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

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

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

Date/Time

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

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

Colloquium Series

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

ScheduleALL COLLOQUIA ARE IN HUMANITIES 1, ROOM 210

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Participants

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Colloquium Series

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Colloquium Series

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

Schedule
ALL COLLOQUIA ARE IN HUMANITIES 1, ROOM 210

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Colloquium Series

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Colloquium Series

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

Schedule ALL COLLOQUIA ARE IN THE OAKES MURAL ROOM

October 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Participants

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.”