photo of speaker, Louise Meintjes

October 12 – Louise Meintjes – Giving Voice to a Politics of Breath

This event is co-sponsored by the Departments of Music and Anthropology

This paper draws on long term ethnographic study of South African Zulu song and dance traditions. It revisits instances of ngoma vocal performance in order to explore the sonics and concept of the sound of breath, and connects that to popular political expression in the USA during the global turbulence of the last two and a half years.

Louise Meintjes is the Marcello Lotti Professor of Music and Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. She has worked as an ethnographer in Johannesburg and rural KwaZulu Natal for three decades, authoring Sound of Africa!: Making Music in a South African Studio (Duke UP, 2003) and Dust of the Zulu: Ngoma Aesthetics after Apartheid (Duke UP 2017), which won the Gregory Bateson and Alan Merriam prizes.

Date | Time
October 12, 2022 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]
Free and open to the public

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

Fall 2021 Colloquium Series

THE CENTER FOR CULTURAL STUDIES hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty & visitors. 

We are pleased to announce our Fall 2021 Series. We have missed the intimacy, energy, and sense of community provided by gathering in person. However, we realize some of you may not be coming to campus regularly, and a number of challenges remain in holding in-person events on campus. To maximize accessibility for audience members, the CCS colloquium series will have a hybrid format, meaning that you will have the option of attending in person in Humanities 210 or remotely via Zoom. Those who attend in person must adhere to the campus mask mandate for all indoor activities and must complete a symptom-check form before coming to campus. To attend remotely via Zoom, please RSVP in advance and you will receive a Zoom link on the morning of the colloquium. Speakers will appear remotely so that they do not have to wear a mask when presenting.

Please RSVP to either all colloquia here or select the individual event you would like to RSVP for here on our website. The Zoom link will be circulated at 11:30 AM on the day of the colloquium. Please be online by 12:10 PM [PST] if you are attending remotely. Sessions begin promptly at 12:15 PM and end at 1:30 PM. Sessions will not be recorded.

October 13
Thomas Serres (UCSC)
Reflections on Abject Victimhood and the Impossibility of Post-Islamism: The Trajectory of the Rachad Movement

October 20
Radhika Natarajan (Reed College)
Post-Imperial Contractions: Asian Migration and Marriage in Deindustrializing Britain

October 27
Jennifer Steverson (Independent Scholar and Artist) + Naya Jones (UCSC)
The Art of Black Ecologies: A Virtual Studio Visit & Conversation

November 3
BuYun Chen (Swarthmore College)
Making the Intangible Tangible: Craft, History, and the Ryukyus

November 10
Lital Levy (Princeton University)
World Literature, Translation, and Diaspora: The Intimately Global Journey of Grace Aguilar’s The Vale of Cedars

November 17
Nasser Zakariya (UC Berkeley)
Questions on “Anthroperiphery”

 

Center for Cultural Studies Staff

Mayanthi Fernando & Marc Matera, co-Directors

Piper Milton, GSR (cult@ucsc.edu; Humanities 1, 428)

 

2021-2022 Advisory Board 

Gerald Casel (Theater Arts)

Yasmeen Daifallah (Politics)

Muriam Haleh Davis (History)

Gina Dent (Feminist Studies, History of Consciousness)

Nathaniel Deutsch (History)

Carla Freccero (History of Consciousness, Literature, Feminist Studies)

Deborah Gould (Sociology)

Peter Limbrick (Film & Digital Media)

Laurie Palmer (Art)

Savannah Shange (Anthropology)

Massimiliano Tomba (History of Consciousness)

 

January 13, 2016 – Elena Gapova: “Suffering and the Soviet Man’s Search for Meaning: the ‘Moral Revolutions’ of Svetlana Alexievich”

Elena Gapova’s research focuses primarily on the issues of gender, class, and nation building in the post-soviet region. In particular, she examines how intelligentsia articulate and negotiate emerging class formations and new forms of inequality specific to the post-industrial world.

Gapova is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Western Michigan University and Founding Director of the Centre for Gender Studies at European Humanities University.

Date/Time
January 13, 2016 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

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

October 7, 2015 – Tyler Stovall: “White Freedom: Race and Liberty in the Modern Era”

Tyler Stovall is currently working on two research projects. One concerns the history of migration from the French Caribbean to France during the 19th and early 20th centuries. The other explores the relationship between freedom and race, arguing that modern concepts of liberty are often racialized.

Stovall is the Dean of Humanities and Distinguished Professor of History at UC Santa Cruz.

Date/Time
October 7, 2015 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

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

October 14, 2015 – Ronnie Lipschutz: “Utopia or Catastrophe”

This talk is connected to Professor Lipschutz’s work on politics and popular culture, of which his most recent publication was Political Economy, Capitalism and Popular Culture.

Lipschutz is Professor and Chair of Politics and Provost of College Eight at UC Santa Cruz.

Date/Time
October 14, 2015 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

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

October 21, 2015 – Tyrus Miller: “The Non-Contemporaneity of György Lukács: Cold War Contradictions and the Aesthetics of Visual Arts”

Tyrus Miller has recently published Modernism and the Frankfurt School, and his forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Wyndham Lewis will appear in 2015. He is the translator/editor of György Lukács’s, The Culture of People’s Democracy: Hungarian Essays on Literature, Art, and Democratic Transition and series co-editor (with Erik Bachman) of Brill’s Lukács Library Series. Current work includes a study of 20th-century architectural and urbanistic utopias and a translation-in-progress of György Lukács’s Heidelberg writings on aesthetics and the philosophy of art.

Miller is the Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies and Professor of Literature at UC Santa Cruz.

Date/Time
October 21, 2015 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

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

October 28, 2015 – Juliana Spahr: “The Politics of Poetry Production > The Politics of Poetic Form”

This talk is part of a larger project about contemporary US literature that asks a very old question about the relation between literature and politics. Professor Spahr suggests that turn of the century US literature is somewhat analogous to the earth’s ailing ecosystem, at risk because of multiple forces– economic changes, government interference, liberal foundations, and higher education–that bolster each other in ways that are expansive and self-reinforcing, like a Fibonacci sequence.

Spahr is Professor of English at Mills College.

Date/Time
October 28, 2015 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

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

November 4, 2015 – Jasmine Syedullah: “‘Not Contraband, but Soldier:’ Against the Domestic Violence of National Security”

Jasmine Syedullah’s current project, “No Selves to Defend: Fugitive Justice and Black Feminist Loopholes of Abolition” is a political theory of abolition rooted in the antislavery writings of Harriet Jacobs, the anti-prison testimonies of political prisoners Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, and narratives from the 1971 uprising at Alderson Federal Reformatory for Women.

Syedullah is a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of English at UC Riverside.

Date/Time
November 4, 2015 | 12:15 PM
Free and open to the public

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

November 18, 2015 – Catherine Sue Ramírez: “’Our Porto Ricans’: Puerto Rican Students at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, 1898-1923″

Catherine Ramírez works on 20th-century Mexican-American history, histories of migration and assimilation, Latino literature, feminist theory, and comparative ethnic studies. She is writing a book on the history of assimilation in the U.S. and was recently awarded a grant from the Mellon Foundation for her work on migration, belonging, and non-citizenship.

Ramírez is Associate Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies and the Director of the Chicano Latino Research Center at UC Santa Cruz.

Date/Time
November 18, 2015 | 12:00 PM
Free and open to the public

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

Screening and Panel Discussion: The Stuart Hall Project: Revolution, Politics, Culture, and the New Left Experience

A major success in Britain last Fall, “The Stuart Hall Project” is now being distributed in the USA. See the review and interview links below.

It will be screened at UCSC on Tuesday evening, February 25th. 7:30 PM, Studio C. (Communications 150)

The film, 102 minutes, will be followed by an informal panel and general discussion animated by James Clifford (History of Consciousness), Jennifer Gonzalez (HAVC), and Herman Gray (Sociology).

Read reviews of the film here and here.

Generously funded by the Arts Dean’s Fund for Excellence. Co-sponsored by The Center for Cultural Studies and the Department of Film and Digital Media.