LECTURE
The Art of Waiting: Queer Diasporas and The Book of Salt
Thursday, October 18 / 4 PM / Humanities 210

David Eng’s forthcoming book, The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Diasporas and the Racialization of Intimacy, examines the impact of Asian diasporic and queer social movements on conventional structures of family and kinship in the U.S. It explores the ways race is exploited and privatized in a “colorblind” age to shore up ideals of family and kinship in the global North. The book also investigates why we have numerous poststructuralist accounts of language but few poststructuralist accounts of kinship. This presentation, drawn from The Feeling of Kinship, explores Monique Truong’s 2003 novel The Book of Salt in relation to issues of historiography and historicism. When Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas were expatriates living in Paris, the American couple employed a series of Vietnamese cooks. Truong’s novel is told from the cook’s point of view. In this talk, Eng asks why it is that Stein and Toklas can appear in history as the iconic lesbian couple of modernism and modernity while Bình, the “gay” migrant laborer, cannot appear. In other words, how is it that Stein and Toklas are placed in history while Bình is displaced from it? As an “Asian American,” “refugee,” “postcolonial,” and “queer” text, The Book of Salt positions itself within and against the historiography of modernism by illuminating what this historiography obscures: the more extensive forms of social violence and forgetting that configure the political as well as epistemological limits of modernity.

SEMINAR
Transnational Adoption, Racial Melancholia, and Racial Reparation
Friday, October 19 / 10 AM – 12 PM / Humanities 210

David Eng’s previous work has explored the relationship between racial melancholia and processes of immigration, racialization, and assimilation for Asian Americans. In these two essays, he considers how the contemporary practice of transnational adoption traces out a psychic and social arc from racial melancholia to racial reparation. He writes, “If racial reparation might be considered a constrained response to the psychic and social pressures of racial melancholia, I would like us to consider collectively in this seminar how, and under what conditions, the disparate paradigms of psychic and political reparation might be brought together in a productive manner. In other words, what (if any) is the relationship between psychic reparation, which is at the heart of object relations theory (Melanie Klein), and political reparation, which is central to histories of genocide, slavery, apartheid, comfort women, and other crimes against humanity?”

David L. Eng is Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Diasporas and the Racialization of Intimacy (Duke, forthcoming) and Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Duke, 2001). In addition, he is co-editor with David Kazanjian of Loss: The Politics of Mourning (California, 2003); with Alice Y. Hom of Q & A: Queer in Asian America (Temple, 1998); and with Judith Halberstam and José Muñoz of a special issue of the journal Social Text (2005) entitled “What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now?” Professor Eng is the current co-chair of the Board of Directors of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop as well as the former chair of the Board of Directors of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, both based in New York City. Prior to joining the University of Pennsylvania, he was a faculty member at Columbia University and Rutgers University and was also a visiting professor at Hong Kong University and Harvard University. He received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California at Berkeley.

For a copy of the seminar readings, please email cult@ucsc.edu.

Thursday, October 11 / 4 PM / Humanities 210

Kara Keeling works on film, media, and popular culture, and across the disciplines of media studies (especially film and television theory and criticism), cultural studies, critical theory, Black studies, and women’s studies. Her essays on media and popular culture have appeared in The Black Scholar and Qui Parle. Her essay “‘Joining the Lesbians’: Cinematic Regimes of Black Lesbian Visibility” appeared in Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology (eds. Patrick and Mae G. Henderson, Duke, 2005.) She is completing a book manuscript entitled The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense. Professor Keeling’s talk will focus on the films The Aggressives (dir. Wakefield Poole, 2005) and Brother to Brother (dir. Rodney Evans, 2004).

For more information contact blackculturalstudies@ucsc.edu.

Sponsored by the Black Cultural Studies Research Cluster

Monday, October 9 / 4PM / Oakes Mural Room

Adi Ophir is Associate Professor at the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University, and is research fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and the Shalom Hartman Institute for Jewish Studies. An activist and a scholar, his research centers on modern and contemporary continental philosophy in the domains of ethics, political philosophy, and critical theory. His books include Working for the Present (Avodat Hahove, Hakkibutz Hameuchad 2001) and, with Ariella Azoulay, Terrible Days (Yamim Raim, Resling 2002). In 2005, Zone Books of MIT Press published Ophir’s The Order of Evils, an English translation of a Hebrew original published in 2000. This erudite, rich, and experimentally structured philosophical text asks fundamental questions about moral judgment in the wake of Heideggerian and poststructualist philosophy. Shaped by reflections on the Holocaust and on Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory, Adi Ophir offers new perspectives on evil, emphasizing its existential and political character, and suggests new ground for moral being in the present age. About his current work, he writes:

I am currently engaged in research on “states of disaster”. The contemporary state is the main institution capable of and responsible for protecting the people it governs against disasters – natural and man-made alike. At the same time, the state is capable of creating conditions and implementing policies that turn out to be catastrophic for its own subjects as well as for the subjects of other states. Today, “the providential state” and “the catastrophic state” seem as but two aspects of what Carl Schmitt called “the total state” and its apparatuses. In my research I am trying to reconstruct the genealogy, the theological and metaphysical presuppositions, and the modus operandi of each of these two “state formations,” questioning the common wisdom that sees them as two sides of a single dialectical process in which progress and destruction are inevitably linked. This research is inspired by a long term interest in and opposition to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, which lately, in response to the outbreak of the second Intifada, has turned catastrophic for the Palestinian non-citizens of Israel. My talk will be based on a joint work with Ariella Azoulay in which we study the modus operandi of the Israeli occupying power.

Friday, October 5 / 1–4 PM / Humanities 210

This event presents a forum for interdisciplinary scholars in science and technology studies to offer fragments, nascent thought formations, and elusive ideas. Through the interplay of less-than-complete papers, the cluster will experiment with the ways that early interaction inflects more fully realized work. In keeping with our current theme, Risk and Play: Experiments in Knowing and Relating, this discussion will encourage collective speculative engagement as a form of experimental academic practice. Topics of exploration include human/ non-human relatings, ecologies of hope, and the ethics of scientific experimentation. We welcome interlocutors from all disciplines to collaborate with our presenters.

For more information contact: Martha Kenney, mkenney@ucsc.edu.

Sponsored by the Science Studies Research Cluster

Kara Keeling
Critical Studies and American Studies and Ethnicity, USC

Looking for Marquise: Queer Temporality, Black Political Possibility, and Poetry from the Future

Thursday, May 17 / 12 PM / Humanities 210

Kara Keeling works on film, media, and popular culture, and across the disciplines of media studies (especially film and television theory and criticism), cultural studies, critical theory, Black studies, and women’s studies. Her essays on media and popular culture have appeared in The Black Scholar and Qui Parle. Her essay “‘Joining the Lesbians’: Cinematic Regimes of Black Lesbian Visibility” appeared in Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology (eds. Patrick and Mae G. Henderson, Duke, 2005.) She is completing a book manuscript entitled The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense. Professor Keeling’s talk will focus on the films The Aggressives(dir. Wakefield Poole, 2005) and Brother to Brother (dir. Rodney Evans, 2004).

For more information contact blackculturalstudies@ucsc.edu.

Sponsored by the Black Cultural Studies Research Cluster

Moderated by Anjali Arondekar, Feminist Studies, UC Santa Cruz

Thursday, May 10 / 2:30 PM / Humanities 210

Jasbir K. Puar is Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and a member of the Graduate Program in the Department of Geography at Rutgers University. She will present material from her forthcoming book on terror, affect, race, and sex titled Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Duke, 2007). Puar is also working on India Shining, a video project about the challenges of South Asian progressive organizations in New York City to the Hindutva nationalist and communalist politics of the annual India Day parade. Recent publications include “Mapping U.S. Homonormativities,” Gender, Place, and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography (February 2006) and “On Torture: Abu Ghraib,” Radical History Review (Fall 2005).

For more information, please contact Heather Turcotte at hmturcotte@juno.com

Sponsored by the Africana Dialogues Research Cluster and the Queer Theory Research Cluster

Thursday, May 3 / 4 PM / Humanities 210

After authoring a number of pathbreaking works in nineteenth-century studies—on romanticism, the English and American novels, the English language in the U.S., and other topics—David Simpson began to make a series of broad critical interventions in theory and criticism. Romanticism, Nationalism, and the Revolt Against Theory (Chicago, 1993) gave a convincing and original genealogy of Anglo-American resistance to theory, filiating it to eighteenth-century British conservatism’s ideology of nationalism and common sense. The Academic Postmodern and the Rule of Literature: A Report on Half Knowledge (Chicago, 1995) does similar genealogical work with postmodern theory, analyzing some of the political and ideological consequences of postmodernism’s unacknowledged roots in literary studies. Situatedness, or, Why We Keep Saying Where We’re Coming From (Duke, 2002), is an exploration of the aporetic, antinomic quality of the universalist/situated binary in a range of discourses: legal reasoning, social science, literature, biography, and philosophy. Following the aftermath of September 11th, David Simpson wrote a series of widely discussed essays on the dominant U.S. discourses of apocalypse and commemoration. These and additional essays are collected in 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration (Chicago, 2006). His talk is from a project titled “Wordsworth’s Spectral Modernity: Commodification and the Poetics of Social Concern.”

He writes:

It takes up the uncannily unresolvable qualities of Wordsworth’s poetic encounters with strangers, especially needy or afflicted persons, which subsist without such familiarizing resources as sympathy, charity, hospitality or even dialogue itself. As such these poems undercut the civil society discourse that has been a linchpin of the neoliberal consensus since the triumph of the ‘West’ in 1989. Instead they reflect and embody the effects of a rapid increase in the effects of commodification (an increase in the scale and influence of commodity form) around 1800, a process analyzed by Marx, restored to literary life by Derrida, and poetically staged by Wordsworth. The abstraction performed by commodity form as the agent and distributor of social as well as economic relations renders virtual and indeed spectral the characters in poetic stories, who appear as figures of death in life. It is also reflected in and analyzed by a Wordsworthian aesthetic that is critically concerned about the ambiguous and often death-dealing effects of poetic images whose mortifying attributes are not restricted to the worn coinages of poetic diction but impinge also upon the best aspirations of high poetry. Finally it is in the sphere of reading and the context of print culture that ghostliness, commodification and concern come together to create a poetry whose analytic power is as fresh now as it was in 1800, because the mature capitalist formation that Wordsworth saw coming into being has not yet become a thing of the past.

Thursday, April 26 / 4 PM / Humanities 210

E´tienne Balibar has argued that in both Arendt’s analysis of the Nazi extermination of Jews and Foucault’s work on the extermination of the abnormals there is an argument that before a society engages in extermination it goes through a social state where those who are to be exterminated are, in effect, prepared for their extermination. Ghassan Hage calls this social state a culture of exterminability. He writes:

This is because I want to emphasize the production of a total social environment and climate in which the pratice of extermination becomes something that can be practically contemplated: society cannot produce its potential exterminable others without producing at the same time its potential exterminators. I will argue that we in the Western world are already living in such a culture of exterminability where the exterminable is located in the dominant imaginary of the Muslim other.

Ghassan Hage is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Sydney. He has been a visiting professor at the American University of Beirut, University of Copenhagen, Université de Paris X –Nanterre, and at Pierre Bourdieu’s Centre de Sociologie Européenne at the École des Hautes Études Internationales, Paris. He is currently visiting professor and research associate at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard. Hage’s research centers on the comparative study of nationalism, racism, and multiculturalism. His most important works in that domain are White Nation (Pluto and Routledge, 2000) and Against Paranoid Nationalism (Pluto and Merlin, 2003). He has also published widely on the Lebanese civil war and on the Lebanese diaspora. He is currently working on an ethnography of Lebanese Muslims in France, England, the U.S., and Australia.

Thursday, April 5 / 4 PM / Oakes Mural Room

Providing a trenchant examination of California prisons, shifting patterns of capital investment and incarceration, and increases in punitive justice in the post-Civil Rights era, Ruth Wilson Gilmore will speak about her new book Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, a January 2007 release in the American Crossroads Series of the University of California Press.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Associate Professor of Geography and Director of the Program in American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. She is a member of the founding collective of Critical Resistance, one of the most important national anti-prison organizations in the United States. Trained as a geographer, Professor Gilmore is an expert in race and justice issues, and has been at USC since 2004.

Sponsored by the Critical Race Studies Research Cluster and the Sociology Department, with co-sponsorship by the Center for Justice, Tolerance, and Community, the Institute for Advanced Feminist Research, Stevenson College, and the Departments of Anthropology, Feminist Studies, History of Consciousness, Latin American and Latino Studies, and Psychology

A MULTI-MEDIA DIALOGUE

Friday, March 16 / 3 PM / Kresge 159

An evening-long conference of papers and creative responses to Juliana Spahr’s This Connection of Everyone With Lungs (California, 2005) and Ammiel Alcalay’s From the Warring Factions (Beyond Baroque, 2002).

“The role of the artist has always been that of image maker. Different
times require different images.” —Ammiel Alcalay

We invite graduate students and faculty to participate in this event dedicated to the ongoing memory of the war in Iraq. We welcome formal papers and creative responses in different media. Event followed by discussion and pot luck dinner.

Sponsored by the Poetry and Politics Research Cluster