Tuesday, May 30 / 4PM / Oakes Mural Room

This colloquium will focus on the distinctive experiences and perceptions of women of color in the physical sciences. The goal of this event is to establish communities across the disciplines and to discuss the issues surrounding the lack of representation of women of color in the physical sciences. The graduate students leading the discussion are Kirsten Howley (astrophysics), Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (astrophysics/physics), Chelsey Juarez (physical anthropology), and Karen Glocer (computer science). Students and faculty of all disciplines are invited to attend this open discussion.

Sponsored by the Research Cluster for the Study of Women of Color in Collaboration and Conflict

Thursday, May 25 / 4PM / Oakes Mural Room

Susan Leigh Star is a poet who has also taught women’s studies, information science, sociology, and science and technology studies. She is currently President of the Society for the Social Studies of Science, and is Senior Scholar and Visiting Professor in Science and Technology Studies at the University of Santa Clara. Her talk is drawn from her work on the human-infrastructure interface. She addresses the questions of how people become “non-people,” the part played by technoscience in that process, and the nature of being disconnected and dismembered. Star’s publications include Sorting Things Out (MIT, 1999), co-authored with Geoffrey Bowker.

Sponsored by the Science Studies Research Cluster

Thursday, May 18 / 3PM – 7PM / Oakes Learning Center

Marilyn Arsem has been creating live events since 1975, ranging from solo performances to large-scale, site-specific events incorporating installation and performance. Arsem has presented work at festivals, alternative spaces, galleries, museums, and universities in many countries. She has been the recipient of numerous grants, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She is the founder and continues as a member of Mobius Artists Group in Boston.

Hiroko Kikuchi is a practicing artist who has performed and exhibited her work in cultural venues in the Boston area, New York, and Tokyo. Recent and upcoming projects include “Sifting the Inner Belt,” a yearlong social performance and research project (Boston Center for the Arts), and various collaborative performance art projects. She is currently Education/Outreach Coordinator and Freshman Advisor/Lecturer at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center, and serves on the advisory board and steering committees of Art Interactive and Arts & Business Council of Greater Boston.

Sponsored by the Visual Studies Research Cluster

Saturday, April 29 / 1PM – 6PM / Kresge 159

FRANTZ FANON is best known as the author of Black Skin, White Masks (1952), a devastating critique of colonialism, and The Wretched of the Earth (1961), a major diagnosis of the cultural politics of decolonization written during the last years of Fanon’s life, when he was acting Ambassador of the Algerian Provisional Government to Ghana during the Algerian War of Independence. Bringing together psychoanalytic, Marxist, deconstructionist, and postcolonial approaches, this symposium will consider the relevance of Fanon’s thought for understanding contemporary crises in sovereignty and state terror, nationalism and globalization, alterity and difference, and ethics and politics.

SCHEDULE

1 – 3 PM SESSION 1
Introduction NEFERTI TADIAR
(History of Consciousness, UC Santa Cruz)
Chair

DAVID MARRIOTT, The Politics of Affect
VILASHINI COOPPAN, National/Global Consciousness: Frantz Fanon and the Political Imaginary

3 – 3:30 PM BREAK

3:30 – 6 PM SESSION 2
GOPAL BALAKRISHNAN, Fanon on Divine Violence
PHENG CHEAH, Crises of Money

CONCLUDING DISCUSSION

David Marriott is Associate Professor of History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz. He is author of Letters to Langston (Rutgers, forthcoming Fall 2006), Incognegro (Salt, forthcoming July 2006), and On Black Men (Columbia, 2000), and is co-editor with Vicky Lebeau of Psychoanalysis and Poetics (Fragmente, 1998).

Vilashini Cooppan is Assistant Professor of Literature at UC Santa Cruz. Her essays on postcolonial and world literatures, globalization theory, psychoanalysis, and nationalism have appeared in the journals symploke,
Comparative Literature Studies, and Gramma, and in several edited volumes. Her book, Inner Territories: Fictions and Fantasms of the Nation in Postcolonial Writing, is forthcoming from Stanford.

Gopal Balakrishnan is a Rockefeller Fellow at the Center for Cultural Studies at UC Santa Cruz, and an editor of the New Left Review and Verso Books. His books include The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt (Verso, 2000), the edited volume Debating Empire (Verso, 2003), and the co-edited volume, with Benedict Anderson, Mapping the Nation (Verso, 1996). A collection of twelve essays is forthcoming from Verso in 2007.

Pheng Cheah is Associate Professor of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley. He is author of Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights (Harvard, forthcoming 2006), and Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation (Columbia, 2003), and co-editor, with Bruce Robbins, of Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (Minnesota, 1998).

Thursday, April 27 / 4:30 PM / Oakes Mural Room

Respondent: Charlotte Fonrobert, Religious Studies, Stanford University
Moderator: Robert Meister, Politics, UC Santa Cruz

Gil Anidjar is Associate Professor in the Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University. He is the author of “Our Place in Al-Andalus”: Kabbalah, Philosophy, Literature in Arab Jewish Letters(Stanford, 2002) and The Jew, the Arab: History of the Enemy (Stanford, 2003). He is currently completing a manuscript entitled: Blood: A Critique of Christianity.

Charlotte Fonrobert’s interests include Talmudic literature and culture, gender in Jewish culture, and the relationship between Judaism and Christianity in late antiquity. She is the author of Menstrual Purity: Rabbinic and Christian Reconstructions of Biblical Gender (Stanford, 2000). She is currently coediting the Cambridge Companion to Rabbinic Literature with Martin Jaffee.

Sponsored by the Religion and Culture Research Cluster, Jewish Studies, and the Literature Department

Friday, April 21 / 3:30 PM / Oakes Mural Room

Drawing on the work of philosopher Ernst Bloch, this paper stages a posterior glance at different moments and acts of queer futurity that offer an anticipatory illumination of queerness. It posits a concrete utopianism that can remake rationalism, delinking it from the provincial and pragmatic politics of the present to imagine a future of queer possibility.

José Esteban Muñoz is the chair of the Department of Performance Studies at Tisch School of the Arts and Associate Professor in Social and Cultural Analysis and Latino Studies at New York University. He is the author of Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minnesota, 1999), Cruising Utopia: the Performance and Politics of Queer Futurity (forthcoming, NYU), and co-editor of Pop Out: Queer Warhol (Duke, 1996) and Everynight Life: Culture and Dance in Latin/o America (Duke, 1997).

Sponsored by the Queer Theory and Critical Race Studies Research Clusters

Wednesday, April 19 / 4PM – 6PM / Oakes Mural Room

Please email cult@ucsc.edu for a copy of the paper, which should be read in advance.

Isabelle Stengers, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Brussels, is a major contemporary philosopher and has been, with her colleague and collaborator Bruno Latour, a key shaper of science and technology studies. Her many books, in addition to the seven-volume series Cosmopolitiques (Les empêcheurs de penser en rond), include The Invention of Modern Science (Minnesota, 2000), Power and Invention: Situating Science (Minnesota, 1997), and Penser avec Whitehead (Seuil, 2002). She is also known for her co-authored books with Ilya Prigogine, including Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature (Bantam, 1984).

Sponsored by the Science Studies Research Cluster and the History of Consciousness Department

Thursday, April 6 / 4 PM / Oakes Mural Room

What’s really inner about the inner voice? Denise Riley writes:

“To propose the outerness of the intimate innerness of speech may seem an inhumane violation of that “inner voice” as the truth of conscience. Yet to scrutinize inner speech soon throws into crisis the standard conception of inside and outside, resulting instead in an image of an inner speech periodically turned, like a Moebius strip, outward. We readily sense, without any dramatic topographical straining, that outer and inner speech don’t run in parallel as opposites; and this isn’t merely speculative: this non-symmetry of our interiority and exteriority emerges through contemplated experiences of inner speech. Conventionally imagined as inaccessible, the innermost, though, isn’t necessarily concealed. The very display of articulation can do the work of hiding. …We’d lose nothing in subscribing to the inner voice’s social nature – because that sociality is where, in all its idiosyncracy, my linguistic self is founded. “Conversation,” then, may not so much run between persons as its originating points, as through and across them.”

Denise Riley is Professor in the School of Literature at the University of East Anglia. Her writing is concerned with rhetoric and the emotionality of language, and has included investigations in the philosophy of language, social philosophy, and the nature of self-presentation and irony. Her books include War in the Nursery: Theories of Child and Mother (Virago, 1983); ‘Am I that Name?’ Feminism and the Category of Women in History (Minnesota, 1988); The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony (Stanford, 2000); and Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect (Duke, 2005). She has published many collections of poetry. She edited Poets on Writing: Britain 1970-1991 (Macmillan, 1992).

Respondent: Daniel Boyarin Near Eastern Studies, UC Berkeley
Moderator: Catherine Soussloff HAVC, UC Santa Cruz

Wednesday, March 15 / 5 PM / Cowell Conference Room

Ann Pellegrini is Associate Professor of Performance Studies and Religious Studies at New York University. She is the author of Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race (Routledge, 1997) and co-author, with Janet R. Jakobsen, of Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance (NYU, 2003). She is the co-editor of Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (Columbia, 2003) and is currently completing a new book, Against Childhood. With José Esteban Muñoz she co-edits the book series “Sexual Cultures,” published by New York University Press. Her work explores the intersections of gender and sexuality, religion, psychoanalysis, trauma studies, performance, autobiography and confessional culture, childhood studies, and Jewish cultural studies.

Daniel Boyarin is Professor of Talmudic Culture, Departments of Near Eastern Studies and Rhetoric, University of California at Berkeley, an affiliated member of the Department of Women’s Studies, and a member of the core faculty in the minor in Gay and Lesbian Studies. He is the author of many books including Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (California, 1993), Jews and Other Differences: The New Jewish Cultural Studies (Minnesota, 1997), Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism (Stanford, 1999), and, with Jonathan Boyarin, Powers of Diaspora: Two Essays on the Relevance of Jewish Culture (Minnesota, 2002).

Sponsored by the Religion and Culture Research Cluster, Jewish Studies, and Visual and Performance Studies

Thursday, March 2 / 4 PM / Oakes Mural Room

Lee Edelman is the Fletcher Professor of English Literature and Chair of the Department of English at Tufts University. Along with numerous essays in the fields of queer theory, cinema studies, and British and American literature, he is the author of Transmemberment of Song: Hart Crane’s Anatomies of Rhetoric and Desire (Stanford, 1987), Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (Routledge, 1994), and No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Duke, 2004). He is currently working on two new books: Hollywood’s Anal Compulsion and Up to No Good: Toward a Bad Education. His talk comes from this latter project.

Professor Edelman will also meet with the Research Unit on Friday, March 3, at 3:30 PM in Oakes 109.

Sponsored by the Queer Theory Research Cluster and the Psychoanalysis and Sexuality Research Unit of the IHR