LECTURE

Iran, Close-Up: The View from Kiarostami
Thursday, March 6 / 4 PM / Humanities 210

Shame was the torture of choice at Abu Ghraib because Washington neo-cons believed the Islamic system of modesty made Muslims more susceptible to shame. Joan Copjec examines the modesty system through its impact on Iranian cinema generally, and the films of Abbas Kiarostami specifically, in an attempt to define shame in psychoanalytic and cinematic terms. Ultimately she aims to intervene in the debate about the veiling of Muslim women in a way that avoids many of the traps into which it has so far fallen.

SEMINAR
Sex is Difference
Friday, March 7 / 10 AM – 12 PM / Humanities 210

Download a copy of seminar reading #1

Download a copy of seminar reading #2

“Sex is Difference” will try to take a fresh look at sex and sexual difference. While a lot has been said on these subjects, the point of departure for this seminar will be that sex is a much more difficult notion than critics have assumed. While Freud was often criticized for his “pan-sexualism,” this charge strikes at the wrong target insofar as it takes sex as the answer to everything. No, sex is the problem, and it cannot be found anywhere, or: it is totally without country.

Joan Copjec is Distinguished Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Media Study and Director of the Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture at the University at Buffalo, NY. She is the author ofImagine There’s No Woman (MIT, 2002) and Read My Desire (MIT, 1994) and the editor of six volumes published by Verso, including Jacques Lacan’s Television, Shades of Noir, Radical Evil, and The Politics of Propinquity. A former editor of October, she also edited a series for Verso for a time, the S series. Her books have been translated into Japanese, German, and Spanish, and are currently being translated into Korean and Turkish.

Co-sponsored by The Psychoanalysis and Sexuality Research Unit of the Institute for Humanities Research.

SEMINAR
The Three Names of the Dialectic
Friday, February 29 / 3-5 PM / Humanities 210

Download a copy of the seminar reading.

Fredric Jameson is the William A. Lane Professor of Comparative Literature and Romance Studies at Duke University and Director, since 2003, of Duke University’s Institute for Critical Theory. He is the author of over 20 books, including Marxism and Form (Princeton, 1971), The Prison-House of Language (Princeton, 1972), The Political Unconscious (Cornell, 1981), Late Marxism: Adorno, or, the Persistence of the Dialectic (Verso, 1990), Signatures of the
Visible (Routledge, 1990), Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Duke,1990, winner of the MLA James Russell Lowell Award in 1990), Seeds of Time (Columbia, 1994), Brecht and Method (Verso, 1998), The Cultural Turn (Verso, 1998), A Singular Modernity (Verso, 2002), and The Modernist Papers (Verso, 2007). At Duke he teaches modernism, Third World literature and cinema, Marx & Freud, the modern French novel and cinema, and the Frankfurt School. Among Fredric Jameson’s ongoing concerns is the need to analyze literature as an encoding of political and social imperatives, and the interpretation of modernist and postmodernist assumptions through a rethinking of Marxist methodology. He is on the Editorial Board of South Atlantic Quarterly, Critical Inquiry, Rethinking Marxism, and boundary 2, among others. His work has been translated into Catalan, Chinese, Danish, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Rumanian, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, and Spanish.

This seminar will be an introduction to the dialectic as a philosophical system and a method of thought, taking into account many of the current objections to this mode of thinking.

For more information please contact Gopal Balakrishnan, gopalb@ucsc.edu.

Sponsored by the Capitalisms and Anti-Capitalisms Research Cluster

Thursday, February 21 / 4 PM / Humanities 210

POETRY READING
Thursday, February 21 / 6:30-7:30 PM
Felix Kulpa Gallery, 107 Elm Street, downtown Santa Cruz

Joshua Clover is the author of The Totality for Kids (California, 2006), The Matrix (British Film Institute, 2004), Their Ambiguity (Quemadura, 2003), and Madonna anno domini (Louisiana State, 1997). Recipient of numerous awards for his work, Joshua Clover is Professor of English, specializing in Poetry and Poetics, with an emphasis on contemporary and 20th-century American poetry, at the University of California, Davis. He also contributes to the Village Voice and the New York Times.

For more information contact Andrea Quaid, aquaid@ucsc.edu.

Sponsored by the Poetry and Politics Research Cluster

Friday, February 8 / 4 PM / Humanities 210

Elizabeth Povinelli is Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University, where she is also Co-Director of the Center for the Study of Law and Culture. She is the author of numerous books and essays, including The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism (Duke, 2002) and The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and Carnality (Duke, 2006). Currently a senior editor at Public Culture, she has also served as a consultant for several indigenous land and native title claims in Australia.

Professor Povinelli’s talk returns to “the body” as an intersection of matter and discourse. Rather than privilege one understanding over another, the talk assumes that this intersection is a foundational predicament and production of liberal governance. Drawing on the lifeworlds of contemporary indigenous Australians and Radical Faeries, and locating its discussion in the post-9/11 neoliberal world, Professor Povinelli examines how the material conditions and discursive embarrassments of “the body” are differentially distributed across global populations.

For more information contact Brian Malone, bmalone@ucsc.edu, or Greg Youmans, gyoumans@ucsc.edu.

Sponsored by the Queer Theory Research Cluster

GRADUATE STUDENT CONFERENCE

Uprooting Area Studies

KEYNOTE SPEAKER: Takashi Fujitani
Saturday, February 2 / 9 AM – 5:30 PM / Cowell Conference Room

Please join the Asia Pacific Americas Research Cluster (APARC) as it hosts its third annual graduate research conference considering the social, political, and epistemological implications of area studies in an increasingly interconnected world. Area studies is rooted in a particular historical moment; scholarship borne out of Cold War imaginings of bounded regions has shaped its fields of study and modes of analysis. This multidisciplinary conference explores these knowledge-making practices by questioning how regions are constructed and reproduced; re-imagining areas through alternative geographies and histories; and connecting area studies with contemporary transnational connections of technology, capital, and travel.

The conference will include a keynote address by Takashi Fujitani, Associate Professor of History at UC San Diego, entitled “Total War and Inclusionary Racism: Japanese as Americans and Koreans as Japanese in WWII,” and multidisciplinary paper presentations from graduate students across California. 

Takashi Fujitani is the author of Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan (California, 1996) and is co-editor of Perilous Memories: The Asia Pacific War(s) (Duke, 2001). His forthcoming book is Racism Under Fire: Japanese as Americans and Koreans as Japanese in WWII.

For more information please visit: http://www2.ucsc.edu/aparc/

Sponsored by the Asia Pacific Americas Research Cluster

Hortense Spillers
English, Vanderbilt University

LECTURE
The Idea of Black Culture I
Thursday, January 24 / 4 PM / Humanities 210

SEMINAR
The Idea of Black Culture II
Friday, January 25 / 10 AM – 12 PM / Humanities 210

Download a copy of the seminar reading.

Hortense Spillers’s essays have become classics in the study of psychoanalysis, race, and Black feminism, each articulating, in provocative, and often humorous, eloquently hortatory terms, a critical imperative for its moment. “Interstices,” for example, concludes, “the goal is not an articulating of sexuality so much as it is a global restoration and dispersal of power. In such an act of restoration, sexuality becomes one of several active predicates. So much depends on it.” “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” a powerfully memorable critique and repurposing of The Moynihan Report, suggests that “the African-American woman, the mother, the daughter, becomes historically the powerful and shadowy evocation of a cultural synthesis long evaporated…our task is to make a place for this different social subject.” And, in addressing the relations that might obtain between psychoanalysis—what she calls “this ethical self-knowing”—and “race,” Spillers urges us to “unhook the psychoanalytic hermeneutic from its rigorous curative framework and try to recover it in a free-floating realm of self-didactic possibility that might decentralize and disperse the knowing one.” Her talk and seminar will be taken from her forthcoming book, The Idea of Black Culture (Blackwell, 2008).

Hortense J. Spillers holds the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in English at Vanderbilt University, where she joined the faculty after holding positions at Duke, Cornell, and Emory. She has published many articles and essays on slavery, 19th- and 20th-century U.S. literature, African-American literature, and the Harlem Renaissance, as well as theoretical interventions in psychoanalysis, critical race studies, Black feminism, and American Studies. She is the author of Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago, 2003). She is also editor of Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text, Selected Papers from the English Institute (Routledge, 1991), and co-editor, with Marjorie Pryse, of the groundbreaking Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition (Indiana, 1985).

For more information contact Nick Mitchell, nmitchel@ucsc.edu.

Sponsored by the Black Cultural Studies Research Cluster, with additional cosponsorship provided by the Institute for Advanced Feminist Research, Graduate Studies, Oakes College, Porter College, and the Departments of History of Consciousness, Literature, and Sociology.

“Animal Studies,” Disciplinarity, and the Posthumanities

Wednesday, December 5 / 12 PM / Humanities 210

Cary Wolfe teaches at Rice University, where he holds the Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Chair in English. His recent books include Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory(Chicago, 2003), and the edited collection, Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal (Minnesota, 2003). He recently founded the series “Posthumanities” at the University of Minnesota Press and is currently completing two books: What Is Posthumanism? and a collection of essays (with Branka Arsic) called The Other Emerson.

What Is Posthumanism? explores issues animating the new series at the University of Minnesota Press, “Posthumanities.” Both investigate the ways the idea of “the human” has become decentered and re-configured under pressure from a range of forces in contemporary social, material, and intellectual life. One particular manifestation of this fact is how our views of the relations between human and nonhuman animals have radically changed in the wake of myriad developments in the sciences, such as cognitive ethology, and in philosophy and ethics around areas associated with “animal rights.” At the other end of the spectrum, “the human” has been unsettled by a host of developments in technology, media, and biomedicine that have posed similarly pressing questions about the autonomy and self-determination of the human as traditionally conceived by familiar forms of humanism (particularly liberal humanism). Wolfe’s work therefore concerns itself not with the transcendence or eclipse of “the human” but rather of “humanism” and as such it confronts the various modes of embeddeness, interdependence, embodiment, and prostheticity that in a fundamental sense restore “the human” to its full complexity. What is Posthumanism? explores various attempts to think and express these developments in philosophy, “theory,” and ethics, and in cultural practices such as film, architecture, art, and music.

SEMINAR

Introducing the Insectopedia: 2 out of 26
Tuesday, November 20 / 4–6 PM / Humanities 210

Hugh Raffles is Associate Professor and Chair of Anthropology at the New School for Social Research in New York. He is the author of In Amazonia: A Natural History (Princeton, 2002); his essays have appeared in a range of publications, most recently in Cabinet, Granta, and Public Culture.

The seminar discussion and presentation are drawn from his current book project, The Illustrated Insectopedia, an exploration of encounters between humans and insects in a wide variety of times and places (contemporary Shanghai, Zurich, Bamako, Tokyo, and Santa Fe; Renaissance Prague, early twentieth-century Berlin, nineteenth-century Provence, etc.). What happens when humans and insects meet? The book focuses on the ineffability and indifference of insects and their ability to provoke moments of ontological instability in which taxonomic hierarchies of various kinds break down, unexpected relationships form and dissolve, and unanticipated events take place.

Email cult@ucsc.edu for a copy of the seminar readings.

This faculty-graduate student seminar is being held in conjunction with a talk for the Anthropology Department,
Squish That Bug! Crush Freaks in an Unforgiving World
Monday, November 19 / 3:30 PM / Soc Sci I, 261.

This event is co-sponsored with the Department of Anthropology.

LECTURE AND DISCUSSION
Friday, November 16 / 4–5:30 PM / Humanities 210

POETRY READING
Friday, November 16 / 6:30–7:30 PM
Felix Kulpa Gallery, 107 Elm Street, downtown Santa Cruz

Lyn Hejinian is the author or co-author of fourteen books of poetry, including My Life in the Nineties (Shark, 2003) and The Fatalist (Omnidawn, 2003), as well as the award-winning My Life (Green Integer, 2002). Poetry Flash has described My Life as a work that has “real, almost hypnotic power, obvious intelligence, and [is] astonishingly beautiful.” Hejinian teaches in the English Department at UC Berkeley. Her critical writings were published in The Language of Inquiry (California, 2000). She has been the editor of Tuumba Press and co-editor of Poetics Journal.

For more information contact Andrea Quaid, aquaid@ucsc.edu

Sponsored by the Poetry and Politics Research Cluster

A PANEL DISCUSSION
Thursday, November 15 / 4 PM / Humanities 210

SPEAKERS
Cullum Ogg, Manager at Frenchy’s (local pornography retailer)
Chelsea Iwamoto, Sales Manager at Camouflage (local pornography retailer)
Ross Sublett, Former Long-term Employee (in product update management) at a major Internet pornography company

The Feminism and Pornography Research Cluster—a group formed to develop feminist understandings and critiques of the pornography industry—will present its first panel event in Fall 2007. This event invites cluster participants and other interested members of the UCSC community and the public to investigate emerging production and consumption patterns in the contemporary “adult” industry, including locally retailed pornographic films and magazines as well as nationally marketed hardcore Internet pornography. Panelists include representatives from local pornography (and pornography-related) retail shops, from “high-end”/specialty retail markets to inexpensive rental markets for mainstream, alternative, and fetishistic pornographies. Online (streaming) videos of hardcore pornography—an increasingly large and important sector of the pornography industry—will also be a topic of discussion. Each of the speakers will field questions related to supply and demand trends over time, changes in prevalent content/themes, the rise and fall of specific niche markets, clientele demographics, and the changing profitability of pornography sales and distribution. Additionally, we hope to learn about the connections and relationships among pornography distributors, producers, and performers, and the relative size and scope of companies marketing pornography locally. This panel session will introduce us to the structural characteristics of—and relationships among—selected pornography production and distribution companies.

In preparation for this event, we will make readings on pornography production, distribution, and markets available for cluster participants and other interested members of the UCSC community or the public.

Please contact Natalie Purcell at: feminismandpornography@gmail.com for more event information.

Sponsored by the Feminism and Pornography Research Cluster