG is Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies at Bates College. Her first book, Suffering for Science: Reason and Sacrifice in Modern America (Rutgers, 2005), traced the peculiar intertwining of rationality and devotion evident in nineteenth-century scientific communities. Her talk at the Center, drawn from a larger history of body modification tentatively titled The Affliction of Freedom, considers the interpenetration of suffering and domination in emerging practices of self-constitution.

NACIRA GUENIF SOUILAMAS, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Paris, is the author of Les Féministes et le Garçon Arabe and has written on European racism, queer theory, feminism, and the cultural politics of Arabs in France. About her talk she writes, “In November 2005, France saw an unprecedented series of riots. These events bring to light a new kind of bio- politics, racially informed, that implicitly means to rule bodies rather than to free individuals. Physical and cultural salience and gestures more than individual choices are regarded as proofs of belonging to this new identity and justify rejection from a protected common space with high boundaries.”

EUGENE MCLAUGHLIN is based in the Department of Sociology at City University, London, where he is a member of the Centre for Race and Ethnic Studies. He has written extensively on policing, criminology, and criminal justice and his recent co-edited publications include: Restorative Justice: Critical Issues (Sage, 2003); Crime Prevention and Community Safety: New Directions (Sage, 2002); and Controlling Crime (2nd ed. Sage, 2001). He is currently completing a book entitled The New Policing. Through a critical examination of the Parekh Report, his paper considers the dilemmas British academics confront in intervening in public debates on issues of race and national identity.

IAN WEDDE is a poet, novelist, and founding visionary of the Te Papa National Museum in New Zealand, where he has worked in the Maori/Pakeha border zones for decades. His books include Survival Arts (Faber and Faber, 1988), Tendering: New Poems (Auckland, 1988), How To Be Nowhere: Essays And Texts, 1971-1994 (Victoria, 1995), and the edited Penguin Anthology of New Zealand Verse (1985). His talk expands on case-study material from his recent book Making Ends Meet: Essays and Talks 1992-2004 (Victoria, 2005), focusing on the narratives of contact, exchange and cultural coding enabled by research into museum collections. It argues that “discipline-inclusive and cross-cultural views can work to promote tolerance of ‘difficult’ difference—as against oxymoronic tolerance within smoothly emulsified national brands.”

JENNIFER REARDON is Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Santa Cruz and Adjunct Research Professor of Women’s Studies at Duke University. She taught in the Division of Biology and Medicine at Brown University from 2002 to 2004. She is the author of Race to the Finish: Identity and Governance in an Age of Genomics (Princeton, 2004). Reardon is currently investigating the paradoxes and dilemmas that confront researchers, policy makers, and potential research subjects who seek to address the problems of governance and research design created by the emergence of human groups as objects of genomic analysis.

MATTHEW LASAR is the author of two books on the Pacifica radio network and the evolution of public broadcasting in the United States: Uneasy Listening: Pacifica Radio’s Civil War (Black Apollo, 2005), and Pacifica Radio: The Rise of an Alternative Network(Temple, 2000). Lasar writes about broadcasting and telecommunications politics for his Web site, “Lasar’s Letter on the Federal
Communications Commission” (www.lasarletter.com). He teaches U.S. history at UC Santa Cruz. 

HAIRONG YAN is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. From 2002 to 2005 she was a Cotsen Fellow at Princeton University. Her publications include “Rurality and Labor Process Autonomy: The Question of Subsumption in the Waged Labor of Domestic Service,” Cultural Dynamics 18.1 (2006), and “Spectralization of the Rural: Reinterpreting the Labor Mobility of Rural Young Women in Post-Mao China,” American Ethnologist 30.4
(2004). Her talk is drawn from her book project, “Belaboring Development: Migration and Domestic Service in China.”

SIANNE NGAI is Assistant Professor of English at Stanford University. Her first book,Ugly Feelings (Harvard, 2005), presents a study of the aesthetics of minor negative affects, examining their politically ambiguous work in a mix of cultural artifacts produced in the “fully administered” world of late modernity. Her current book project, “Poetry in the Expanded Field,” reexamines American art and literature after 1945 through the lens of minor aesthetic concepts. A chapter from this new project, “The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde,” appeared in Critical Inquiry 31.4 (Summer 2005).

Colloquium Series
In winter 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. 

ScheduleALL COLLOQUIA ARE IN THE OAKES MURAL ROOM

January 18
Martin Fuglsang
(Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark)
Critique and Resistance–In the Midst of the Biopolitical Production of the Socius

January 25
Peter Steeves
(Philosophy, DePaul University)
Monkey SeeFebruary 1
Felicity Schaeffer-Grabiel
(Feminist Studies, UCSC)
Colombian Women and Pliable Bodies: Mobility through Beauty and Foreign MarriageFebruary 8
Anne Norton
(Political Science and Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania)
The School of Baghdad: Neoconservatives and American Empire
February 15
Karen Barad
(Feminist Studies, UCSC)
Experimental Meta/physics and the Matter of Time

 February 22
Philip Steinberg
(Geography, Florida State University and Rockefeller Fellow, Center for Cultural Studies)
Thomas Chapman
(Ph.D candidate, Geography, Florida State University)
Contesting Connectedness: Performances of Difference in Key West, Florida

March 1
Julie Guthman
(Community Studies, UCSC)
Teaching the Politics of Obesity: Insights into Neoliberal Embodiment

March 8
Minghui Hu
(History, UCSC)
Linear Progression Is Not Always Modern: A History of Astronomical Accuracy in Late Imperial China

Participants

MARTIN FUGLSANG is Associate Professor in Organisational and Social Philosophy at the Copenhagen Business School, and is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Center for Cultural Studies. His talk is drawn from his research project, a social-philosophical investigation of contemporary work-life which focuses on how late capitalism in the realm of globalization transforms the workforce into a multiplicity of “immaterial labor,” an assemblage of Work-Life-Existence. He posits a transformed world where “the binary segmentation, by which traditional thought has given our existence its definite content and its boundaries, has given way to zones and passages of imperceptibility. In this sense we have to reinvent ourselves in order to become. The question then becomes: how is critique and resistance possible when there no longer is a secluded ‘outside’ and when the ‘liberating’ ideology of humanism has become the fundamental component in the biopolitical technologies of contemporary management?” Martin Fuglsang is the author of four books, in Danish and in English, the latest of which is Gilles Deleuze and the Social, forthcoming in the Deleuze Connections series from Edinburgh University Press in May 2006.

PETER STEEVES, Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago, is a Visiting Scholar this year at Stanford University’s Center for Latin American Studies. His main areas of teaching and research include applied ethics, especially animal/environmental and bioethics, social and political philosophy (especially communitarianism), philosophy of culture, philosophy of science, and phenomenology. He has written often on popular culture, including Las Vegas, Disney, Andy Kaufman, The Simpsons, The Sopranos, and The Passion of the Christ. His books include Founding Community: A Phenomenological-Ethical Inquiry (Kluwer, 1998), and he is the editor and a contributor to Animal Others: On Ethics, Ontology, and Animal Life (SUNY, 1999). His talk is from a forthcoming book from SUNY Press, and takes up the question of animal language/consciousness by looking to a phenomenology of nonspecies-specifc language, as well as the appearance of animals in fiction by Franz Kafka and
Ursula Le Guin.

FELICITY SCHAEFFER-GRABIEL is Assistant Professor of Feminist Studies at UC Santa Cruz. Her talk will be from her book manuscript, “Cyber-brides between the United States and Latin America: Transnational Imaginaries, Migration, and Marriage.” She writes, “In this chapter I use interviews with women and men at the Romance Tour in Cali, Colombia and in chat-room discussions alongside the popular discourse of beauty in Colombia to theorize women’s use of their body capital as a form of mobility. I discuss women’s marriage migration alongside beauty because it demonstrates a shift in the perception of women from objects of trade to their strategic use of the biological and popular rendering of their body within the transnational marketplace.” Her articles include “Planet-Love.com: Cyberbrides in the Americas and the Transnational Routes of U.S. Masculinity,” forthcoming in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (Winter 2006), and “Cyberbrides and Global Imaginaries: Mexican Women’s Turn from the
National to the Foreign,” in Space and Culture: International Journal of Social Sciences (Feb. 2004).

ANNE NORTON, Professor of Comparative Literature and Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, is one of the most important political theorists writing today. Her Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire (Yale, 2004) made a major contribution to our understanding of contemporary neo-conservatism and its connection to Strauss’s thought. Other books include 95 Theses on Politics, Culture, and Method (Yale, 2003), Reflections on Political Identity (Johns Hopkins, 1988), and Republic of Signs: Liberal Theory and American Popular Culture (Chicago, 1993). She is currently working on questions of states and sovereignty, political theology, a political alphabet, and on a book entitled “Citizen of the Empire.”

KAREN BARAD is Professor of Feminist Studies at UC Santa Cruz. She previously taught at Rutgers University. Her Ph.D. is in theoretical particle physics, and her research in physics and philosophy has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Hughes Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among others. She is the author of numerous articles on physics, feminist philosophy, philosophy of science, cultural studies of science, and feminist theory, including “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter” in Signs: Journal of Women in
Culture and Society (Spring 2003), and “Re(con)figuring Space, Time, and Matter,” in Marianne DeKoven, ed., Feminist Locations: Global and Local, Theory and Practice (Rutgers, 2001). Her Meeting the Universe Halfway, from which her talk is taken, is forthcoming from Duke.

PHILIP STEINBERG is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at Florida State University and Rockefeller Fellow at the Center for Cultural Studies. He is the author of The Social Construction of the Ocean (Cambridge, 2001) and co-author of Managing Cyberspace: Governance, Technology, and Cultural Practice in Motion (Temple, forthcoming). THOMAS CHAPMAN is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Geography at Florida State University, where he is presently writing his dissertation, “Antidiscrimination Ordinances and Urban Political Economy: Constructions of Moral Landscapes and the Sexual Citizen.” Their talk will be drawn from ongoing research on how Key West’s historical and contemporary residents and visitors use discourses of isolation and connectivity to continually cross and redefine boundaries of sexual, American, Caribbean, and island identities.

JULIE GUTHMAN is Assistant Professor of Community Studies at UC Santa Cruz. Her research centers on sustainable agriculture and alternative food movements, the international political economy of food and agriculture, political ecology, and the economic geography of California. Her work on organic food culminated in her book Agrarian Dreams? The Paradox of Organic Farming in California (California, 2004). In her current research on obesity, Professor Guthman argues that “understanding both the causes and effects of the current so-called epidemic of obesity requires us to consider neoliberalism as both a political economy project an a form of governmentality. Specifically, obesity is both a spatial fix to contemporary capitalism and a reflection of impossible subject formation such that the neoliberal subject is compelled to participate in society as both out-of-control consumer and as self-controlled subject.” Her talk will reflect on the unusual student discomfiture she encountered while teaching an undergraduate course on this material. 

MINGHUI HU is Assistant Professor of History at UC Santa Cruz. Previous affiliations include a Mellon Fellowship at the University of Chicago and visiting positions at UC Irvine, Korea University, and Qinghua University in Beijing, China. With degrees in Engineering, Science and Technology Studies, and History, Minghui Hu writes on the history of Chinese science, China in the early modern world, and Chinese philosophy. His work promises to be a major revision to the dominant view of late imperial Chinese Western style science as fundamentally reactive to the West. He has written on late imperial Chinese astronomy in several publications. His “Xixue zai Qingdai Zhongguo de sange jieduan (Three Stages of Western Learning in Qing China), recently published in three parts in Dushu, China’s foremost intellectual journal, has had a major impact in Chinese science studies.

Colloquium Series
In fall 2005, 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 THE OAKES MURAL ROOMOctober 5
Gopal Balakrishnan
(Editor, New Left Review)
Future Wars
October 12
Sharon Kinoshita
(Literature, UCSC)
Paying Tribute: Old French Literature and the Medieval Culture of Empire
October 19
Haejoang Cho
(Sociology, Yonsei University)
The Anxious South Korean University Student:
Globalization, Human Capital, and Class
October 26
Helene Moglen (Literature, UCSC) & Sheila Namir (Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis)
(History, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs)
The Dis-Eases of Otherness: Psychoanalysis and War
November 2
William Marotti
(History, UCSC)
Political Aesthetics: Activism, Everyday Life, and Art’s Object in 1960s Japan
November 9
Laura Garcia-Moreno
(Humanities, San Francisco State University)
The Politics of Recycling in Juan Luis Martínez’s La nueva novela (1977)
November 16
Chris Hables Gray
(TUIU and Goddard College)
Naming Pragmatics: Cyborgs, Wars, Empires,
Informations, PowersParticipants

GOPAL BALAKRISHNAN is an editor at the New Left Review. He has taught at the University of Chicago, where he was Harper Schmidt Assistant Professor of History. He is the author of The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmidt (Verso, 2000) and editor of Debating Empire(Verso, 2003) and (co-edited with Benedict Anderson) Mapping the Nation (Verso, 1996). His project for the Rockefeller fellowship, “Future Wars,” focuses on the role that military power will play in shaping the international law and world market conventions of the 21st century. He will examine, among other issues, the extent to which war-making capacity still counts in the ranking systems of international power, how privatization has affected the strategic environment in which major states plan for war, whether there has been (as claimed) a revolution in military affairs that could overcome the anticipated problems of 21st century battlefield scenarios with new
technologies, and what the effects have been of widening military asymmetries.

SHARON KINOSHITAis Professor of Literature at UC Santa Cruz. Her Medieval Boundaries: Rethinking Difference in Old French Literature is forthcoming (Pennsylvania, 2006). Her talk is drawn from a new project, about which she writes, “This book project recasts old French epic and romance as a record of the encounter between medieval ‘European’ society and a Mediterranean world dominated by great tributary empires like Byzantine Greece and Fatimid Egypt, as well as the expanding commercial empires of the Venetian and Genoese, throwing into question the place of medieval Europe in the civilizational history of ‘the West.’

HAEJOANG CHO, a cultural anthropologist and feminist, is a professor at Yonsei University. Her early research focused on gender studies in Korean modern history; her current interests and research are in the area of education and youth culture in the global/local and post-colonial context of modern-day Korea. Cho’s works in Korean include Women and Men in South Korea (1988), Reading Texts, Reading Lives in the Post-colonial Era (1992, 1994), and Talking at the Edge: Letters Between Japanese and Korean Feminists (2004,co-authored with Ueno Chizuko). As an “action researcher,” Cho founded a youth center (The Youth
Factory for Alternative Culture, www.haja.net) in 1999, and serves as the principal of two alternative schools in Seoul.

HELENE MOGLEN holds a Presidential Chair in the Literature Department at UC Santa Cruz and is the founding director of the Institute for Advanced Feminist Research (IAFR). She has published in the areas of literary theory and criticism, feminist, psychoanalytic, and cultural theory, literacy, and education. Her most recent book is The Trauma of Gender: A Feminist Theory of the English Novel(California, 2001). She is currently working on a collection of personal, political, and theoretical essays.

SHEILA NAMIR is a training and supervising analyst at the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles and a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in Santa Cruz. She has published in the areas of psychosocial aspects of AIDS and cancer, trauma, and feminist psychoanalysis.

WILLIAM MAROTTI is Visiting Assistant Professor of History at UC Santa Cruz. His talk is drawn from his book project Money, Trains, and Guillotines: Art and Revolution in 1960s Japan. He will discuss the development of an avant-garde artistic production in Japan from 1957 to 1964. He writes, “Focused upon the everyday world and its debris, this art was the first to identify its structures of domination and imagine its possible transformation, anticipating core issues for later 1960s activism.”

LAURA GARCIA-MORENOis Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities at San Francisco State University, where she coordinates the American Studies Program. Her publications include “The Indigestible Other: Writing, Cannibalism and Melancholy in Juan José Saer’s The Witness” (Revista de Estudios Hispánicos37, 2003). Of her talk she writes, “La nueva novela by Juan Luis Martínez is an experimental, humorous and at the same time sharply disquieting neo-avant-garde Chilean text. The author acts primarily as an anonymous collector who redefines the book as a heterogeneous, hybrid archive made of recycled cultural references found in the wasteland of the twentieth century.”

CHRIS HABLES GRAY works in the cultural studies of science and technology, with a recent focus on theories and technologies of information and the role they play in constructions of empire and of social movements. His major publications are The Cyborg Handbook, edited with Heidi Figueroa-Sarriera and Steven Mentor (Routledge, 1995), Postmodern War (Routledge/Guilford, 1997), Cyborg Citizen
(Routledge, 2001), and Peace, War and Computers (Routledge, 2005). He is Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at the Graduate College of The Union Institute and University and at Goddard College.

Colloquium Series

In spring 2005, 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

April 6
Eduardo Mendieta
(Philosophy, Stony Brook University, SUNY)
The “Clash of Civilizations” and the Just War Tradition

April 13
Tony Crowley
(Language, Literature and Cultural Theory, University of Manchester, UK)
James Joyce and the Politics of Language in Ireland: From Finnegans Wake to Human Rights

April 20
Kirsten Gruesz
(Literature, UC Santa Cruz)
The Gulf of Mexico System and the Abjection of Latin America

April 27
Chris Vaughan
(Communication, Santa Clara University)
Mediated Memory of the Dawn of American Globalization: 1898 and its Legacies

May 4
Radhika Mongia
(Women’s Studies, UC Santa Cruz)
Contract and Consent: The Post-Abolition Discourse on Freedom

May 11
Edward Casey
(Philosophy, Stony Brook University, SUNY)
Coming to the Edge: Reflections on the Borders and Boundaries

May 18
Ravi Rajan
(Environmental Studies, UC Santa Cruz)
Spiderman India and the Globalization Myth

May 25
Mark Anderson
(Anthropology, UC Santa Cruz)
“This is the Black Power We Wear”: ‘Black America’ and the Contradictions of Consumption in Honduras

Participants

EDUARDO MENDIETA, is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University. His books include Latin American Philosphy: Currents, Issues, Debates (ed., Indiana, 2003) and The Adventures of Transcendental Philosphy: Karl Otto Apel’s Semiotics and Discourse Ethics (Rowman and Littlefield, 2000). He has translated and edited the works of Karl-Otto Apel, Jurgen Habermas, and Enrique Dussel. In 2004-2005 he is a Rockefeller Resident Fellow at the Center for Cultural Studies. His talk is part of his current book project on war, space, and philosophy.

TONY CROWLEY is Professor of Language, Literature and Cultural Theory at the University of Manchester, U.K. His talk is based on two forthcoming works: Wars of Words: The Politics of Language in Ireland 1537-2004 (Oxford, 2005), and In the Shadow of his Language: James Joyce and the Language Questions (Oxford, forthcoming 2007). Wars of Words includes an account of the roles of language in cultural and theoretical debates around race, national and cultural identity, gender, literature, religion, theories of legitimacy, historicity and cultural memory. The talk will discuss the language of Finnegans Wake, Joyce’s critique of cultural nationalism, and the importance of the politics of language (including language rights) to the future formation of both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.

KIRSTEN GRUESZ is Associate Professor of Literature at UC Santa Cruz, and works on American, Latina/o, and hemispheric cultural politics and literatures. Her 2001 Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing (Princeton) was an important intervention into the transnational study of literature of the Americas. Her talk is part of an essay series in progress that “posits the Gulf of Mexico as a different kind of border zone that could reorient our thinking about relations between the U.S., Mexico, and Central America. Coastal cities from St. Petersburg to Campeche have been linked ecologically, economically, and culturally at specific historical moments. This talk focuses on the proposed transoceanic canal across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, which would have made New Orleans the key port in the nation, and on that city’s role in establishing U.S. hegemony over the region from the late nineteenth century forward.”

CHRIS VAUGHAN is Associate Professor and Director of the Journalism Program in the Department of Communication at Santa Clara University. He has published widely as a journalist, and his scholarly works include many articles on the U.S. press in the context of the colonization of the Philippines. He is the author of Imperial Subjects: U.S. Media and the Philippines (Illinois, forthcoming). He writes that “a century after its unilaterally declared conclusion in 1902, the so-called Philippine Insurrection remains obscure, forgotten by many and never encountered at all by most, but the Moro wars that followed are being given fresh attention because of the re-insertion of American troops through the back door of the War on Terror. The strands of memory do not always tie up neatly, but tugging on them does reveal a process that adds insight into how contemporary notions of the American identity in global historical contexts is created.”

RADHIKA MONGIA is Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies at UC Santa Cruz, and is currently completing a book titled “Genealogies of Globalization: Migration, Colonialism, and the State” that focuses on the relationship between colonial migration law and the formations of the modern nation-state system. She has published in Public Culture and Cultural Studies. Her talk argues that “abolition might well provide the best explanation for the global transformations of nineteenth-century contract law. It further suggests that the paradigmatic site for the separation of ‘consent’ from the notion of ‘equality in exchange’ that characterizes the nineteenth-century reformulation of the contract, and indeed of liberalism, is to be found not within the metropolitan heartland, but within the peripheral sites of Mauritius, the Caribbean, and India that the paper examines.”

EDWARD CASEY is Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University, SUNY. The author of many books and articles, Professor Casey is widely recognized as the central philosopher on place. His three books on place stand as the foundational points of reference on the topic—Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World (Indiana, 1993), The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (California, 1997), and Representing Place: Landscape Painting and Maps (Minnesota, 2002). About his talk, he writes, “[e]xtending my earlier work on place, I here explore the role of edges in human and non-human environments. In this presentation, I will take up the contrasting character of boundaries and borders, which I distinguish at several levels. I shall pay particular attention to the instance of the U.S.–Mexican border, focusing on various of its geographic, historical, and cultural vicissitudes.”

RAVI RAJAN is Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at UC Santa Cruz. He is the author of Modernizing Nature: Tropical Forestry and the Contested Legacy of Colonial Ecodevelopment, 1800–2000(Oxford, forthcoming 2005), and of several scholarly papers and edited anthologies, newspaper columns and radio shows. He is currently at work on a book entitled: “Sustenance, Security and Suffrage: Environmentalism and Justice in the Twenty-First Century.” His talk “will explore the emergence of the Spiderman India comic series against the backdrop of the cultural and economic changes that are shaking and shaping modern India. In doing so, it will enter the world of super heroes, villains, politicians, businessmen, cricketers, hockey players, scientists, astronauts, avant garde scholars, novelists, natural disasters, national triumphs, software programmers, BPOs and the Walter Mitty-like ruminations of the popular media and the imagination.”

MARK ANDERSON is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz. His research interests include race, indigenism, diaspora, transnationalism, and Latin America. He has published articles in Transforming Anthropology, Journal of American Folklore, and Mesoamerica, and is currently working on a manuscript titled “Indigenous Rights and Black Diasporas: Garifuna and the Politics of Race and Culture in Honduras.” The project analyzes the multiple ways Garifuna identify as “Black” yet also claim a status of indigenous. The work explores everyday and organized struggles over the meanings of race, culture and identity in the context of neoliberal multiculturalism. His talk will explore how Honduran Garifuna relate to the racial geography they call “Black America.”

Colloquium Series

In winter 2005, 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

January 12
Eduardo Mendieta
(Philosophy, Stony Brook University, SUNY)
The Spaces of War and the Wars for Space: Technology, Law, City

January 19
M. Theresa Hernandez
(Social Work and Anthropology, University of Houston)
Cemeteries of Ambivalent Desire

January 26
Tony Crowley
(English Literature and Language, University of Manchester, UK)
James Joyce and the Politics of Language in Ireland: From Finnegans Wake to Human Rights

February 2
Dean Mathiowetz
(Politics, UC Santa Cruz)
Smuggling the “Self” into “Interest”: A Critical Reflection on a Liberal Dissimulation

February 9
Vilashini Cooppan
(Literature, UC Santa Cruz)
Global Literature: Race, Writing, and the World System

February 16
Kären Wigen
(History, Stanford University)
Sacred Peaks, Secular Visions: Reorienting Mountains in Modern Japan

February 23
Jason Ferreira
(President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, UC Santa Cruz)
Medicine of Memory: Third World Radicalism in 1960s San Francisco and the Politics of Multiracial Unity

March 2
David Marriott
(History of Consciousness, UC Santa Cruz)
Spooks(II): That Within

Participants

EDUARDO MENDIETA, currently Rockefeller Fellow at the Center for Cultural Studies, is the author of The Adventures of Transcendental Philosophy: Karl-Otto Apel’s Semiotics and Discourse Ethics (Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), and editor of numerous works including Latin American Philosophy: Currents, Issues, Debates (Indiana, 2003). He writes, “This talk considers the way in which types of war correlate with particular topologies (earth, sea, air), which in turn correlate with different legal orders (European, American, Global, etc). The city registers these dialectical interplays, becoming a palimpsest of the war for space, but also a supplement that challenges the logic of war.”

MARIE THERESA HERNANDEZ is the author of Delirio: The Fantastic, The Demonic, and The Réel: The Buried History of Nuevo León (University of Texas, 2002). Her current project, The Prophecy: Death, Legacy, History, and the Survival of Jim Crow, critiques the history of a strategic plantation county in southeast Texas, the site of the state’s first official white colony. Hernandez analyzes the county’s genealogy of origins and tragedy, using literature, anthropology, and ethnography to explore the past and the present of its narrative.

TONY CROWLEY‘s talk is based on two forthcoming works: Wars of Words: The Politics of Language in Ireland 1537-2004(Oxford, 2005), and In the Shadow of His Language: James Joyce and the Language Questions (Oxford, 2007). Wars of Wordsincludes an account of the roles of language in cultural and theoretical debates around race, national and cultural identity, gender, literature, religion, theories of legitimacy, historicity and cultural memory. The talk will discuss the language of Finnegans Wake, Joyce’s critique of cultural nationalism, and the importance of the politics of language (including language rights) to the future formation of both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.

DEAN MATHIOWETZ, Assistant Professor in the Politics Department at UC Santa Cruz, is working on a manuscript entitled “The Politics of Interest.” He writes, “Liberal theories of politics are typically defended on the basis of their reverence for individual self-interest. In the talk, I criticize Stephen Holmes’s influential historical defense of liberalism on the basis that he smuggles into the foundations of his argument what his liberalism presumes: the stable, identifiable self. I observe the migrations of the word ‘interest’ through his own argument to mark the restrictions and exclusions he needs to define the ‘self’, and explore the potential that invocations of ‘interest’ hold for a politics beyond liberalism.”

VILASHINI COOPPAN is Assistant Professor of Literature at UC Santa Cruz, completing a manuscript entitled “Inner Territories: Fictions and Fantasms of the Nation of Postcolonial Writing.” Her talk will explore the transnational literary traffic that emerged as the corollary to such systems of world capital as slavery, empire, apartheid, and globalization. Tracing the connection between the ideologies of national sovereignty, racial identity, and literary genre, this project attempts to discern the cultural and political work that genre performs. The talk will trace the rise of the novel through the migrations of the slave trade, from Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Behn’s Oroonoko through the British, United States, and Cuban slave narratives of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to the twentieth century postcolonial writings of the Caribbean novelist Caryl Phillips.

KÄREN WIGEN teaches Japanese history and the history of early modern mapping. Her research interests include the historical geography of East Asia, early modernity in Japan, regional economies and rhetorics, and geographies of the imagination. She is the author of The Making of a Japanese Periphery (California, 1995), which won the Fairbank Prize of the American Historical Association, and co-author with Martin Lewis of The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (California, 1997). Her current work centers on the discovery of the Japanese Alps at the turn of the twentieth century.

JASON FERREIRA is completing a book manuscript entitled “All Power to the People: A Comparative History of Third World Radicalism in San Francisco, 1968-1974.” His work explores how activists of color articulated a radical Third World identity that expressed a transformative set of politics, enabling them to view their separate histories and circumstances as fundamentally related. His study outlines how the boundaries separating the different struggles of communities of color were extremely porous, allowing a profound cross-fertilization of both ideas and people.

DAVID MARRIOTT is the author of On Black Men (Columbia, 2000), Letters to Langston (forthcoming), and several essays on race and psychoanalysis, as well as Lative, Dogma, and other poetry chapbooks. His talk will explore the phenomenology of the racial double in Sartre, Fanon, and Rosenberg.

Colloquium Series
In fall 2004, 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 (Except October 27) ARE IN THE OAKES MURAL ROOM 

October 6
Angela Davis
(History of Consciousness, UCSC)
Legacies of Women of Color Feminisms

October 13
Alexei Lalo
(Philosophy and Culture Studies, European Humanities University,
Minsk, Belarus)
In the Noose of National Idiosyncrasies: Resisting Globalization and Inventing Other Modernities in the Postcommunist Western New Independent States

October 20
Candace Vogler
(Philosophy, University of Chicago)
The Element of Surprise October 27
(in Oakes 109)
Christina Jimenez
(History, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs)
The Performed City: Consumers, Sellers, and Spectators in Urban Mexico, 1880-1930 

November 3
Eugene Holland
(French and Comparative Studies, The Ohio State University)
The Death State 

November 10
Tony Crowley
(English Language and Literature, University of Manchester,UK)
Writing the Demotic: The Politics of Language in Contemporary British Fiction
November 17
Irene Gustafson
(Film and Digital Media, UCSC)
The Space of the Screen /Test
 

Participants

ANGELA DAVIS is an internationally prominent scholar, writer, and activist. Her works, and books about her and her work, have appeared in many languages. Professor Davis’s most recent books include Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (Vintage, 1999) and Are Prisons Obsolete? (Open Media, 2003).

ALEXEI LALO, Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Culture Studies at the European Humanities University in Minsk, Belarus, is the author of Thomas Pynchon and His America: Enigmas, Parallels, and Cultural Contexts(Minsk: RIVSH BGU, 2001) and co-editor of Deviance in Society, Culture and Literature (UNIPAK, 2004), both published in Russian. His project, “Globalization, Russification, and ‘Double Translation’ in the Borderland Regions of the Western Newly Independent States of the Ex-USSR,” looks at contemporary Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, Russia, and the Baltic States, as they enter a period of transition between one imperial legacy—the Czarist and Soviet eras—and an emergent U.S.-based globalization. Professor Lalo is interested in how these questions are being answered in the social and cultural fields, as well as in the theoretical models that regional scholars can bring to an analysis of these problems. His work focuses on a “translation” of postcolonial theory into an analysis of regional political culture.

CANDACE VOGLER is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Co-Director of the Master of Arts Program in the Humanities at the University of Chicago. She is the author of a book on practical reason entitled Reasonably Vicious(Harvard, 2002); John Stuart Mill’s Deliberative Landscape (Routledge, 2001); and essays on such topics as intimacy, Rousseau and contemporary social contract theory, philosophy and literature, feminism, and sexuality studies. Her research interests center upon the strengths and limits of liberal humanism in ethics, moral psychology, social and political philosophy, gender studies, and cultural studies. Her talk is part of a philosophical examination of happiness.

CHRISTINA JIMENEZ is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, and a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow. She is completing a book manuscript entitled Buying Into the Nation: Negotiating Citizenship and Modernity in Urban Mexico, 1880-1930. Based on thousands of letters and petitions to municipal and state governments, as well as legal codes and governmental memos, her work explores how urban residents were able to secure concessions and protection from the Mexican government by demanding fulfillment of their rights under the Mexican Constitution of 1857. She locates the roots of the informal economy, urban consumer culture, populist state employment, and collective petitioning in the pre-revolutionary late nineteenth century.

EUGENE HOLLAND is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Studies at The Ohio State University. He is the author of Baudelaire and Schizoanalysis:
The Sociopoetics of Modernism(Cambridge, 1993) and Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to Schizoanalysis (Routledge, 1999). His project, “Realizing Global Democracy: Nomad Citizenship and Other Studies in Applied Nomadology,” elaborates a concept of nomad citizenship based on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. His colloquium talk mobilizes schizoanalysis for a socioeconomic analysis of consumerism and its connection to the U.S.A.’s repression of the death instinct.

TONY CROWLEY is Professor of English Literature and Language at the University of Manchester, UK. His works include The Politics of Language: The Standard Language Question in Cultural Debates(Palgrave, 2003); Proper English? Readings in Language, History and Cultural Identity (Routledge, 1991); and the forthcoming Wars of Words: The Politics of Language in Ireland 1534-2003(Oxford, 2004). His current project, “Language and Cultural Identity in Contemporary British Writing,” argues that in the twentieth century the sense that language was constitutive of identity became popular and commonplace. He explores the experimentation and innovation of writers who have represented Black British, Asian Scottish, Welsh, Liverpudlian, London and working-class (often unemployed) experiences in modes of language adequate to those experiences.

IRENE GUSTAFSON teaches production as well as film and video criticism and theory. Her video productions include Velvets (1999) and Screen Test No. 1, No. 2, No. 3. (1998-2002), which have been screened at many galleries and festivals worldwide, including Neo-Queer: Shorts from the Queer Frontier (Center on Contemporary Art, Seattle, 2003), and the Impakt Festival (Utrecht, Netherlands, 2001). Her talk is from her current research project, centering on the form of the screen test and the spaces it both occupies and produces—short form film, industry by-product, experiment. This research takes the form of critical writing, film/video work, and curation.

Colloquium Series

In spring 2004, 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 THE OAKES MURAL ROOM
Unless Otherwise NotedApril 7
George Lipsitz
(American Studies, UCSC)
Popular Culture and Digital Capitalism: De´tournement and Retournement

April 14
Ivaylo Ditchev
(Cultural Anthropology, History and Theory of Culture,
Sofia University, Bulgaria, and Rockefeller Fellow, UC Santa Cruz)
The City as Stage of the New Life

April 21
Peregrine Horden
(Medieval History and History, University of London)
Mediterranean Excuses: Historiography of a Region Since Braudel

April 28
Carla Freccero
(Literature, UCSC)
Queer Spectrality

May 5
Ruth Frankenberg
(American Studies, UC Davis)
Living Spirit, Living Practice: Poetics, Politics, and Epistemology
Note: This colloquium, cosponsored with the Departments of Sociology and Women’s Studies, will be held in the College Eight Red Room.

May 12
David Cope
(Music, UCSC)
Experiments in Musical Intelligence

May 19
Elizabeth Castle
(President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, UCSC)
Behind the Scenes at the Big House: The Politics of Race Politics at President Clinton’s Initiative on Race

May 26
Ben Carson
(Music, UCSC)
Compositional Economy and Self-Identical Bodies in New Music

Participants

GEORGE LIPSITZ is an internationally acclaimed scholar of race, culture, social identities, and popular culture in the U.S. His many books include The Possessive Investment in Whiteness (Temple, 1998), and Dangerous Crossroads (Verso, 1994). About his talk he writes, “The best scholarship in Cultural Studies has long revolved around what the French Situationists call de´tournement—which in the age of industrial capitalism meant inflecting standardized products with local meanings. In the age of digital capitalism, however, these oppositional practices are promoted by the system itself as a form of retournement—recapturing the dynamic and resistant practices of consumption for dominant ends. Cultural production itself changes under these conditions, as capital out-sources the work of product differentiation to consumers as part of a fully integrated and linked system of production, distribution, and consumption.”

IVAYLO DITCHEV is Professor of Cultural Anthropology in the Department of History and Theory of Culture at Sofia University, Bulgaria, and a Rockefeller Fellow at UC Santa Cruz for winter and spring quarters, 2004. His publications include “The Eros of Identity,” in Balkans as Metaphor, ed. Savic Bielic (MIT, 2002), and From Belonging to Identity: Politics of the Image (LIK, 2002). Ditchev’s project, “Globalizing Civic Ritual: Imported Forms of Belonging and Legitimation in the Balkans,” centers on social life, cultures of consumption, and styles of urbanism from the Soviet period. While at UC Santa Cruz, he is working on a book-length study of imported rituals and the role of the media in the dissemination of ritual practice.

PEREGRINE HORDEN is a Reader in Medieval History and Director of Graduate Studies in History at the University of London. He has published widely in global history, medieval history, and medical history. Horden is the co-author, with N. Purcell, of The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History, a history of the relationship over the past 3,000 years. In Volume One, published by Blackwell in 2000, Horden and Purcell write, “Rather than being a problem whose relevance we should contest, the political and ethnic untidiness of the Mediterranean could turn out to be inspiring. Dense fragmentation complemented by a striving towards control of communications may be an apt summary of the Mediterranean past.”

CARLA FRECCERO’s books include Popular Culture: An Introduction (NYU 1999) and the coedited (with Louise Fradenburg) Premodern Sexualities(Routledge 1996). Her Queer/Early/Modern is forthcoming from Duke. Freccero’s historicized psychoanalytic and deconstructive readings track the envocation of ghosts—and ghostly returns—across a wide archive. In this talk, drawn from a final section of the book, Freccero reads a proleptic spectral relation to the Other in the ethnographic work of the 16th century French Calvinist Jean de Léry. Using Derrida’s concept of spectrality, Freccero proposes a model for a kind of anti-historicist historiography that brings together temporality, affect and the hope for an ethical and more just relation to the past, present, and future.

RUTH FRANKENBERG is Associate Professor of American Studies at UC Davis. Her research focus has been on whiteness, feminist and interdisciplinary theory, and, more recently, religion and spiritual practices in the contemporary United States. Her books include: White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minnesota, 1993) and the edited volume Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism(Duke, 1997). This talk will be held in the College Eight Red Room, as part of the Department of Sociology colloquium series.

DAVID COPE is an award-winning author and composer whose compositions have been widely recorded and performed in the U.S. and abroad. His New Directions in Music (Waveland) is now in its seventh edition. Since 1981, he has been working on a project titled Experiments in Musical Intelligence, a computationally based composition program which has produced works in the styles of Bach, Mozart, Stravinsky, Palestrina, and Joplin. These works have been discussed and reproduced in three of his books: Computers and Musical Style (A-R Editions, 1991), The Algorithmic Composer (A-R Editions, 2000), and Virtual Music (MIT, 2001). The project suggests that long-held conceptions of musical genius and individual style might be in need of revision. To obtain Experiments in Musical Intelligence and other music by David Cope go to
http://www.spectrumpress.com

ELIZABETH CASTLE is a Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Santa Cruz. She works in Native American Studies, with a focus on Native American women’s activism, and has published widely in that area. Her book Women Were the Backbone and Men were the Jawbone: Native American Women’s Leadership and Activism in the Red Power Movement is forthcoming in 2005 from Oxford. Her talk is based on (PIR) and as a delegate for an NGO consultative organization at the United Nation’s World Conference Against Racism (WCAR). She writes: “These events have major and relatively unexplored implications for the history of racial politics, reparations, and social movements in a global context. In addition to exploring these implications, I will share how behind-the-scenes interpersonal behaviors around race and color undermined the abilities of both PIR and WCAR.”

BEN CARSON is a composer and theorist who engages a variety of scientific and critical theories of mind in order to investigate musical consciousness. His music has been performed in cities throughout the western U.S. and Canada, as well as at international festivals. About his talk he writes, “An earlier conversation among practitioners of art music distinguishes Romantic individuation and ‘developing variation’ as alternative ‘compositional economies’ from which to understand musical subjects as allegorical expressions of human identity. Works of Schoenberg and Boulez can be heard as a ‘progressive’ revival of the aesthetics of individuation. A consideration of poet/critic Traise Yamamoto’s notions of body and identity and Chaya Czernowin’s 1999 opera Pnima Ins Innere (1999)—addressing the problem of collective memory among the descendants of victims of trauma—suggests that performative ‘embodiment’ and related ensemble practices are bases for a narrative formation of ‘unspeakable histories’.”

Colloquium Series

In winter 2004, 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 THE OAKES MURAL ROOMJanuary 14
Donna Haraway
(History of Consciousness, UCSC)
Companion Species & Other Messmates: Canine Insight on Acquiring Genomes in Technoculture

January 21
Manuela Ribeiro Sanches
(Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa)
Where is the Post-Colonial?: In-Betweenness, Identity and “Lusophonia” in Trans/National Contexts

January 28
Megan Thomas
(Politics, UCSC)
Authority, Authenticity, and the Native Voice: Ethnographies of and by Filipinos in the Late 19th Century

February 4
Deborah Whaley
(Center for Cultural Studies, UCSC)
Disciplining Women, Respectable Pledges, and the Meaning of a “Soror”: Reconstituting the Cultural Politics of Violence in a Predominantly Black Sorority

February 11
Peter Limbrick
(Film and Digital Media, UCSC)
Cinema’s Imperial Mode: British Empire Films and their Transnational Contexts

February 18
Scott Barclay
(Politics, UCSC)
Cause Lawyers as Legal Innovators for the State: The Case of Civil Unions in Vermont and the Religious Law Conflict in Israel

February 25
Earl Jackson
(Literature, UCSC)
Is Gone Better? Existence as Practice and Theory in Korean Cinema

March 3
Anna Tsing
(Anthropology, UCSC)
Engaged Universals

Participants

DONNA HARAWAY’s most recent book is The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Prickly Paradigm, 2003). Of her talk she writes, “The root meaning of ‘companion’ in companion species is ‘com panis’ or ‘with bread.’ I am interested in messmates; i.e., in those who eat together—or eat each other—in evolutionary, social, and intimate personal history. Thinking well about messmates turns out to require a baroque array of temporalities and spatialities. The current landscape in cultural studies is cluttered with descriptions of entanglements of bodies, meanings, monies, histories, agencies, and much else. I want to further complicate the knot by tying in some threads from human-dog relatings. I am, in short, interested in those who ‘partake of each other’ in species-making ways. Derrida will make a cameo appearance, followed by a restorative cast of middle-aged women who breed dogs and know rather more about animals.”

MANUELA RIBEIRO SANCHES is Assistant Professor in the Department of German Studies at the University of Lisbon, and a Resident Scholar at the Center for Cultural Studies. She writes, “Portugal has defined its national identity through its colonial and imperial histories, thus making of its post-colonial condition a contradictory question that unites in a most obvious way the rupture or the continuities that link the country to its former colonies. How is this ‘in-betweenness’ to be interpreted? What are the ‘origins’ of discourses on Portuguese hybridity? How is the post-colonial understood in contemporary Portugal, and how does this understanding influence the reception of postcolonial studies in ‘Lusophone’ contexts? How can post-colonial studies contribute to a decentering of these approaches and understandings?”

MEGAN THOMAS is Assistant Professor of Politics. Her talk draws on her book project, Orientalist Enlightenment: The Emergence of Nationalist Thought in the Philippines, 1880-1898, examining texts written by educated, creolized natives of the Philippines during the last decades of Spanish colonial rule at the end of the 19th century. She notes, “Those authors, some of whom were central figures in the nationalist movement, wrote folkloristic and ethnographic accounts of different ethnolinguistic groups in the Philippines. They self-consciously adopted the European sciences of folklore and ethnography and yet they claim authority as experts precisely because of their status as natives, even when writing about a group of which they were not a member. These texts call colonial authority into question and prefigure later debates about the theory and practice of ethnographic fieldwork.”

DEBORAH WHALEY, Resident Scholar at the Center for Cultural Studies, has taught at the University of Kansas and at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Whaley is author of “To Capture a Vision Fair: Margaret Walker and the Predicament of the African American Female Intellectual,” in Maryemma Graham (ed.), Fields Watered with Blood: Critical Essays on Margaret Walker
(Georgia, 2001) and “The Neo-Soul Vibe and the Postmodern Aesthetic: Black Popular Music and Culture for the Soul Babies of History,” American Studies (Fall 2002). Her talk “will explore the way a historically Black sorority creates and struggles to make meaning of the use of violence as a rite of passage. Black sorority women use ethnic-specific rites to redistribute cultural flows of power within their subculture and in so doing, they produce new registers for understanding the complex social function of violence and the cultural politics of Black feminine identities.”

PETER LIMBRICK is Assistant Professor of Film and Digital Media. His book project, On Location: Cinema, Empire, and Colonial Space, traces the production and circulation of films of and about empire and colonialism. It is, he writes, “particularly concerned with the ways in which race, gender, and sexuality are conceived and maintained through the representations of colonial and postcolonial spaces and geographies. The project tangles with established connections between cinema, nation, and genre to instead propose an imperial cinematic mode that can be traced through widely dispersed historical moments and contexts.”

SCOTT BARCLAY, Visiting Associate Professor in the Legal Studies Program, is the author of An Appealing Act: Why People Appeal in Civil Cases(Northwestern, 1999) and co-author of “The States and Differing Impetus for Divergent Paths on Gay Rights, 1990-2001,” Policy Studies Journal 31 (2003). His current research considers the legal, social, and political struggle over same-sex marriage. He writes, “Cause lawyers—lawyers who systematically pursue a cause on behalf of a socially marginalized group—develop new legal rights as a means to alleviate the targeting of this oppressive authority against a particularly marginalized social group. Instead of operating only from an oppositional position…some cause lawyers enter into a symbiotic relationship with selected parts of the state. … In this symbiotic relationship, the law becomes the shared language that allows these actors with divergent goals temporarily to occupy a common space.”

EARL JACKSON, Associate Professor of Literature, in Spring 2004 will be Visiting Professor of Cinema Studies at Korean National University of the Arts. He is the author of Strategies of Deviance: Essays in Gay Male Representational Agency(Indiana, 1995) and “Polylogic Perversity,” GLQ 9.4 (Winter 2003). About this talk he writes, “Given Korea�s turbulent modern history, it is not surprising that a considerable number of Korean films raise questions concerning the meaning of human life in general and specific individual lives. It is important to read these questions not thematically but cinematically. Obaltan[Aimless Bullet, 1960] is a fictional drama and considered a masterpiece of the Korean golden age. Nappeun Yonghwa[Bad Movie, 1997] is an experimental quasi-documentary featuring runaway or abandoned youth and homeless adults. Each foregrounds the tensions between the represented subject and the system of representation and illuminates the political stakes therein.” In conjunction with this talk, Obaltan will be shown on Tuesday, February 24th at 7 PM in Social Sciences I, Room 159. 

ANNA TSING is author of In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-Way Place (Princeton, 1993) and co-editor of Nature in the Global South: Environmental Projects in South and Southeast Asia (Duke, 2003). Her talk is drawn from her forthcoming book Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connections, of which she writes, “Environmental activists, illegal loggers, transnational mining corporations, nature hikers, crony capitalists, and village elders vie for attention in this book, in which Indonesian rainforest politics provides the site for an exploration of the contingencies of global connection. Here global capitalism and utopian social mobilizations make appearances through the grip of cultural encounter, and liberal universals are realized in the sticky materiality of ‘friction.’”

Colloquium Series

In fall 2003, 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 THE OAKES MURAL ROOMOctober 1
Teresa de Lauretis
(History of Consciousness, UCSC)
“Damned and Carefully Public”: Djuna Barnes andNightwood

October 8
Alain-Marc Rieu
(Humanities, UC Santa Cruz)
Modernization Theory Today 

October 15
Lisa Rofel
(Anthropology, UCSC)
Legislating Desire: Homosexuality, Intellectual Property Rights, and Consumer Fraud in Post-Socialist China

October 22
Jeremy Prestholdt
(History, Northeastern University and Rockefeller Fellow, Fall 2003)
On Consumerism and Peripheral Visions of Globalization

October 29
L.S. Kim
(Film and Digital Media, UCSC)
Maid in Color: The Figure of the Racialized Domestic in American Television

November 5
Herman Gray
(Sociology, UCSC)
Sight and Sound: Recognition, Visibility, and Black Cultural Politics

November 12
Elizabeth DeLoughrey
(English, Cornell University and Rockefeller Fellow, 2003-04)
Gardening in the Tropics: Excavating the Roots of Island Transplantations

November 19
Rosa Linda Fregoso
(Latin American/Latino Studies, UCSC)
meXicana Encounters: The Making of Social Identities on the Borderlands

Participants

Teresa de Lauretis is Professor in the History of Consciousness department, and is internationally recognized for her work in semiotics, psychoanalytic theory, literature, science fiction, film, film theory, and queer and feminist theory. She is author of over a dozen books, which have appeared in many languages, including the canonical Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Indiana, 1984). Her talk is an introduction to and a section of her current book project on Freud’s theory of the drives in relation to the body and subject formation, and the relevance of Freud’s theory for the history of the present.

Alain-Marc Rieu is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Lyon, and is currently Visiting Professor of Humanities at UCSC. He has published widely on the philosophy of knowledge, on contemporary Europe, and on knowledge societies in Japan and elsewhere. About his talk, he writes, “the objective is to build a concept of modernization strong enough to analyze, compare and evaluate various modernization trajectories. The goal is to establish an epistemological ground to develop comparative studies of societies.”

Lisa Rofel is Associate Professor of Anthropology at UCSC. She works on issues of gender, sexuality, and modernity in China and elsewhere. She is the author of Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China After Socialism (California, 1998). She is currently working on a manuscript about desire and globalization in contemporary China, and on a book of essays about contemporary Zionism. Her talk is about recent legal cases and legalistic debates in China and the way they construct neo-liberal subjects of desire.

Jeremy Prestholdt, Rockefeller Fellow for Fall, 2003, works in world history. He received his Ph.D. this year from Northwestern University, having done his doctoral research in East Africa, and he has recently joined the History faculty at Northeastern University. About his talk, he writes, “the project highlights the roles of seemingly peripheral people in the fashioning of global systems by considering the repercussions of African consumer desire on patterns of global integration. In its focus on how pre-colonial East African consumerism shaped global relationships from Bombay to Boston, the project excavates alternative visions of globality and develops a narrative of interrelation focused on local and social contingencies.”

L.S. Kim, Assistant Professor in Film and Digital Media at UCSC, joined the faculty in 2002. Her essays, largely in television studies, include “‘Serving’ a New Orientalism: Discursive Racial Identity in the Television Text” (forthcoming in the Journal of Film and Video), and “‘Sex and the Single Girl’ in Postfeminism: The F-word on Television” (Television and New Media, November, 2001). Her talk will be from her current book project on the cultural significance of the racialized female domestic—the maid.

Herman Gray is Professor of Sociology at UCSC, and is a prominent scholar in media and cultural studies. His books includeWatching Race: Television and the Struggle for “Blackness” (Minnesota, 1995). His talk is taken from his current book project, Cultural Moves, which examines black cultural politics of the last decade from the perspective of struggles over representation in American network television, the institutional seizure and subsequent battles over the canonization of jazz at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, and the relationship between identity and new information technologies in the case of experimental music.

Elizbeth DeLoughrey, Assistant Professor of English at Cornell University, is a Rockefeller Fellow for 2003-2004. She has completed one book manuscript, Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures, and her talk is from her work in progress, “Island Transplantations: Literary Seeds of Culture.” Tracing the centuries-long history of commodity crop transfer around the world, she argues that human and plant diasporas facilitated a sense of modernity centuries before what we now term “globalization.” She further examines the literary use of plants as metaphors for diaspora and the cultivation of historically bound island identities.

Rosa Linda Fregoso is Professor of Latin American/Latino Studies at UCSC. Her books include The Bronze Screen: Chicana and Chicano Film Culture (Minnesota, 1993). Her talk will be an introduction to her forthcoming book, meXicana Encounters: The Making of Social Identities on the Borderlands (California, December 2003), a formally innovative self reflexive approach to cultural politics, blending cultural history, testimonial, memory, autobiography, film criticism, critical race studies, and transnational feminist theories. It includes discussion of the recent murders and disappearances of women in Ciudad Juárez, John Sayles’s film Lone Star, and the significance of la familia to the identity of Chicanas/os.

Colloquium Series

In spring 2003, 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 THE OAKES MURAL ROOMApril 16
Warren Sack
(Film and Digital media, UCSC)
Discourse Architecture: Online Public Space and Public Discourse

April 23
David Anthony
(History, UCSC)
The Isle of Cloves in the Gaze of the World: The Fifth Zanzibar International Film Festival

April 30
Pal Ahluwalia
(Politics, University of Adelaide and University of London)
Out of Africa: Post-Structuralism’s Colonial Roots

May 7
Elizabeth Castle
(Postdoctoral Fellow, Women’s Studies, UCSC)
Women Were the Backbone: American Indian Women’s Activism in the Red Power Movement

May 14
Eleanor Kaufman
(English, University of Virginia)
Rocks, Sardine Cans, and Cut Fruit: Solid Objects and the Dialectic in French Phenomenology

May 21
Stacy Kamehiro
(History of Art and VisualCulture, UCSC)
Temple-Palaces and the Art of Kingship in Late Nineteenth-Century Hawai`i

May 28
Jonathan Beecher
(History, UCSC)
French Socialism in Lenin’s Moscow: David Riazanov and the French Archive of the Marx-Engels Institute

Participants

Warren Sack, Assistant Professor of Film and Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz, is a media theorist and software designer. He was previously an assistant professor at UC Berkeley, a research scientist at the MIT Media Laboratory, and a research collaborator in the Interrogative Design Group at the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies. His work concerns theories and designs for online public space and public discourse. Currently he is collaborating with artist/ designer Sawad Brooks on the “Translation Map,” a net art project commissioned by Gallery 9/Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. His colloquium talk will be on this and other recent art and research projects. To view or experience the Translation Map, please see http://translationmap.walkerart.org

David Anthony, Associate Professor of History at UC Santa Cruz, is completing a critical biography entitled The Lives of Max Yergan. Anthony is one of the compilers and editors of African-American Linkages with South Africa, a two-volume documentary text. This talk is an outgrowth of his research on the social and cultural history of Tanzania. Since its inception six years ago, the Zanzibar festival has evolved from a primarily East African phenomenon to a global showcase for Zanzibar, for African and Indian Ocean diaspora cinema, and ultimately for the maritime civilizations of Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and their overseas migratory extensions. Anthony’s talk engages larger questions of how Zanzibar and some Zanzibaris position themselves with respect to globalization.

Pal Ahluwalia teaches Politics at the University of Adelaide and will take up the Foundation Chair of Politics at Goldsmiths College, University of London, in July 2003. He has written extensively on Africa and post-colonial theory. His recent books include Politics and Post-Colonial Theory(Routledge, 2001) and Edward Said(Routledge, 2001). About his talk, Ahluwalia writes,”An examination of French post-structuralist theorists reveals several constellations of identities. There are theorists from what could be called the Jewish diaspora. There are many who, although they made their careers in the metropolitan centers, are ‘outsiders.’ This project seeks to understand why the most important theoretical elaboration of French postmodernists occurs in the work of theorists whose early experience or later political life are informed, inflected by or implicated in the disruptions of French colonialism.”

Elizabeth Castle is a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Santa Cruz. She received her Ph.D. in History from Cambridge University. She has studied radical activism by women of color in post-WWII social movements, oral history methodology, and the history of anti-racist activism. In 1997-1998 she worked as a policy associate for the President’s Initiative on Race in the Clinton White House. Her talk will examine American Indian women’s leadership and participation in the red power movement of the late 1960s and 1970s from the vantage point of native epistemology. Castle also will discuss the ethics of research in Indian country today.

Eleanor Kaufman, Assistant Professor of English at the University of Virginia, is a Resident Scholar at the Center for Cultural Studies in May and June 2003. She is author of The Delirium of Praise: Bataille, Blanchot, Deleuze, Foucault, and Klossowski (Johns Hopkins, 2001) and coeditor of Deleuze and Guattari: New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy, and Culture (Minnesota, 1998). Kaufman is currently working on two projects. The first considers the recurring fascination for solid objects in the French phenomenological tradition, connecting phenomenology to a slightly later and more resoundingly anti-humanist moment in French thought (that of Deleuze, Lacan, and Foucault). Her second project, “The Jewry of the Plain,” explores the memoirs left by Western and Great Plains Jewish settlers at the turn of the twentieth century. The project draws on the work of Jacques Derrida and other French thinkers, connecting in unexpected ways to her interest in modern French thought.

Stacy Kamerhiro is Assistant Professor of the History of Art and Visual Culture at UC Santa Cruz; she has also taught at the University of Redlands. Kamehiro’s talk explores architectural patronage through King David Kalakaua’s (r. 1874-91) building project, the ‘Iolani Palace (Honolulu, O`ahu) (1880-1882). This instance of art patronage can be understood within the context of nationalist responses to escalating colonial pressures, combined with Kalakaua’s individual vision of himself as both an internationally recognized ruler and exalted Hawai`ian chief. The function and location of the Palace were designed to project Hawai`i’s selfdeclaration as a modern independent nation. At the same time, the Palace was to function as a sacred structure that allowed Kalakaua to present himself as a legitimate political and religious authority in “traditional” Hawai`ian terms.

Jonathan Beecher is Professor of History at UC Santa Cruz. He is the author of Victor Considerant and the Rise and Fall of French Romantic Socialism (U. of California, 2001) and Charles Fourier: The Visionary and His World (U. of California, 1987). Beecher’s talk draws on his recent work in an important archive of manuscript material on the French Revolution and the history of nineteenth-century French socialism. This archive, which was assembled in the 1920s and eventually became part of the Central Archives of the Communist Party, was opened to western scholars after the fall of the Soviet Union. In this archive Beecher has located the world’s largest collection of Babeuf manuscripts and hundreds of letters of Auguste Blanqui, Louis Blanc and P. J. Proudhon. His talk will tell the story of the archive and its creator, David Riazanov, a learned and scrupulous scholar and one of the most engaging and fiercely independent figures in early Soviet history.