Colloquium Series

In fall 2002, 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 2
Jerome Neu
(Philosohy, UCSC)
An Ethics of Fantasy?

October 9
Chris Berry
(Film Studies, UC Berkeley)
Where Do You Draw the Line? Ethnicity in Chinese Cinemas

October 16
Vanita Seth
(Politics, UCSC)
The Timing of Race: or What Made Race Classification Possible?

October 23
Flora Veit-Wild
(Dept. of African Studies, Humboldt University, Berlin)
Borderlines of the Body in African Literature

October 30
Brian Catlos
(History, UCSC)
Infidels and Allies: A Reappraisal of the Ethno-Religious Element in Western Mediterranean Politics in the Era of the Crusades

November 6
David Kim
(Philosophy, Univ. of San Francisco)
Black Atlanticism: Africana Studies and Pacific Empires

November 13
Audrey Jaffe
(Center for Cultural Studies, UCSC)
Measurement Without Numbers: Figures of Nineteenth-Century Statistics

November 20
Brett Ashley Crawford
(Performing Arts, American University)
The Arts Audiences in the 21st Century—Community, Consumer, or Tourist

Participants

Jerome Neu is Professor of Philosophy at UC Santa Cruz. He is the author of Emotion, Thought, and Therapy (University of California, 1977), and A Tear Is an Intellectual Thing: The Meanings of Emotion (Oxford University Press, 2000), and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Freud, (Cambridge, 1991). His book in progress is entitled Sticks and Stones: the Philosophy of Insults. About this talk he writes, “Is there, in addition to the ethics of action, an ethics of fantasy? Are there fantasies one ought not to have? Do the problems such fantasies raise depend on their links to desire and action?” Taking up pornographic and sexual fantasies, the talk emphasizes psycho-analytic and legal aspects of the issues.

Chris Berry is Associate Professor of Film Studies at UC Berkeley. He is currently completing a book co-authored with Mary Farquhar and entitled Cinema And Nation: China On Screen (Cambridge, forthcoming). His new research, a project investigating “the look” in Chinese cinema, attempts a de-Westernization of film theory. He is also working on the translation of Lu Fei-i’s history of the cinema in Taiwan. In this talk, Chris Berry argues for re-thinking the scope and conceptualization of ethnicity in Chinese cinemas. Illustrated with clips from films such as Wedding Banquet(1993), Serfs (1963), Horse Thief (1986), and City of Sadness (1989), this talk explores new models of ethnic relations.

Vanita Seth is Assistant Professor of Political Science at UC Santa Cruz. She is currently working on a project entitled “Genealogies of Difference: European Representations of the Amerindians and Indians,” focusing on the period from the 15th to the 19th century. Central to this work is an understanding of how European constructions of difference changed historically. She argues that race as a form of classification and racism as a form of discrimination are ways of seeing difference that are peculiar to the modern, crucially formed in the 19th century. “What made such classification possible,” she writes, “is not simply the emergence of medical and anthropological discourses but a radically new conceptualization of time.”

Flora Veit-Wild has been Professor of African Literatures and Cultures at the Department of African Studies, Humboldt University, Berlin, since 1994. From 1983-93, she lived in Harare, Zimbabwe, where she researched and published widely on the history and developments of Zimbabwean literature. Her works include Teachers, Preachers, Non-Believers: A Social History of Zimbabwean Literature and, co-authored with Anthony Chennels, Dambudzo Marechera: A Source Book on his Life and Work (both 1992). Veit-Wild’s colloquium talk is drawn from her current project on “Borderlines of the Body in African Literature.” Her earlier work in this field includes studies of pain, authorship, the female body, and madness in African literature.

Brian Catlos is Assistant Professor of History at UC Santa Cruz. He is editing the final draft of a forthcoming book, The Victors and the Vanquished: Christians and Muslims in Catalonia and Aragon, 1050–1300 (Cambridge), while conducting archival research on Muslims and Jews living under Christian rule in medieval Iberia, and exploring larger questions regarding the nature of the political, economic, and social interaction of ethno-religious communities. He writes, “The Middle Ages is traditionally portrayed as an era of ‘conquest’ and Crusade in Iberia and the Maghrib. This paper takes the career of a Muslim mercenary in thirteenth-century Christian Aragon as the departure point for a reassessment of the role of ethno-religious identity and ideology in the politics and society of that age.”

David Kim is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Director of Asian American Studies at the University of San Francisco, where he holds the NEH Chair for 2002-3. His essays include “The Color Line in the Era of Pacific Empires” in David Theo Goldberg and Tommy Lott, eds., The Color Line: Du Bois on Race and Culture (Blackwell Press, forthcoming). His book-in-progress, tentatively entitled The Black Pacific, investigates a largely hidden but rich tradition of black liberatory thought on Asia, from the late 19th century through the Cold War era. His talk will highlight various strands of this tradition, notably the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, and C.L.R. James, and their significance for two important works in Africana studies, Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic and Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism.

Audrey Jaffe is the author of a book on Dickens, Vanishing Points: Dickens, Narrative, and the Subject of Omniscience(University of California, 1991), and more recently of Scenes of Sympathy: Identity and Representation in Victorian Fiction(Cornell, 2000). She has taught at NYU, the University of Toronto, and
Ohio State University, where she was until recently an Associate Professor of English. When not visiting UC Santa Cruz she can be found in Berkeley, where, at the moment, she teaches a nineteenth-century-novel course for UC Extension and thinks about the graph. Her talk, part of a project about the genealogy of and meanings attached to the image of the graph in modern culture, will address representations of identity in statistical history, focusing especially on the work of nineteenth-century theorists such as Quetelet, Galton, and Jevons.

Brett Ashley Crawford is Assistant Professor in the Department of Performing Arts at American University. She received a Ph.D. in theatre history and criticism and a graduate certificate in women’s studies from the University of Maryland, College Park and an M.F.A. in arts administration from Texas Tech University. Her current projects include research on and conceptualization of the future of audiences in America and the practice of audience development in arts organizations; gender, race, and management in the creative and administrative arenas of the arts; women and leadership; and the use of technology in arts and education. Her research on audience development investigates the complex intersections between race, gender, ethnicity and class in an increasingly competitive, niche-driven cultural marketplace.

Colloquium Series

In Spring 2002, 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 10
Erica Rand (Art, Bates College, Lewiston Maine)
“The Traffic in my Fantasy Butch: Sex, Money, Immigration, and the Statue of Liberty”

April 17 
Niamh Stephenson (Critical Psychology, University of Western Sydney, Australia)
“Interrupting Experience: Demarcating Neoliberal Technologies of the Self”

April 24 
Hayden White (History of Consciousness, UC Santa Cruz and Comparative Literature, Stanford University)
“The Illusion of Historical Perspective”

May 1 
Gabriela Arredondo (Latin American and Latina/o Studies, UC Santa Cruz)
“Navigating Ethno-Racial Currents: Mexicans in Chicago, 1917-1939.”

May 8 
Annette Clear (Politics, UC Santa Cruz)
“A Disarticulated State and Its Implications for Democratization in Indonesia”

May 15 
Esther Yau (Film and New Media, Occidental College, Los Angeles)
“The Spectral Present: Can Chinese Film Erotics be Different?”

May 22 
William Nickell (Language program and Literature department, UC Santa Cruz)
“Tolstoy and the Articulate Death”

May 29
Eric Porter (American Studies, UC Santa Cruz)
“Losing Face: Walter White, Hydroquinone, and the ‘Color Line'”

Participants

Erica Rand is Associate Professor of Art at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. She has written widely in the areas of queer theory, gender studies, pedagogy, and lesbian studies. Her many publications include Barbie’s Queer Accessories (Duke, 1995), an original and insightful look at the marketing strategies of the Barbie doll and at queer and other appropriations of Barbie, and many articles on a range of topics, including “Diderot and Girl-Group Erotics” (Eighteenth-Century Studies 25 Summer, 1992). Her talk is from her current book project, tentatively called “The Ellis Island Snow Globe: Sex Money Products Nation,” that concerns artifacts, politics, and practices connected to immigration at Ellis Island in New York.

Niamh Stephenson is an Associate Professor of Critical Psychology at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. Currently on sabbatical, she is a visiting research fellow in the Department of Community Studies here at UC Santa Cruz, where she is working on a book which examines the problem of experience in the social sciences. This work involves an interrogation of the relationships between anti-foundational approaches to experience, subjectivity and collectivity. She has co-edited two books on theoretical psychology and is the author of numerous articles, including “The Question of Collective Subjectivity in Memory-Work” (forthcoming in the International Journal in Critical Psychology). Her publications span her theoretical work on memory and agency and her empirical projects, which include work in the field of HIV/AIDS and on sex education in schools.

Hayden White is Professor Emeritus of History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz, and Bonsall Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University (Winter term). His pathbreaking books in the field of “meta-history” have been translated into over ten languages. His latest book is Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (Johns Hopkins, 1999). About his talk, which takes as its point of departure E. H. Gombrich’s studies of perspectival painting, he writes, ” I ask how does one draw a line between the past and the present? What kind of problems does the study of the recent past present that the study of the remote past does not? Are these problems a result of the feeling that we cannot get “historical perspective” on the present, the recent past, or emergent reality? I ask what is the relationship between recent (or present) events and events more remote in time (and space).”

Gabriela Arredondo is Assistant Professor of Latin American and Latina/o Studies at UC Santa Cruz, where she is also on the steering committee of the Chicano/Latino Research Center. She works on U.S. social history, Chicana/o history, comparative Latina/o histories, gender and racial formations, US-Mexico transnationalisms, and comparative im/migrations. She is a co-editor of Chicana Feminisms: Disruptions in Dialogue (Duke, 2002). Her articles include “Cartographies of Americanisms: Possibilities For Transnational Identities, Chicago, 1916-1939, ” (forthcoming Garcia, et al., eds., Geographies of Latinidad: Mapping Latina/o Studies Into the Twenty First Century). Her talk is from her current book project, “Mexican Chicago: Negotiating Race, Ethnicity and Identity, 1916-1939.”

Annette Clear Assistant Professor of Politics at UC Santa Cruz. Her recently completed PhD. dissertation (Columbia, 2002), “Democracy and Donors in Indonesia,” has been nominated for several awards, including the Bancroft Award. . Its analysis focuses on how different donor strategies of three primary donors – the United States, Japan, and the Netherlands – have influenced the process of democratization in Indonesia. Professor Clear has had extensive experience in the global non-governmental realm, holding positions with the Asia Foundation in Tokyo, Phnom Penh, and San Francisco, monitoring the 1999 parliamentary elections in Indonesia, as well as observing the East Timorese ballot for the Carter Center for Human Rights. 

Esther Yau is Associate Professor of Film and New Media at Occidental College in Los Angeles, and is one of the most important scholars writing on contemporary Chinese and Hong Kong cinema. She is editor of At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World (2001) and author of many essays on mainland Chinese and Hong Kong cinemas. She is currently working on a study of Chinese Cinema entitled “Shaking the Great Divide: Violence and Vision in Chinese Cinema. ” Her talk discusses an enigmatic Chinese film, Wushan Yunyu (Rainclouds Over Wushan, 1995) set in a town by the Yangzi River will be permanently submerged as the result of the Three Gorges Dam project.

William Nickell is lecturer in Russian language and literature at UC Santa Cruz, having received his PhD in Slavic Literatures at UC Berkeley in 1998. His published articles, written in Russian and in English, include “The Death of Tolstoy and the Genre of the Public Funeral in Russia.” (Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, Winter 2000). His talk is from his current book project, “Tolstoy in the Public Domain: His Death as a National Narrative,” about which he writes, “I approach Tolstoy not as an author, but as the subject of a public narrative regarding his death, and describe how the tropes of that narrative stimulated public discourse and reveal the various collective investments that were made in Tolstoy as a celebrity.”

Eric Porter Assistant Professor of American Studies at UC Santa Cruz, and was formerly on the American Studies faculty at the Unversity of New Mexico. He works in the fields of African American history, comparative race and ethnicity, and jazz studies. His first book, What Is This Thing Called Jazz? African American Musicians as Artists, Critics, and Activists, will be published this year by the University of California Press. His talk is part of a larger project exploring issues around race and science in black intellectual and popular discourse during the 1940s. He writes that “the project explores divergent black racial formations at this moment, as well as various ways black subjects pondered the potential freedoms that scientific ‘proof’ of the insubstantiality of racial categories might offer.”

Colloquium Series

In Winter 2002, 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 16
(English, The Ohio State University)
“Zones of Privacy: Privacy in American Law and Memoirs, 1850 to the Present”

January 23
Dimitris Papadopoulos
(Psychology, Free University, Berlin)
“Bombing as Usual: Subjectivity, Liberalism, and Technostructural Violence”

January 30
Gary Lease
(History of Consciousness, UC Santa Cruz)
“The Agony of the German-Jew: Hans-Joachim Schoeps, Cultural Identification, and Disintegration in 20th-Century Europe”

February 6
Wendy Chapkis
(Sociology and Women’s Sutides, University of Southern Maine)
“Protecting Innocents, Punishing Immigrants: Trafficking, Migration, and the Law”

February 13
Richard Rodríguez
(Chicano Studies, California State University at Los Angeles)
“Serial Kinship: Representing the Family in Early Chicano Publications”

February 20
Paul Ortiz
(Community Studies, UC Santa Cruz)
“Rethinking Resistance in the Jim Crow South”

February 27
Daniel Selden
(Literature, UC Santa Cruz)
“Tributary Economies: Literature and Ideology'”

March 6
Catherine Ramírez
(American Studies, UC Santa Cruz)
“Talking (Back): Mexican American Women and Caló”

Participants

Wendy Chapkis is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies at the University of Southern Maine. Chapkis, who is the author of the award-winning book, Live Sex Acts: Women Performing Erotic Labor (Routledge 1997), received her Ph.D. in Sociology from UCSC in 1995. She is currently a visit-ing scholar in the Department of Women’s Studies. Of her collo-quium talk she writes, “In the fall of 2000, the U.S. House and Senate joined together to unanimously pass legislation (HR 3244) providing legal residency and welfare benefits to undocumented workers and prostitutes. Not surprisingly, not all undocumented workers qualified, only those understood to have been forced to violate U.S. borders and laws as victims of ‘severe forms of trafficking.’ This presentation examines whether HR 3244 is a departure from — or conversely of a piece with — other recent U.S. immigration legislation notable primarily for its hostility to immigrants and to the poor.”

Leigh Gillmore is Associate Professor in the English Department at the Ohio State University and Research Scholar at the Center for Cultural Studies. Her research has largely centered on feminist theory and autobiography. Her most recent book is The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony (Cornell, 2001). In recent years, Professor Gillmore has been working on representations of sexuality in America, drawing on and connecting obscenity, privacy law, and experimental narrative. Her currentproject, she writes, “begins in an effort to understand the crafting of a legal subject in the United States endowed with privacy but not liberty…. The ironic legacy of privacy in the U.S. is that it can be extended to citizens in such a way as to reduce their liberty even as it appears to expand it…. I anticipate that legal texts will reveal places where privacy’s promise was curtailed, where privacy was welded to unfreedom to produce partial citizenship, where the problem is not privacy per se, but privacy in the absence of power.”

Gary Lease is currently Professor and Chair of History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz, where his work has focused primarily on the theory of religion and contemporary efforts to disengage the academic study of religion from various religious claims and community practices. At the same time, Lease also works in German studies, concentrating on the phenomenon of German Judaism as well as the institutional and cultural history of Germany over the past two centuries. He is the author of “Odd Fellows” in the Politics of Religion: Modernism, National Socialism, and German Judaism (Berlin 1995), and of “The History of ‘Religious’ Consciousness and the Diffusion of Culture: Strategies for Surviving Dissolution”, Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques 20 (1994). colloquium talk is based on a forthcoming biography of Hans-Joachim Schoeps.

Paul Ortiz is Assistant Professor in the Department of Community Studies at UC Santa Cruz, where he teaches courses on Theory and Practice of Resistance and Social Movements, the African Diaspora, and C.L.R. James. He is co-editor of Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life In The Segregated South (New York: New Press, 2001). Ortiz is completing a manuscript entitled “Invincible Against All Forms of Injustice and Oppression”: The African American Freedom Struggle in Florida, 1877-1920. His new project is a history of the Oilfield Workers’ Trade Union of Trinidad and Tobago, and the role it played in anti-colonialism, politics, and transnational unionism from 1936 to1989.

Dimitris Papadopoulosis Assistant Professor of Devel-opmental and Theoretical Psychology at the Free University in Berlin, Germany, and a Resident Scholar at the Center for Cultural Studies. His publications include his 1998 doctoral dissertation, a study of Russian psychologist L.S. Vygotsky, a co-edited volume on the culture concept in psychology (2001), and numerous articles, in English and German, on subjectivity, critical psychology, and activity theory. While at the Center, he is writing a book on the sociohistorical foundations of developmental rationality: an analysis of the historical and cultural situated-ness of developmentalism against the background of the neo-liberal, transnational, and biotechnological reorganization of social space. His colloquium talk is based on a project tracing the interdependences between theory construction in the social sciences and the social and technoscientific transformations in the post-World War II period. It focuses on the concatenation of neo-liberal governmentality, new forms of violence in the nineties, and the concept of subjectivity as utilized in the social sciences.

Catherine S. Ramirez is a Research Fellow in the Depart ment of American Studies at UC Santa Cruz. Her research inter-ests include Chicana/o literature, history, and culture; gender stu-dies and feminist theory; cultural studies; and comparative ethnic studies. She is the author of “Crimes of Fashion: The Pachuca and Chicana Style Politics” in Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 2:2 (forthcoming, March 2002), and is col-laborating with Eric Porter on a project on black and brown sci-ence fiction and popular science. Her talk explores the performance and performativity of gender, race, and class via women’s use of taboo languages, including caló (the “pachuco patois”), in the Sleepy Lagoon trial of 1942 and Chicana literature from the 1970s and 1980s. It is excerpted from a book project on the par-ticipation of Mexican American women in the zoot subculture of the early 1940s and the mean-ings that Chicana and Chicano writers and artists have ascribed to the figures of the pachuco and pachuca and the World War II period.

Richard T. Rodriguezrecently received his Ph.D. in the History of Consciousness from UC Santa Cruz, and is Assistant Professor of Chicano Studies at California State University, Los Angeles. He is currently revising a manuscript on the symbolic function of the family in relation to nationalism and masculinity in Chicano/a literary, visual, and popular culture, as well as projects which explore the connections between Chicano/a studies and cultural studies and Chicano/a working-class identities and community formations. He recently co-curated the exhibition “Gender, Genealogy, and Counter Memory: Remembering Latino/a Cultural Histories” at MACLA in San Jose.

Daniel Selden is Associate Professor of Literature at UC Santa Cruz, where he teaches courses in Greek and Latin liter-atures, Hellenistic culture, the classical tradition, history of criticism, and literary theory. He has just returned from two years at the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, where he worked with the faculty there on Afro-Asiatic languages, literatures, and cultures. His most recent publications and lectures have dealt with the classical Egyptian backgrounds to Hellenistic Greek poetry. His current research involves the structure of tributary empires in the ancient world (Persian, Roman, Byzantine, Islamic) and the interplay between economy, philosophy, and literature.

Colloquium Series

In fall 2001, 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 3
Yugin Yaguchi
(Center for Pacific and American Studies, University of Tokyo)
American Objects, Japanese Memory: American Architecture in Sapporo, Japan 

October 10
Bruce Levine
(History, UC Santa Cruz)
Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free Slaves During the Civil War

October 17
Pamela Perry
(Community Studies, UC Santa Cruz)
Doing Identity in Style: Youth Cultures and the Everyday Construction of Racial Meanings

October 24
Lynn Westerkamp
(History, UC Santa Cruz)
Prophets and Preachers, Heretics and Whores: Engendering Puritan Religious Culture in Old and New England

October 31 
Mary Orgel
(Center for Cultural Studies, UC Santa Cruz)
Loitering With Intent: Anarchists, Anthropologists, and Other Shady Characters in a Spanish Village

November 7
Robert Kaufman
(English, Stanford University)
Aura, Still: Lyric Mechanical Reproduction After Brecht, Benjamin, and Adorno

November 14
David Crane
(Film and Digital Media, UC Santa Cruz )
Embodied Convergence: Dark Angel’s Race for the Future of Television

November 21
Barbara Epstein
(History of Consciousness)
Allies Underground: The Minsk Ghetto Resistance and Solidarity between Jews and Non-Jews, 1941-1943

Participants

Yugin Yaguchi is Associate Professor at the center for Pacific and American Studies at the university of Tokyo, Japan. His broad area aof research is the intercultural history of the U.S. and Japan. His publications include “Hollowing of Industrial Ideology: Japanese Corporate Familialism in America: (with Tomoko Hamada, 1994) and “The Politics of the Picture Bride” (Rikkyo Universit American Studies, 2000). While at the Center, he will work on his book “The Ainu in U.S.-Japan Relations.” He writes that his colloquium talk focuses on how American-designed buildings in Sapporo, Hokkaido “conditioned the ways in which the Ainu became marginalized not only materially but also symbolically, enabling the Japanese to establish a particular vision of the Hokkaido’s past and future.”

Bruce Levine is Professor of Hisoty at UCSC, and works on U.S. labor history, U.S. slavery, and the Civil War. His books include The Spirit of 1848: German Immigrants, Labor Conflict, and the Coming of the Civil War (University of Illinois, 1992) and Half Slave and Half free: the Roots of Civil War (Hill & Wang, 1992). His colloquium talk is from a forthcoming book on a Confederate policy to arm slaves to fight against Union troops and to reward those who did so with their freedom, a policy with many impolications, including the need “to re-think our view of how southern white values and priorities evolved over the course of the war.”

Pamela Perry is Assistant Professor of Community Studies at UCSC. her research is on schooling, youth cultures, and racial identity formation. Her articles include “White Means Never Having to Say You’re Ethnic: White Youth and the Construction of ‘Cultureless’ Identities” (Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Feb. 2001). Her colloquium talk centers on a chapter from her forthcoming book, Shades of White: Youth and Racial Identity in a Multicltural World (Duke 2002). The work is based on comparative ethnographic research in two high schools, one predominantly white and the other multiracial and minority white. She argues that different types and proximities of association with racialized othes result in very different constructions of white identity. 

Lynn Westerkamp is Professor of History at UCSC. She is widely known in the filed for her pioneering work in the gendering of early American religious history. Her most recent book is Women and Religion in Early America, 1600-1850: the Puritan and Evangelical Tradition (Routledge 1999). Her talk is drawn from Ann Hutchinson, Sectarian Mysticism, and Puritan Pariarchy, her in-progress biography of Hutchinson, 1590-1643. At the core of Hutchinson’s challenge was neither political activism nor an anti-clerical agenda, but this religiosity, both mystical and female, that placed her beyond control of magistrates, ministers, even common law and custom.”

Mary Orgel‘s doctoral dissertation, “Sueno Nuestro: Anarchism and Anthropology in a Spanish Village,” was completed this year at the University of Massachusetts. While at the Center, she will work on a book manuscript based on this work, a local oral/ethnohistory of the Spanish anarchist movement that focuses on its 1930s heyday, the negotiation of its historical legacy during the Spanish fascist era and the country’s return to democratic government, and its contemporary relevance. In her colloquium talk she “will discuss some of the affinities and oppositions, both political and intellectual, between the theories and practices of Spanish anarchism and the discipline of anthroplogy.

Robert Kaufman is Assistant Professor of English at Stanford University. His numerous articles include the very influential “Red Kant, or The Persistance of the Third Critique in Adorno and Jameson” (Critical Inquiry, 2000). His colloquium talk is excerpted from two longer projects, “Negative Romanticism, Almost Modernity: Keats, Shelley, and Adornian Critical Aesthetics” and “Experiments in Construction: Frankfurt School Aesthetics and Contemporary Poetry.” In both of these works, Kaufman finds in forceful new readings of Adorno and Benjamin a means to articulate “the notion of poetry, art, and aesthetic experience is to stimulate those modes of critical thought that have the potential to challenge the ideologicaly given.”

David Crane is Assistant Professor of Film and Digital Media at UCSC. He works on film and media theory and history, narrative and psychoanalytic theory, technocriticism, and avant-garde movements. His publications include “In Medias Race; Filmic Representation, Networked Communication, and Racial Intermediation” (in Race in Cyberspace. ed. Beth E. Kolko, et al. Routledge, 2000). His colloquium presentation uses the TV show Dark Angel to address technological and industrial changes in television (namely, the shift to digital production), connecting these transformations to the issues of race and ethnicity that are raised in the show.

Barbara Epstein is Professor of HIstory of Consciousness at UCSC. Her many publications include studies of social movements, histories of protest, feminist theory and sociology, cultural politics, and academic culture. She is the author of three books, including Political Protest and Cultural Revolution: Nonviolent Direct Action in the Seventies and Eighties (University of California, 1991). Her colloquium presentation is based on fieldwork and oral history collection in Minsk, Belarus, a site of anti-Nazi resistance notable for the strength of the Jewish/non-Jewish alliance. It is drawn from her bok in progress titled Mobilization Against Fascism: The Jewish Youth Movements of the 30s and the World War Two Ghetto Undergrounds in Lithuania, Poland, and Belarus.

Colloquium Series

In Spring 2001, 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 4
Radhika Mongia
(Women’s Studies, UC Santa Cruz )
Rethinking State Sovereignty or, Colonial Genealogies of the Modern State 

April 11
Anjali Arondekar
(Women’s Studies, UC Santa Cruz)
The Story of an India-Rubber Dildo: Locations of Desiere in Colonial Pornography 

April 18
Frazer Ward
(Art History, Maryland Institute, College of Art)
Notes on Approaching Marina Abramovic’s Rhythm 

April 25
Caroline Streeter
(UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, Sociology and the Center for Cultural Studies, UC Santa Cruz)
“I’m thinking if that Oprah got her a gun…”: African American Celebrity and Popular Culture in Gayl Jones’s ‘Mosquito and The Healing'”

May 2 
John Dean
(American Literature and Cultural Studies, University of Versailles St. Quentin en Yvelines)
How Twentieth Century American Subcultures Have Contributed to the Nation’s Pantheon of Popular Heroes

May 9
Bettina Aptheker
Memoir, Memory, and the Collective (De)Construction of Women’s History

May 16
Bob White
(Anthropology, UC Santa Cruz )
Cuban ‘Rumba’ and Other Cosmopolitanisms in the Belgian Congo (1949-1999)

May 23
Christopher Breu
(English, Illinois State University)
Come Fly With Me: Frank Sinatra and the Short American Century 

Participants

Radhika Mongia is Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies, UCSC. She is currently working on a book-length project, titled Genealogies of Globalization: Migration, Colonialism, and the State. The project focuses on the emergence of state technologies for controlling international migration examining, in particular, how the distinction between ‘legal’ and’illegal’ migration is historically produced. “Race, Natonality, Mobility: A History of the Passport,” a portion of this research, appeared in Public Culture, in Public Culture in 1999.

Anjali Arondekar is Assistant Professor in Women’s Studies at UCSC, having recently arrived from Smith College where she was the Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow (1999-2001). Her research interests include queer studies, Victorian studies, critical race studies and post-colonial theory. She has published variously in the Journal of Asian Studies,Symploke, Post-Modern Culture and The Village Voice. Her most recent article, “Lingering Pleasures, Perverted Texts,” is forthcoming in collection entitled Queer Texts/Colonial Texts(University of Minnesota Press, 2002). She is currently co-editing a collection, Queer Postcolonialities: Borders, Limits and Margins, with Professor Geeta Patel, and also working on a book manuscript titled A Perverse Empire: Victorian Sexuality and the Indian Colony.

Frazer Ward is Assistant Professor of Art History at the Maryland Institute, College of Art, and currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History at Stanford University. He is working on a project dealing with Vietnam-era performance art, examining the ethical implications of the ways in which publics constitute themselves around violence and its representations. He has recently written an essay surveying Vito Acconci’s career, an essay on Chris Burden’s Shoot for the journal October, and guest-edited an issue of the journal Documents on the topic of privacy.

Caroline Streeter is a UC President�s Postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Cultural Studies and the Department of Sociology at UC Santa Cruz. She received her Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender and Sexuality from UC Berkeley in 2000. Her postdoctoral research investigates how cultural work by black women negotiates the complex terrain of consumption in mass commercial culture. Shehas been active in the area of mixed-race scholarship, and her areas of research interest include narratives of race mixing in African American literature, film, and visual art, along with the politicized emergence of mixed-race identities i the post-Civil Right era. She is published in The Multiracial Experience (Sage, 1996) and has an essay in the forthcoming New Faces in a Changing America: Multiracial Identity in the 21st Century.

John Dean is on the faculty of the University of Versailles St. Quentin en Yvelines, where he teaches American literature and cultural studies. He has held research positions at the University of Strasbourg and the Kennedy Institute for American Studies in Berlin. His publications include European Readings of American Popular Culture (1996) and Restless Wanderers: Shakespeare and the Pattern of Romance(1979), several volumes on the United States published in French, a large number of articles on French and English language science fiction, as well as poetry, fiction, scholarly articles, and journalism on a wide range of topics. While at the Center this spring, he will work on several projects, among them a book on the hero and heroine in American popular culture.

Bettina Aptheker is Professor and Chair of Women’s Studies. Her books include: The Morning Breaks: The Trial of Angela Davis, second edition, Cornell University Press, 1999; Tapestries of Life: Women’s Work, Women’s Consciousness and the Meaning of Daily Experience, University of Massachusetts Press, 1989; Woman’s Legacy: Essays on Race, Sex and Class in American History, University of Massachusetts Press, 1982. She is near completion of work on a memoir.

Bob White, Assistant Professor in Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz, specializes in popular culture and politics in francophone Africa. His primary research examines the production and meaning of popular dance music in Congo-Zaire (now Democratic Republic of the Congo), where he conducted fieldwork and worked as a musician in a local band from 1995-1996. He has published several articles on this subject: “Modernity’s Trickster: ‘Dipping’ and ‘Throwing’ in Congolese Popular Dance Music” (forthcoming in Research in African Literatures, special issue on performance), and “Soukouss or Sell-Out? Congolese Popular Dance Music on the World Market,” in Commodities and Globalization: Anthropological Perspectives, Angelique Haugerud, M. Priscilla Stone, and Peter D. Little (eds.), forthcoming.

Christopher Breu is an Assistant Professor of English at Illinois State University, where he teaches courses in twentieth-century American literature, popular culture, and critical theory. He is currently completing work on a book manuscript entitled Hard-Boiled Masculinities: Fantasizing Gender in American Literature and Popular Culture, 1920-45. In addition, he has published on a diverse array of subjects including Maryse Cond�’s _I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem and contemporary techno and indie-rock. His current work on Frank Sinatra represents the beginning of a larger project on internal struggles over politics and culture in the United States and their relationship to the emergence of the U.S. as a global hegemon in the middle years of the twentieth century.

Colloquium Series
In winter 2001, 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 10
Earl Jackson
(Literature, UC Santa Cruz )
Toward a Post-Wave East Asian Cinema 

January 17
Wlad Godzich
(Dean of Humanities, UC Santa Cruz)
Reconstructing the Subject  

January 27
Margaret Jolly
(Gender Relations Centre, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University)
Looking Back? Gender, Race and Sexuality in Pacific Cinema  

January 31
Dana Frank
(American Studies, UC Santa Cruz)
GIRL STRIKERS OCCUPY CHAIN STORE, WIN BIG: the Detroit Woolworth’s Sit-Down Strike 

February 7 
Ann Saetnan
(Sociology and Political Science, Norweigan University of Science and Technology)
Elicited Whispers, Broken Sound Barriers  

February 14
Rob Wilson
(Literature, UC Santa Cruz)
Global/local rumblings inside Empire: Gladiator and sublime spectacle 

February 21
Marcial Gonzalez
(English, UC Berkeley )
Fredric Jameson’s Arrested Dialectic and the ‘Absent First Step of Renewed Praxis’ 

February 28
Alexandra Stern
(History, UC Santa Cruz)
Modern Racial Formations: Interrogating the History of Eugenics in California  

March 7
Renya Ramirez
(American Studies, UC Santa Cruz)
Sarah Morgan’s Government Story: A Redefinition of Culture, Community and Citizenship 
 

Participants

Earl Jackson is Associate Professor of Literature at UCSC. His research interests include new Asian cinema, science fiction, suspense, and genre fiction, gay male sexuality, digital media, and Japanese literature and poetics. He has published poetry, fiction, and many articles, and is involved in numerous web-based critical and literary activities. His books include Fantastic Living: The Speculative Autobiographies of Samuel Delany(forthcoming, Oxford) and Strategies of Deviance: Essays in Gay Male Representational Agency(Indiana, 1994). His web projects can be found at www.letsdeviant.com and www.anotherscene.com. Professor Jackson’s talk is from a current project on New Asian cinema.

Wlad Godzich is Dean of Humanities at UCSC, having recently arrived from the University of Geneva, where he was Professor of English and Chair of Emergent Literature. He is the author of numerous books and articles, including The Culture of Literacy(Harvard, 1994), Philosophie einer un-europ�ischen Literaturkritik(Philosophy of a Non-European Literary Criticism, Wilhelm Fink, 1988), and An Essay in Prosaics: The Emergence of Prose in the French Middle Ages(co-authored with Jeffrey Kittay, Minnesota, 1987). Dean Godzich’s current research interests include theories and modes of subjectivity, globalization and culture, and the field he founded: emergent literature.

Dana Frank is a Professor of American Studies at UCSC, where she teaches labor history, political economy, race, gender, and the cultural politics of class. She is the author of Buy American: The Untold Story of Economic Nationalism(Beacon Press, 1999), which was excerpted in the Washington Postand won the Book of the Year Award from the International Labor History Association. She is also the author of Purchasing Power: Consumer Organizing, Gender and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1919-1929(Cambridge, 1994), and reviews books regularly for The Nation. Her current project, on the Detroit Woolworth’s sit-down strike of 1937, is part of a forthcoming book with Robin D. G. Kelley and Howard Zinn, in which each author tells the story of a different strike.

Margaret Jolly is Professor and Head of the Gender Relations Project at the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at the Australian National University. She has been at ANU since 1989. One of the world’s distinguished scholars of Pacific Island anthropology and cultural studies, Professor Jolly has published a wide-ranging series of books and articles, including Women of the Place: Kastom, Colonialism and Gender in Vanuatu (1994). A recent manuscript, An Ocean of Difference: Colonialisms, Maternalisms, and Feminisms in the Pacific, is under review. While at the Center, Professor Jolly will pursue research on gender, indigeneity, and diaspora in the Pacific with a particular emphasis on cinema and the visual arts.

Ann Saetnan is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Political Science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway. Her research focuses on science and technology as they relate to gender and to work. Her co-edited volume, Localizing and Globalizing Reproductive Technologies,was just published by Ohio State University Press. While at the Center, Professor Saetnan will work on her new book project, provisionally titled Ultrasonic Discourse,a mapping of the debates surrounding the use of ultrasound in pregnancy in Norway.

Rob Wilson joins the UCSC faculty this quarter as Professor of Literature, after having been a faculty member at the University of Hawaii at Manoa since 1976. He is one of the world�s most prominent scholars of Hawaiian and Pacific literatures and cultural production, as well as of American literature and poetics. His books include Reimagining the American Pacific: From �South Pacific� to Bamboo Ridge and Beyond(Duke, 2000), American Sublime: The Genealogy of a Poetic Genre(Wisconsin, 1991), as well as the co-edited volumes Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics and Identity in the New Pacific(Rowman and Littlefield, 1999) and Global/Local: Cultural Production in the Transnational Imaginary.

Marcial Gonzalez received his Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University in 2000, and became an Assistant Professor in the English Department at UC Berkeley in the fall of 2000. He works on Chicana/o literary and cultural studies, and is currently working on a book manuscript titled Postmodernism, History and the Chicana/o Novel: Toward a Dialectical Literary Criticism,a study of several important Chicana/o novels published from 1970-1992, which includes an argument that the postmodern critique of history has limited the potential for Chicana/o studies to develop an effective social criticism. An earlier version of his talk this quarter won the Michael Sprinker Award for best dissertation chapter from the Marxist Literary Group of the MLA in June 2000.

Alexandra Stern is Assistant Professor of History at UCSC, having completed her Ph.D. in History at the University of Chicago in 1999. From 1999-2000 she was interim director of the Historical Center for Health Sciences at the University of Michigan. Her work is on the history of science and technology, specifically eugenics. Recent articles include “Buildings, Boundaries, and Blood: Medicalization and Nation-Building on the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1910-1930” (Hispanic American Historical Review, Feb. 1999) and “Responsible Mothers and Normal Children: Eugenics, Welfare, and Nationalism in Post-Revolutionary Mexico, 1900-1940” (Journal of Historical Sociology,Fall 1999). Her talk is from a book in progress on eugenics and the U.S.-Mexican borderland.

Renya Ramirez is Assistant Professor of American Studies. She received her Ph.D. from the School of Education at Stanford University in 1999, and her Masters degree in Anthropology from Stanford in 1998. She has published several articles and given many papers on contemporary Native American issues, several of which draw on her fieldwork, which explored Native American healing practices and community formation in San Jose, California. Among the articles is “Healing Through Grief: Urban Indians Re-imagining Culture and Community in San Jose, California” (Journal of American Indian Culture and Research,1999). Her work is part of an attempt to establish new frameworks for the study of urban Indians.

Colloquium Series

In Spring 2000, 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 and tea.

ScheduleApril 12 OAKES MURAL ROOM
Jonathan Hunt
(English, Santa Clara University)
The Ominous Bicycle

April 19 OAKES MURAL ROOM
Ulla Haselstein
(American Literature, University of Munich)
‘To give one’s self’: The ethics of the gift in Harriet Jacobs’Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

April 26 OAKES MURAL ROOM
Shu-mei Shih
(Comparative Literature, East Asian Languages and Cultures, and Asian American Studies, UCLA)
The End of Nostalgia and the Problem of National Allegory

May 3 OAKES MURAL ROOM
David Anthony
(History, UC Santa Cruz)
African Americans and South Africans: Narratives of A Jouney

May 10 OAKES MURAL ROOM
Pheng Cheah
(Rhetoric, UC Berkeley)
Chinese Cosmopolitanism in Two Senses and Postcolonial National Memory

May 17 OAKES MUAL ROOM
Hugh Raffles
(Anthropology, UC Santa Cruz)
The Dreamlife of Ecology

May 24 OAKES MURAL ROOM
Melissa Orlie
(Political Science, Criticism & Interpretive Theory, and Women’s Studies, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)
Political Capitalism, the Desire for Freedom,and the Consumption of Politics

Presenters

Jonathan Hunt is Lecturer in the Department of English at Santa Clara University and an associate editor of College English. His dissertation, Naturalist Democracy (UC Santa Cruz Department of Literature, 1996) examines 19th-century French and U.S. literary naturalism’s participation in and resistance to the political and cultural project of producing the democratic citizen. He writes, “This talk, which might be considered an exercise in critical bicycle historiography, is part of a new project on obsolescence and nostalgia, and has its roots in literary naturalism’s anxious fixation on the mechanical technologies of the steam age. These technologies, particularly the railroad, both demonstrated the racial and cultural superiority of the economic core and ominously figured the eclipse of the human subject in a relentless determinism. The bicycle, widely popularized in the 1880s and 1890s, is a uniquely human-powered product of the industrial era, and thus becomes the site of a particular set of cybernetic anxieties. This project examines the wobbly path of these anxieties through the bicycle’s twentieth-century trajectory of obsolescence.” 

Ulla Haselstein is Professor of American Literature at the University of Munich, where she directs the graduate program in gender studies and the America Institute. She is the author of the 1991 book Entziffernde Hermeneutik: Studien zum Begriff der Lekture in der psychoanalytischen Theorie des Unbewubten (Deciphering Hermeneutics: Studies in the Concept of Reading in Psychoanalytic Theories of the Unconscious) and the forthcoming Die Gabe der Zivilisation: Interkultureller Austausch und literarische Textpraxis in Amerika, 1661-1861 (The Gift of Civilization: Intercultural Exchange and Literary Textual Practice in America, 1661-1861). Her many articles range across topics such as contemporary U.S. fiction, Derridean theory, psychoanalysis, and feminist literary theory. Her talk concerns the circulations of the female body as gift in the economics of slavery, of love and of textuality. 

Shu-mei Shih is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature, East Asian Languages and Cultures, and Asian American Studies at UCLA. Her book, The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917-1937, is forthcoming from the University of California Press this year. Shih’s current project is entitled “Visuality and Identity: Cultural Transactions Across the Chinese Pacific.” Her research interests include Chinese literary modernism in local/global circulation, the politics of transnationality in art and cinema from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Asian America, and third world feminisms. Her talk looks at post- 1997 Hong Kong cinema and art as ironic commentaries on the nostalgic search for cultural identity and the national allegory paradigm of third world cultural production.

David Anthony is Associate Professor of History at UCSC and Provost of Oakes College. His research interests encompass the history of Africa and the African diaspora. He has written on the urban history of Dares Salaam, and is currently at work on Pan African Enigma: The Life and Times of Max Yergan, 1892-1975, which explores the life of an activist whose venues spanned South Africa and the United States, and whose politics ranged from communism to extreme conservatism. Because it will be the first full-length published biography on this controversial subject, the Yergan work has spawned ancillary discoveries which may help point the way to new vistas in research on Africa’s diaspora. In his colloquium talk, Anthony will discuss his ongoing research with Professor Robert Edgar, a historian at Howard University, chronicling the relationship between African Americans and South Africans from the late eighteenth century, when African American sailors began venturing to South Africa, to 1965. Anthony and Edgar are preparing a multivolume collage of primary documents, including diaries, private papers, travelers’ accounts, autobiographies, speeches, songs and hymns, government documents, missionary journals, magazines, newspapers, books, and interviews from the United States, Europe, and South Africa. 

Pheng Cheah is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley. He is co-editor of Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (Minnesota, 1998) and Thinking Through the Body of the Law(Allen and Unwin and New York University Press, 1996), and author of “Universal Areas: Asian Studies in a World in Motion,” Traces, Vol. 1, no. 1 (forthcoming, Fall 2000). He is currently working on a book entitled Spectral Nationality, which looks at the philosopheme of culture as freedom in modern philosophy, primarily in the work of Kant, Fichte, Hegel and Marx, and the vicissitudes of this philosopheme in decolonizing nationalism and contemporary postcoloniality. His talk, on the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia, is from a second book in progress on global financialization and the inhuman.

Hugh Raffles is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UCSC. His research concerns questions of locality and region-making, exploring the links between some highly material “local” practices of place-making in the eastern Amazon, and the role of traveling naturalists in the generation of Euro-American imaginaries of Amazonia since the 16th century. His book On the Nature of the Amazon is forthcoming from Princeton University Press. Raffles’s colloquium talk offers a preliminary account of fieldwork among ecological researchers on the devastated mahogany “frontier” of southeastern Amazonia. He writes, “My concern is to detail the simultaneously historical, intertextual, intersubjective, and political-economic exigencies through which this particular scientific work materializes Amazonia in discourse and in place. Scientists working in the midst of such knotted social relations display sophisticated understandings of both constraints and opportunities as they struggle to salvage dreams of conservation from the excess of transregional realpolitik.”

Melissa Orlie is Associate Professor of Political Science, Criticism & Interpretive Theory, and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her research explores sources of normativity and ethical motivation from a perspective that is political rather than epistemological, driven by issues of meaning and inspiration rather than justification and prescription. She is the author of Living Ethically, Acting Politically (Cornell, 1997). Her current work focuses upon the evaluative aspirations and distinctions ineluctably at work in our everyday conduct, what she describes as our capacity to imagine and accept responsibility for something beyond what we already know or have achieved. She is currently at work on a book entitled Suffering Humanity: Aspiration and Joy after Nietzsche & Freud. Her colloquium talk uses Michel Foucault’s analytic of ethics to reconsider commodity consumption as the dominant practice of the self in the regime of political capitalism. 

Colloquium Series

In Winter 2000, 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 and tea.

ScheduleJanuary 12 OAKES MURAL ROOM
Manuela Ribeiro Sanches
(German Studies, University of Lisbon)
Color of Skin, Shape of the Body: “Race” Difference and the Nature of “Man” in 18th-Century Germany

January 19 COWELL PROVOST HOUSE
Peter Euben (Politics, UCSC)
The Polis, Globalization and the Politics of Place

January 26 OAKES MURAL ROOM
Helene Moglen (Literature, UCSC)
The Trauma of Gender: Psychosexuality and the Bimodal Novel 

February 2 COWELL PROVOST HOUSE
Barry D. Adam
(Sociology, University of Windsor)
Globalization/Mobilization: Gay and Lesbian Movements

February 9 OAKES MURAL ROOM
Amelie Hastie
(Film and Digital Media, UCSC)
The Cam�ra Stylo: Intermedial Authorship and Film History

February 16 OAKES MURAL ROOM
Susan Gillman (Literature, UCSC)
The Occult History of Du Bois

February 23 OAKES MURAL ROOM
Dana Takagi (Sociology, UCSC)
Native Nationalisms and Incommensurability; or, Why We Would Rather Not Talk About God

March 1 COWELL PROVOST HOUSE
Kerwin Klein (History, UC Berkeley)
The Culture Concept and Historical Discourse, or What Was the New Cultural History? 

Presenters

Manuela Ribeiro Sanches is Assistant Professor in the Department of German Studies at the University of Lisbon, Portugal. She has published extensively on Georg Forster, a naturalist who participated in Cook’s second voyage and who was to die in exile in Paris in 1794. This talk, part of her work in progress in German anthropology in the 18th century, reflects on the debates about “race” and difference that opposed Forster to Immanuel Kant, a major figure in German anthropology. She places this debate in the contexts of European colonialism, the abolitionist movement, and the appeal to universal human rights, as well as the French Revolution and the way it affected an emergent German anthropology. How were questions of difference approached and interpreted by an academic discourse apparently removed from the colonial centers? How was difference perceived, narrated, classified? How was “race” represented and constructed? How did it relate to cultural difference? And how are these issues to be read from a postcolonial perspective?

Helene Moglen is Professor of Literature at UC Santa Cruz. She has published extensively on the English novel- including books on Laurence Sterne and Charlotte Bronte- and has written on issues relevant to feminist theory, psycho-analysis and education. In her forthcoming book, The Trauma of Gender: A Feminist Theory of the English Novel, she offers an innovative theory of the novel’s form and function. Her book seeks to move beyond long-dominant accounts that have focused almost exclusively on the realist tradition of the novel and the class interests which that tradition serves. Instead, she insists that the modern novel has been essentially bimodal, and that its bimodaliity has functioned to manage the strains and contradictions of the sex-gender system. Further, she suggests that the principal theoretical models through which the novel has been studied are themselves structured by competing narrative modes: the same modes that have shaped the novel and exposed its ambivalent attitudes about sexuality and gender. In her paper, she will set out the theoretical argument of her book, and will ask others to join her in considering its applicability to diverse national literatures, from the 18th through the 20th centuries, and to other disciplinary discourses.

Peter Euben is Professor of Politics at UC Santa Cruz. He is the author of The Tragedy of Political Theory: The Road Not Taken (1990), Corrupting Youth: Political Education and Democratic Culture (1997) and the forthcoming Platonic Noise: Essays on the Modernity of Classical Political Thought (2000). He also co-edited Athenian Democratic Thought and the Reconstitution of American Democracy. His current work focuses on the necessity of utopia and the idea of ironic politics. His colloquium talk asks whether there is an illuminating analogy to be drawn between the experience of political dislocation and the theoretical struggles to understand it that accompanied the eclipse of the classical polis, and our experience of globalization and attempts to understand it theoretically. It explores two oppositions: that between the classical polis and the moral critique leveled at it by Cynics and Stoics, and between neo-Stoic cosmopolitanism of Martha Nussbaum and political critics of her moral universalism.

Barry D. Adam is Professor of Sociology at the University of Windsor. He is author or co-editor of The Survival of Domination, The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement, Experiencing HIV, and The Global Emergence of Gay and Lesbian Politics, as well as articles on new social movement theory, neighborhood mobilization in Sandinista Nicaragua, HIV transmission, and gay and lesbian studies. A central theme of his work is the subjectivity of inferiorized peoples, that is, the ways in which people build identity, community, and a sense of efficacy in highly adverse social conditions. This talk seeks to sort through the thickets of globalization discourse to better understand how social movements develop on a transnational basis. Using gay and lesbian movements as an example, the talk will address ways in which globalizing forces articulate with movement formation.

Amelie Hastie is Assistant Professor of Film and Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz. An assistant editor of Camera Obscura, she is the author of “Fashion, Femininity, and Historical Design: The Visual Texture of Three Hong Kong Films” Post Script (Fall 1999), and “A Fabricated Space: Assimilating the Individual on Star Trek: The Next Generation” in the edited volume Enterprise Zones: Liminal Positions on Star Trek. Her work in progress “examines the role of writing in the construction of cinematic histories, theories, and even images, especially as such writings point toward the multiple roles women have played as ‘authors’ within the production of films and the production of our knowledge about them.” She reconnects the visual and written forms through an exploration of writings by three primary figures who worked in the silent film industry and later took up writing in an attempt to secure their places in film history: early film director Alice Guy-Blach� and silent film stars Louise Brooks and Colleen Moore. Hastie considers how each woman is configured in a complex intertextual system of narrative films, documentaries, their own writings and writings about them, and other diverse objects they have collected and/or produced.

Susan Gillman, Professor of Literature at UC Santa Cruz, has long been interested in how popular genres give voice to racial and national affinities and conflicts. Her previous work on Mark Twain, including Dark Twins: Imposture and Identity in Mark Twain’s America (Chicago, 1989) and an essay collection, co-edited with Forrest Robinson, Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson: Race, Conflict, and Culture (Duke, 1990), focuses on Twain’s uses of the discourses of detective and fantasy fiction (legal, scientific, medical, psychological) in his ongoing exploration of race as a “fiction of law and custom.” The point of departure for her new book, American Race Melodramas, 1877-1915, is a pattern of derogatory references to a wide variety of late 19th-century race writing as “melodramatic.” American race melodrama was a malleable cultural mode that cut across periods, genres and ideologies. Responding to the historically specific situation of post-Reconstruction U.S. nationalism and global internationalism, when the discipline of American history was both politicized and popularized, late 19th-century race melodramas emerge as an explicitly historiographic mode. Gillman’s talk explores W. E. B. Du Bois’s philosophy of history as a project combining his lifelong engagements with science and mysticism, providing Du Bois with a bridge between objectivity and activism, politics and poetry, as well as a means of uncovering the mystical history of race consciousness itself.

Dana Takagi is Associate Professor of Sociology at UC Santa Cruz. Her research interests center on Asian Americans, rights discourses of minority and indigenous peoples, and contemporary nationalism in the age of globalization. She is author of The Retreat from Race: Asian American Admissions and Racial Politics (1993), which won the Gustavus-Myer Center for Human Rights Outstanding Book Award and the National Book Award of the Association of Asian American Studies. She also co-edits the UC Press book series “American Crossroads.” Her most recent article is “Forget Postcolonialism: Self Determination and Sovereignty in Hawaii” (Colorlines, Winter 1999). This talk is drawn from her research on Hawaiian nationalism(s), multiculturalism and various kinds of “rights” discourses in the Pacific, and the expression of nationalist precepts in the odd venues of popular culture, especially card games and collectibles such as Magic and Poke �mon. Professor Takagi�s presentation is also offered as part of the Sociology Department�s colloquium series.

Kerwin Klein is Assistant Professor of History at UC Berkeley. He is the author of Frontiers of Historical Imagination: Narrating the European Conquest of Native America, 1890-1990(University of California, 1997) and “The Emergence of ‘Memory’ in Historical Discourse,” (Representations, forthcoming). Klein is a member of the editorial boards of Representations and the Pacific Historical Review. He is at work on two books: Frontier Tales, which explores the relationship between decolonization and philosophy of history in the Americas, and Charles Manson and the Meaning of History, an account of California and philosophy of history in pop culture.

Colloquium Series

In Fall 1999, 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 and tea.

ScheduleOctober 6 OAKES MURAL ROOM
Richard Terdiman (Literature, UC Santa Cruz)
Enlightenment Representation and the Critique of Postmodernity

October 13 SILVERMAN LOUNGE
Anthony Chennells (English, University of Zimbabwe)
Early Rhodesian Women Novelists and White Rhodesian Nationalism

October 20 OAKES MURAL ROOM
Lisa Rofel (Anthropology, UC Santa Cruz)
Qualities of Desire: Imagining Gay Identities in China

October 27 SILVERMAN LOUNGE
Carla Freccero (Literature, UC Santa Cruz)
Queer Encounters: Early Modern France and the New World

November 3 OAKES MURAL ROOM
Cristina Lucia Ruotolo (Humanities, San Francisco State University)
Music, Audience, and Femininity in Turn-of-the-Century America

November 10 SILVERMAN LOUNGE
Lionel Cantu (Sociology, UC Santa Cruz)
Queer Diasporas: U.S. Immigration and the Political Economy of Sexual Identity

November 17 OAKES MURAL ROOM
Christopher Nealon (English, UC Berkeley)
The Ambivalence of Lesbian Pulp Fiction

Participants

Richard Terdiman is Professor of Literature at UCSC. His work is primarily in French literature and history, and he is the author of several books that deal with representation, the social formation and reception of theory, and the role of memory in culture, including Discourse/ Counter-Discourse: The Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-Century France (1985) and Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis (1993). His talk is drawn from a book in progress that deals with Enlightenment pre-occupations with some of the theoretical choices also prominent in poststructuralism. It might be thought of as something like “Diderot Reads Derrida.” In addition to his current work on the Enlightenment and postmodernity, he is also completing a book on social time.

Anthony Chennells is Associate Professor of English at the University of Zimbabwe. He has published extensively on South African and Zimbabwean literature, history and culture. His co-authored Expanding Perspectives on Dambudzo Marechera appeared last year. During Southern Rhodesia’s ninety-year history, settlers produced over three hundred novels, most of which were published in London. Professor Chennells, whose family settled in Rhodesia more than a hundred years ago, has studied this body of writing to trace how it contributed to the myth of a discrete Rhodesian identity which was neither British nor South African, leading to Ian Smith’s declaration of Rhodesian independence in 1965 and to the liberation war from which Zimbabwe was born in 1980. Several scholars are now beginning to re-examine the women novelists in this group to see how they were implicated in the Rhodesian imperial and nationalist projects. This paper is a contribution to that discussion..

Lisa Rofel is Associate Professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz. Her book Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China After Socialism was published this spring by UC Press. This study of three generations of Chinese women silk workers proposes a cross-cultural approach to modernity that “treats it as a located cultural imaginary, arising from and perpetuating relations of difference across an East-West divide.” Rofel argues that “other modernities” are neither exclusively local nor variations on a universal model. Rather, “[t]hey are forced cross-cultural translations of various projects of science and management called modernity.” Rofel is also co-editor of Engendering China: Women, Culture, and the State (Harvard, 1994). Her talk is part of a current project on transnational culture, cosmopolitanism, and gender and sexuality in contemporary China.

Carla Freccero is Professor in the Literature Department at UC Santa Cruz, and specializes in early modern cultural studies, feminist and queer theory, and U.S. popular culture. Her first book, a study of Rabelais, is entitled Father Figures (Cornell 1991). She is co-editor, with Louise Fradenburg, of Premodern Sexualities(Routledge 1996), and most recently the author of Popular Culture: An Introduction (NYU 1999). Her talk is part of a book-length project on 16th-century French writings about South America and the Tupinamba Indians. This talk focuses on Jean de Lery’s History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, an account of a Protestant preacher’s exile among the Tupi in the 1550s near the bay of Rio. Claude Levi-Strauss called de Lery’s book the first modern ethnography. Using rhetorical and psychoanalytic methods of discourse analysis, the talk explores a configuration of European homoerotic ideological fantasies surrounding the ‘New World’ man.

Cristina Lucia Ruotolo is Assistant Professor of Humanities at San Francisco State University. She completed her Ph.D. in English at Yale University, and her Master’s in Violin Performance at the New England Conservatory of Music. She has been a violinist in the San Jose Symphony and the Marin Symphony orchestras. Professor Ruotolo’s talk is from a book in progress that explores the dramatic changes in American music cultures beginning in the 1890s from the perspective of their impact on and presence in literature, particularly works by Willa Cather, Kate Chopin, James Weldon Johnson and Theodore Dreiser. She writes, “With the development of a centralized music publishing industry (“Tin Pan Alley”), of African American influence on both popular and classical music, and of a strong female presence in public audiences and on the stage, music began to have„ and to be perceived as having„a powerful role in shaping its audience’s sense of self and place. At issue in debates, and for these four writers, is the nature and extent of that power. Does music merely arouse emotions and states of being that already exist within the listening self? Or does music have the capacity to enter into and change a listener’s way of being„to, for example, infuse a young white man with not only black sounds but blackness itself? Or to lead a young middle-class woman into prostitution? In my talk I will bring such questions to bear on Willa Cather’s Song of the Lark and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening.”

Lionel Cantu is a new Assistant Professor of Sociology at UCSC, and has received a post-doctoral fellowship at UC Davis for 1999-2000 to work with anthropologist Roger Rouse on the linkages between global capitalism, sexual commodification, migration, and sexual identities. A Ph.D. in Social Science from UC Irvine, Cantu’s work centers on the intersections of Chicano/ Latino studies, gay and lesbian studies, social movements, globalization, and immigration. His dissertation, “Border Crossings: Mexican Men and the Sexuality of Migration,” is representative of that project. His publications include the forthcoming article “Entre Hombres/Between Men: Latino Masculinities and Homosexualities, and other studies of Latina/o literary and cultural production.

Christopher Nealon is Assistant Professor in the English Department at UC Berkeley, having received his Ph.D. from Cornell two years ago. He works on U.S. lesbian and gay literary and cultural studies, and is also a published poet. His first book, Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Invention Before Stonewall, is forthcoming from Duke, and his articles include “The Modernity of Queer Studies” and “Affect-Genealogy: Feeling and Affiliation in Willa Cather.” Nealon’s talk centers on Ann Bannon’s lesbian pulp novels of the 1950s and 1960s and the ambiguous reception of those novels. Nealon reads the problematics of Bannon’s model of lesbian bodies as gender-inverted to suggest that the novels offer contemporary readers a signal example of how to produce a livable relationship between historical possibilities and historical limits.

Colloquium Series

In Spring 1999, 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 and tea.

ScheduleApril 14 OAKES MURAL ROOM
Curtis Marez (American Studies, UC Santa Cruz)
Signifying Spain, Becoming Comanche: Indian Warfare and the Genealogies of Chicana/o Studies

April 21 COWELL CONFERENCE ROOM
Neil Brenner (Sociology, New York University)
Late Neoliberalism: Urban Governance, Uneven Development and the Politics of Scale in the European Union

April 28 OAKES MURAL ROOM
Margaret Morse (Film and Video, UC Santa Cruz)
Breathing Space

October 27 COWELL CONFERENCE ROOM
Lisa Parks (Film Studies, UC Santa Barbara)
To the Edge of Time: Satellite Vantage Points and the Cosmic Zoom

May 12 OAKES MURAL ROOM
Ruth Gilmore (Geography and Women’s Studies, Rutgers University)
Fatal Festivals: Race, Gender, and Power in Corcoran

May 19 COWELL CONFERENCE ROOM
Jody Greene (Literature, UC Santa Cruz)
Revenge of the Straw Woman

May 26 OAKES MURAL ROOM
Louis Chude-Sokei (Literature, UC Santa Cruz)
The Landscape of A Zone Shared Elsewhere: Harlem and the Caribbean Imagination

Participants

Curtis Marez is Professor of Literature at UCSC. His work is primarily in French literature and history, and he is the author of several books that deal with representation, the social formation and reception of theory, and the role of memory in culture, including Discourse/ Counter-Discourse: The Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-Century France (1985) and Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis (1993). His talk is drawn from a book in progress that deals with Enlightenment pre-occupations with some of the theoretical choices also prominent in poststructuralism. It might be thought of as something like “Diderot Reads Derrida.” In addition to his current work on the Enlightenment and postmodernity, he is also completing a book on social time.

Neil Brenner is Associate Professor of English at the University of Zimbabwe. He has published extensively on South African and Zimbabwean literature, history and culture. His co-authored Expanding Perspectives on Dambudzo Marechera appeared last year. During Southern Rhodesia’s ninety-year history, settlers produced over three hundred novels, most of which were published in London. Professor Chennells, whose family settled in Rhodesia more than a hundred years ago, has studied this body of writing to trace how it contributed to the myth of a discrete Rhodesian identity which was neither British nor South African, leading to Ian Smith’s declaration of Rhodesian independence in 1965 and to the liberation war from which Zimbabwe was born in 1980. Several scholars are now beginning to re-examine the women novelists in this group to see how they were implicated in the Rhodesian imperial and nationalist projects. This paper is a contribution to that discussion..

Margaret Rose is Associate Professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz. Her book Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China After Socialism was published this spring by UC Press. This study of three generations of Chinese women silk workers proposes a cross-cultural approach to modernity that “treats it as a located cultural imaginary, arising from and perpetuating relations of difference across an East-West divide.” Rofel argues that “other modernities” are neither exclusively local nor variations on a universal model. Rather, “[t]hey are forced cross-cultural translations of various projects of science and management called modernity.” Rofel is also co-editor of Engendering China: Women, Culture, and the State (Harvard, 1994). Her talk is part of a current project on transnational culture, cosmopolitanism, and gender and sexuality in contemporary China.

Lisa Parks is Professor in the Literature Department at UC Santa Cruz, and specializes in early modern cultural studies, feminist and queer theory, and U.S. popular culture. Her first book, a study of Rabelais, is entitled Father Figures (Cornell 1991). She is co-editor, with Louise Fradenburg, of Premodern Sexualities(Routledge 1996), and most recently the author of Popular Culture: An Introduction (NYU 1999). Her talk is part of a book-length project on 16th-century French writings about South America and the Tupinamba Indians. This talk focuses on Jean de Lery’s History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, an account of a Protestant preacher’s exile among the Tupi in the 1550s near the bay of Rio. Claude Levi-Strauss called de Lery’s book the first modern ethnography. Using rhetorical and psychoanalytic methods of discourse analysis, the talk explores a configuration of European homoerotic ideological fantasies surrounding the ‘New World’ man.

Ruth Gilmore is Assistant Professor of Humanities at San Francisco State University. She completed her Ph.D. in English at Yale University, and her Master’s in Violin Performance at the New England Conservatory of Music. She has been a violinist in the San Jose Symphony and the Marin Symphony orchestras. Professor Ruotolo’s talk is from a book in progress that explores the dramatic changes in American music cultures beginning in the 1890s from the perspective of their impact on and presence in literature, particularly works by Willa Cather, Kate Chopin, James Weldon Johnson and Theodore Dreiser. She writes, “With the development of a centralized music publishing industry (“Tin Pan Alley”), of African American influence on both popular and classical music, and of a strong female presence in public audiences and on the stage, music began to have„ and to be perceived as having„a powerful role in shaping its audience’s sense of self and place. At issue in debates, and for these four writers, is the nature and extent of that power. Does music merely arouse emotions and states of being that already exist within the listening self? Or does music have the capacity to enter into and change a listener’s way of being„to, for example, infuse a young white man with not only black sounds but blackness itself? Or to lead a young middle-class woman into prostitution? In my talk I will bring such questions to bear on Willa Cather’s Song of the Lark and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening.”

Jody Greene is a new Assistant Professor of Sociology at UCSC, and has received a post-doctoral fellowship at UC Davis for 1999-2000 to work with anthropologist Roger Rouse on the linkages between global capitalism, sexual commodification, migration, and sexual identities. A Ph.D. in Social Science from UC Irvine, Cantu’s work centers on the intersections of Chicano/ Latino studies, gay and lesbian studies, social movements, globalization, and immigration. His dissertation, “Border Crossings: Mexican Men and the Sexuality of Migration,” is representative of that project. His publications include the forthcoming article “Entre Hombres/Between Men: Latino Masculinities and Homosexualities, and other studies of Latina/o literary and cultural production.

Luis Chude-Sokei is Assistant Professor in the English Department at UC Berkeley, having received his Ph.D. from Cornell two years ago. He works on U.S. lesbian and gay literary and cultural studies, and is also a published poet. His first book, Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Invention Before Stonewall, is forthcoming from Duke, and his articles include “The Modernity of Queer Studies” and “Affect-Genealogy: Feeling and Affiliation in Willa Cather.” Nealon’s talk centers on Ann Bannon’s lesbian pulp novels of the 1950s and 1960s and the ambiguous reception of those novels. Nealon reads the problematics of Bannon’s model of lesbian bodies as gender-inverted to suggest that the novels offer contemporary readers a signal example of how to produce a livable relationship between historical possibilities and historical limits.