The talk is sponsored by the Mellon Sawyer Seminar on Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine

This talk examines how anthropologists and human biologists used abducted Indigenous children in South America as sources of evidence for a variety of bio-historical research projects during the Cold War. From 1930 to 1970, human scientists studying the Aché — a traditionally nomadic hunter-gatherer group in Paraguay — used evidence derived from measuring, bleeding, and observing children in the service of research projects concerned with reconstructing global human migrations in the Western hemisphere. Through studies of Aché children and families, scientists like the French naturalist Jehan Albert Vellard, the U.S. human geneticist Carleton Gajdusek, and the French structural anthropologists Pierre and Helen Clastres discerned ancient patterns of migration by considering the diffusion of cultural and linguistic traits, the process of genetic drift in populations, and the immunological effects of European conquest. Yet many of the Aché children used in these studies had been abducted and sold as servants to neighboring ranchers. By highlighting the use of stolen Indigenous children as research objects in Cold War human diversity research, my talk uncovers the enduring and violent colonial structures that made this knowledge possible as well as the ethical and legal protocols and forms of Indigenous resistance that emerged in response.

Sebastián Gil-Riaño is an Assistant Professor of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennyslvania. Born in Colombia and raised in Canada, he is a historian of science who studies transnational scientific conceptions of race, culture, and indigeneity in the twentieth century. His first book, The Remnants of Race Science: UNESCO and Economic Development in the Global South will be published by Columbia University Press on August 31st, 2023.

Date | Time
May 31, 2023 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]
Free and open to the public

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

Please note: this is a hybrid event. To receive a link, RSVP by 11 AM on the day of the colloquium, and you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM.

According to premodern elites, the luxurious appetites of the poor were not only feminine and exotic but also the greatest threat to social order. Popular demands for better wages, sustenance, more festival days, or any improvement in the conditions of ordinary folk were denounced as “luxury.” But scholarship about this discourse has been misdirected by premodern sumptuary laws, focusing on luxury as a class of things. I focus on the act of luxuriating instead, drawing out its embodied, affective, and tactical dimensions as a “structure of feeling.” I argue that a focus on luxuriating opens our thought to the political potential in the physical, sensory, and lived experience of the poor as they lay claim to enjoyment and abundance.

Dean Mathiowetz is Associate Professor of Politics, currently working on a book manuscript Luxuriating in Democracy, Abundance, and the Enjoyment of Bodies Politic. He is the author of Appeals to Interest: Language and the Shaping of Political Agency and the editor of and contributor to Hanna Fenichel Pitkin: Politics, Justice, and Action. His other writings have appeared in journals including Political Theory, Theory and Event, Political Research Quarterly, The New Political Science, and The Arrow.

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

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

Drawing on an archive of nearly three hundred Anansi tales collected between 1814 and 1935, this talk documents the animist multinaturalism at stake in Jamaican Anansi tales. This form of multinaturalism contests colonial conceptions of nature as well as the ideas about language that follow on colonial nature. Using the power of puns, metaphors, rhyme, and performance, Anansi and other insect avatars convert colonial nature into abolition ecologies. More broadly, the constellation of problems and powers associated with West Indian bugs (imperceptibility, smallness, shapeshifting, co-metabolism, environmental change), informs a situated decolonial knowledge inspired by insects’ navigation of their environments.

Monique Allewaert is Associate Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She works at the intersections of eighteenth and nineteenth-century hemispheric American colonialisms, the environmental humanities, literary and cultural studies, and science studies. She is the author of Ariel’s Ecology: Plantations, Personhood, and Colonialism in the American Tropics (2013). Her current book project Luminescence follows insect avatars through eighteenth-century Caribbean natural history, story, riddles, song, and poetry to elaborate counter-plantation knowledges and aesthetics.

Date | Time
January 25, 2023 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]
Free and open to the public

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

Remote Option

RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, January 25, you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.

Join us for a guided tour of the pleasures and perils of lesbian historical fiction, as Linda Garber (author of Novel Approaches to Lesbian History) introduces the thrilling and heart-wrenching adventures, trenchant theoretical insights, and critical political shortcomings of novels that establish a historical footing for contemporary lesbian identity in the face of a problematic, mostly silent, archive.  She’ll cover genres ranging from westerns (Tomboys and Indians) and pirate tales (Unsafe Seas for Women) to the postmodern (Haunting the Archives) and the erotic (Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lesbian Sex), while calling for an intersectional, trans-inclusive lesbian literature and history.

Linda Garber is Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Santa Clara University, where she teaches queer literature and film, and feminist and queer theory.  Her book Novel Approaches to Lesbian History was published by Palgrave in 2021 and is now available in paperback.  Her earlier books include Identity Poetics: Race, Class, and the Lesbian-Feminist Roots of Queer Theory and the anthology Tilting the Tower: Lesbians / Teaching / Queer Subjects.

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

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

RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, February 1, you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.

Event co-sponsored with Kresge College, Media and Society Lecture Series and the Departments of  Literature and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies.

New online writing platforms, like Wattpad, are massively popular (100 million registered users upload ~300,000 stories per day), and with their focus on user generated content and open access, promise to democratize contemporary cultural production. This talk explores how such platforms represent and accommodate Blackness, specifically examining the rise of a new genre category of writing: the #BLM story, over the past five years. Using a mixture of critical and computational methods, and drawing from critical race theory and platform studies, I ask: what textual features define this story, how do such features evolve over time, and how does this story differ from previous iterations of racial protest literature? Also: are such stories able to thrive on such platforms – what is their relationship to platform capitalism?

Richard Jean So is Associate Professor of English and Digital Humanities at McGill University. He focuses on computational and data-driven approaches to contemporary literature and culture, with a particular interest in race and inequality. His most recent book is Redlining Culture: A Data History of Racial Inequality and Postwar Fiction, and he is at work on a new project called Fast Culture, Slow Justice: Race and Writing in the Platform Age. He has published in both academic journals like Critical Inquiry and PMLA and popular periodicals, such as The New York Times and The Atlantic.

Date | Time
February 22, 2023 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]
Free and open to the public

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

RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, February 22, you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.

This event is sponsored by The Humanities Institute, UC Santa Cruz

This talk begins with a discovery – an old faded photocopy that fell off from my copy of Derrida’s Specters of Marx as I was moving offices in 2020. The photocopy was of a page in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) describing a condition wherein patients experience parasites or insects infesting their surroundings and crawling on their skin. Where did this note come from? How did it find its way to that book in particular? And was its revelation during an office move at the height of Covid an accident, a coincidence, or a message from another time and place and experience? I investigate the provenance of this note, embarking on a journey that leads me to the birthplace of the image and photocopying technology with companies such as Xerox and Kodak in Upstate NY. It also leads me to confront the ghosts and monsters of the Lebanese Civil War (1975-90) that crawl into suitcases and possess tightly packed books and items of clothing as they cross oceans and go up rivers and canals. In the process, I reflect on hauntology and theory more generally, questioning its potential as a system of meaning that can access the past and reveal the hidden.

Tarek El-Ariss is an author, a scholar, and the James Wright Professor at Dartmouth College, where he teaches Middle Eastern Studies and Comparative Literature. Born and raised in Beirut during the Civil War (1975-1990) and trained in philosophy, literary theory, and visual and cultural studies, his work deals with questions of displacement, modernity, and the somatic in literature and culture. He has written about disoriented travelers, outcasts, queers, hackers, and characters with complicated relations to home, tribe, nation, and power. He is the author of Trials of Arab Modernity: Literary Affects and the New Political (2013) and Leaks, Hacks, and Scandals: Arab Culture in the Digital Age (2019), and editor of The Arab Renaissance: A Bilingual Anthology of the Nahda (2018). In 2021, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete a forthcoming book entitled, “Homo Belum: An Autobiography of War.”

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

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

RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, March 1, you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.

On the Internet, the book is a drag: a literal metaphor that pulls us back to the material world.  This talk focuses on three examples of the book-object’s material drag on the supposed ephemeral nature of online existence in the digital cloud: 1) Philip Zimmermann and MIT Press’ PGP Source Code and Internals (1995), a printed edition of the source code that forms the basis of all email cryptography; 2) William Gibson’s self-destructing cyberpoem Agrippa (1992), a literary work that uses pseudo-cryptography to subvert print culture and which, by producing an art object consumed (annihilated, even) within its readin—g, recovers a lyrical past against the drag of the future; and 3) The Wu-Tang Clan’s single-copy album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin (2015), which by subverting the democratic nature of art, works against the drag of a speculative art market. The moral of each of these bookworks resides within the materiality of the object. What makes these three examples illustrative is that they all deal—in one way or another—with cryptography. In other words: the book’s secret, which is, in the end, nothing other than the book’s inescapable materiality, even in the digital era.

Zac Zimmer is Associate Professor of Literature at UCSC. His research focuses on the interdisciplinary study of literature, culture and technology in the hemispheric Americas. In addition to his current research on the infrastructure of technosystems, he co-facilitates the Ethics & Astrobiology reading group, part of UCSC’s Astrobiology Initiative. His book First Contact: Speculative Visions of the Conquest of the Americas is forthcoming.  

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

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

RSVP by 3PM on Tuesday, March 7, you will receive the Zoom link and password by 5 PM the day before the colloquium. Please note, the RSVP window has been adjusted this week only.

Image: Marta Minujín, “Partenón de libros” (Buenos Aires, 1983). Reproduced with permission from the artist’s estate

Wooden sailing vessels or dhows have long traversed The Indian Ocean, making it what some scholars have called “the cradle of globalization.” Today, dhows or vahans from Kachchh in western India continue along old Indian Ocean routes as crucial intermediaries in global shipping. This talk traces how this mobile trade network is anchored or moored in specific places and economic concepts in some moments, and unmoored in others. Focusing on arbitrage, long a strategy used by Indian Ocean merchants, I argue that value in the contemporary dhow trade is created through a fractured moral economy. Tracing the movement of one dhow across the Indian Ocean during the COVID-19 pandemic, I argue that sanctions regimes, and questions of jurisdiction at sea in the Persian Gulf have created a geopolitical climate in which value is produced at multiple scales through the intersection of these logics, the body of the sailor becoming the site for capturing value and crafting sovereignty at sea.  

Nidhi Mahajan is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UCSC. Her research focuses on the intersection between political economy, sovereignty, and mobility in the Indian Ocean. A practicing artist, she has also developed multi-media exhibitions in Kenya, India, and the UAE. Her work has appeared in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East; Island Studies Journal, and the edited volumes Reimaging Indian Ocean Worlds and World on the Horizon. 

Date | Time
October 5, 2022 | 12:30 – 1:45 PM [PST]
Free and open to the public

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

Please note that this talk will start at 12:30 rather than 12:15 to accommodate the History of Consciousness job talk by Dimitris Papadopoulos, “The Chemical Milieu. Chemistry, Ecology and Social Change,” from 11:00-12:30 in Humanities 420. We understand that some of you will not be able to attend due to the Yom Kippur holiday and apologize for the cross-scheduling.