Friday, February 17 / 9:30AM – 6PM / Bay Tree Conference Room D

Under the transnationalization of intellectual inquiry and the concurrent challenge to the disciplines, Asia-Pacific-America—a field of intellectual inquiry that emerged from the concrete struggles of civil rights movements and U.S. imperialist adventures in the Asia/Pacific region—is experiencing great institutional change. With the turn to transnational studies, the field of Asian-Pacific-American Studies, structured under the ethnic studies model, requires some critical reflection on its own field imaginary, disciplinary politics, and knowledge formation.
This symposium is an attempt to think about these intersecting issues of knowledge, politics, and the university in the interdisciplinary formation of Asia-Pacific-America. As one of only two UC campuses that does not have an Asian American and/or Pacific Island Studies program, the Santa Cruz campus, with its increasing Asian American and Pacific Islander student population, is in dire need of such discussion. With the participation of scholars and activists from other UC campuses and San Francisco State University, institutions that inaugurated Asian American studies programs in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, we hope this symposium will contribute not only to the theoretical debates on Asian-Pacific-American Studies in the age of interdisciplinarity and globalization, but will also serve the UC Santa Cruz community as it deliberates on its intellectual future.

SCHEDULE

9:30 AM–10 AM OPENING REMARKS
Rob Wilson Literature, UC Santa Cruz

10 AM–12 PM PANEL I
The Transnational Turn: Globalization and Inter-Disciplinarity

Moderator: Rob Wilson, Literature, UC Santa Cruz

Madeline Hsu, Ethnic Studies, SFSU
Transnationalism and Asian American Studies as a Migration-Centered Project

Neferti Tadiar, History of Consciousness, UC Santa Cruz
Cultural Nationalism, Regionalism, and Transnationalism: The Filipino American Community

Vilashini Cooppan, Literature, UC Santa Cruz
Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Transnationalism: Imagining Asian/America

1:30 PM–3:30 PM PANEL II
Structuring Asian-Pacific-American Studies: Past, Present, and Future

Moderator: Deborah Woo, Community Studies, UC Santa Cruz

Isao Fujimoto, Founder of Asian American Studies, UC Davis
Community Activisms Then and Now

Don T. Nakanishi, Director, Asian American Studies Center, UCLA
Coming of Age: Asian American Studies at UCLA, 1969-2004

Sau-ling Wong, Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley
Asian American Literary Studies and Its Internationalization

4–6 PM ROUNDTABLE
Envisioning Asian-Pacific-American Studies at UC Santa Cruz

Moderator:Karen Tei Yamashita, Literature/Creative Writing, UC Santa Cruz

Nancy Kim, Director of Asian American/Pacific Islander Resource Center, UC Santa Cruz

Ashley Uyeda, Pilipino Historical Dialogue Undergraduate Group, UC Santa Cruz

Deborah Woo, Community Studies, UC Santa Cruz

Alice Yang Murray, History, UC Santa Cruz

Co-sponsored by the Asia-Pacific-America Research Cluster and the Asian American/Pacific Islander Resource Center

Thursday, February 9 / 5 PM / Oakes Mural Room

Kaja Silverman is Professor of Rhetoric and Film at UC Berkeley, and the author of seven books, including World Spectators (Stanford, 2000); Speaking About Godard (NYU, l998; with Harun Farocki); The Threshold of the Visual World (Routledge, l996); Male Subjectivity at the Margins (Routledge, 1992); and The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Indiana, l988).

Silverman’s current writing and teaching concentrate on phenomenology, psychoanalysis, photography, and time-based visual art, and she continues to write about and teach courses on cinema, with a developing interest in painting. She maintains a continuing commitment to feminist theory, poststructuralist theory, queer studies, masculinity, and theories of race. Silverman is currently writing a book on photography, and a book—entitled Appropriations—which is centrally concerned with racial, sexual, and economic difference.

Co-sponsored by the Psychoanalysis and Sexuality Research Unit of the IHR and Visual and Performance Studies

Wednesday, February 1 / 3PM-7PM / Oakes Learning Center

Rose Hill is a Seattle-based performance artist who creates site-specific, time-based, and durational pieces for festivals, galleries, and alternative performance spaces. She has performed in Massachusetts, New York, Washington, and California, as well as in New Zealand, Poland, and Chile. Upcoming festivals include the National Review of Live Art in Glasgow, Scotland, and the Spingfluten Performance Festival in Germany, both in 2006.

Jamie McMurry has been creating and presenting original works of performance art for more than 10 years. He co-founded and directed the Rite! Performance Art Troupe (Seattle) and Powderkeg Contemporary Performance (Seattle and Los Angeles) from 1992-1997 and then continued with solo works. McMurry has also organized and produced major regional and international performance art exhibitions in Seattle, Los Angeles, and Boston, including the world-renowned Full Nelson Festival, which celebrated its fifth installment in April of 2003. His works often include intensely visceral activities and a densely packed series of actions referencing the pacing and behavior of young children at confused and often mischievous play.

Dillon Paul is a media and performance artist currently residing in the Bay Area. Her work has been exhibited and performed nationally and internationally at venues including the ODC Theatre, San Francisco, CA; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; the Cleveland Performance Art Festival; Plan B, Tokyo, Japan; and the Kwangju Biennale, Kwangju, Korea. In addition to creating her own work, Paul has danced in the companies of Min Tanaka in Japan, Bennett Dance Company in Boston, and Neta Pulvermacher & Dancers in New York City. She has taught video and performance art in the Department of Art Practice at UC Berkeley, as well as at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

Sponsored by the Visual Studies Research Cluster

Tuesday, January 31 / 4 PM / Oakes Mural Room

Professor Herzig will discuss practices of voluntary suffering among late nineteenth-century American scientists. In drawing historical attention to these forms of expenditure, Herzig hopes to shift some of the dominant analytical assumptions of contemporary science studies. Herzig is Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies at Bates College, and is currently a visiting research fellow at the Center for Cultural Studies. The talk expands on material in her book, Suffering for Science: Reason and Sacrifice in Modern America (Rutgers, 2005). She is also co-editor, with Evelynn Hammonds, of The Nature of Difference: Scientific Accounts of Human Variation (MIT, forthcoming).

Sponsored by the Science Studies Research Cluster

Discussant: David Marriott History of Consciousness, UC Santa Cruz

Thursday, January 26 / 5 PM / Oakes Mural Room

Eric L. Santner is Professor of Modern Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago. His books include Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany (Cornell, 1990); My Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber’s Secret History of Modernity (Princeton, 1996); On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig (Chicago, 2001); and most recently, Catastrophe and Meaning: The Holocaust and the Twentieth Century, co-edited with Moishe Postone (Princeton, 2003). Two new books are forthcoming: The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology (Chicago), written with Slavoj Zizek and Kenneth Reinhard, and On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald (Chicago). Santner continues to work at the intersection of literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and religious thought.

Sponsored by the Religion and Culture Research Cluster, the Psychoanalysis and Sexuality Research Unit of the IHR, the Literature Department and Jewish Studies

Saturday, January 21 / Oakes 105 / 10AM – 5:30PM

Conference Schedule

Globalization theorists have long recognized the importance of cities: as nodes that channel commodities, capital, labor, and information into global flows; as central points where migrants interact to generate new global cultures; as icons whose images as unique places generate an influx of tourists; and as arenas of place-based everyday life that can form the basis for resistance to globalization. Each city’s unique culture, and its residents’ sense of place, emerge from relations between the city’s position in a world of flows, its existence as an arena of everyday life, and a built environment that reflects and reproduces the other two elements.

Pre-Katrina New Orleans exemplified all of these traits. The second largest port in the world in the total value of its waterborne commerce, New Orleans was famed for its distinctive culture and architecture that blended elements of African-American, Anglo-American, French, Cajun, Spanish, and Caribbean society, which in turn was marketed to the world through a tourism industry that annually generated $4.9 billion. New Orleans was also almost as well known for the gritty culture of its everyday life that was radically disconnected from the city’s tourist front, even as it reproduced the culture that was represented to out-of-town visitors.

Since Katrina, few of these characteristics remain intact. The ongoing debates about the city’s future have revealed differing opinions about the responsibility of local and national institutions to preserve the city’s architecture, rebuild its communities, honor its memory, rectify its structural inequalities, care for its displaced citizens, redevelop its economic sector, and ensure that the tragedy is not repeated. At the root of these differing opinions are different ideas about just what a city is. 

The forced restructuring of the relationship between New Orleans and the world of global flows raises questions about the nature of cities and their persistence in a changed world:

• How can a place persist as a place if its connection with the outside world is primarily through imagery and memory?
• What becomes of a place-based culture when a place is rapidly depopulated and its residents scatter? If the restoration and renewal of a city results in a manufactured packaging of culture, how different would that be from what has been occurring anyway with the commodification and global marketing of local cultures and places?
• To the extent that the built environment survives in a depopulated city, can landscape alone sustain local culture and a local sense of place?
• Given that individual and collective senses of place and experiences of displacement are embedded with differences based on race, gender, age, physical ability, class, and duration of residence, how will these differences be renegotiated through the reconstruction process?
• What does the experience of New Orleans’ destruction tell us about how, in the aftermath of tragedy, places can be simultaneously resurrected, remembered, and reformed?

CONFERENCE SPEAKERS

Craig Colten is Carl O. Sauer Professor of Geography at Louisiana State University. He researches environmental historical geography, focusing most recently on New Orleans. He is the editor of Transforming New Orleans and Its Environs: Centuries of Change (Pittsburgh, 2001) and author of An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans from Nature (LSU, 2004).

Jordan Flaherty is an organizer with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in New Orleans and an editor of Left Turn magazine, where he has published several articles on race, power, and corruption in the response to Hurricane Katrina and in New Orleans’ post-Katrina reconstruction.

Paul Ortiz is Associate Professor of Community Studies at UC Santa Cruz. He researches social movements, race and ethnicity, and labor history in the southern United States. He is the author of Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920 (California, 2005) and the co-editor of Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South (New Press, 2001).

Rob Shields is Henry Marshal Tory Professor of Sociology and Art & Design at the University of Alberta. His research focuses on the cultural construction of public spaces in virtual and urban environments. His books include Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity (Routledge, 1991) and The Virtual (Routledge, 2003). He is the founder and editor of the journal Space & Culture.

Elizabeth V. Spelman is Barbara Richmond Professor in the Departments of Philosophy and Women & Gender Studies at Smith College. Her recent research explores analogies and “disanalogies” between repair of the material world and repair of relations among its inhabitants. Her publications include Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought (Beacon, 1988); Fruits of Sorrow: Framing Our Attention to Suffering (Beacon, 1997); and Repair: The Impulse to Restore in a Fragile World (Beacon, 2002).

Karen Till is Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Minnesota. She researches the cultural politics of memorialization and how practices of remembering reflect and reproduce conflicts over the meaning of place and nation, focusing on post-war Berlin and, most recently, postapartheid Cape Town. She is the co-editor of Textures of Place: Rethinking Humanist Geographies (Minnesota, 2001) and author of The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place(Minnesota, 2005).

Lewis Watts is Assistant Professor of Art at UC Santa Cruz. His photography focuses on African-American communities and the ways in which people consciously and unconsciously personalize their living spaces, institutions, and places of business, leaving traces of experience in the landscape. He is the co-author of Harlem of the West: The San Francisco Fillmore Jazz Era (Chronicle, 2005).

Clyde Woods is Assistant Professor of Black Studies at UC Santa Barbara. His research links the southern African-American “blues epistemology” of resistance with the political economy of underdevelopment and racialization. He is the author of Development Arrested: Race, Power, and the Blues in the Mississippi Delta (Verso, 1998).

This conference is the second of three quarterly events produced by the Center for Cultural Studies in its Other Globalizations project, funded in part by the Rockefeller Foundation.

Thursday, January 19 / 4 PM / Oakes Mural Room

The Critical Race Studies Cluster continues its fall quarter conversation (newcomers welcome) about an emerging field pairing race and affect. We will discuss methodology, multidisciplinarity, messy associations, and how affect matters. We particularly invite graduate students and faculty whose work engages race and/or affect to share their thoughts.

Contact Alexis Shotwell (shotwell@ucsc.edu) or Tanya McNeill (tmcneill@ucsc.edu) for readings.

Sponsored by the Critical Race Studies Research Cluster

Friday, December 2 / 3 PM / Oakes Mural Room

The idea of “nation” implies territory, boundaries, place, a past, people who claim to belong, and assurances of rights and privileges. With work that examines these questions across national spaces, “Producing the Nation,” a new research cluster and writing group, will critically explore processes, claims, and contradictions regarding the nation and its influence on the formation of identities. With a focus on intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, and political conviction, the writing group is particularly concerned with the production and consumption of cultural expression. The group’s participants turn to cultural production to help explain the range of emotional and political investments embedded in notions of national belonging. This panel also explores the mapping of national cultures, focusing on circumstances including exile, diaspora, nature, geography, and the impact of American domestic and foreign policies. The cluster plans to hold an additional panel discussion in spring of 2006.

TOPICS & PANELISTS:

Eco-Challenge or Eco-Circus: Adventure Sport and Land Use Controversies in the American Southwest
Barbara Barnes, graduate student in Sociology, UC Santa Cruz

Isabel Allende and the U.S. Marketplace of Latin American Identity
Macarena Gómez-Barris, Assistant Professor, American Studies and Ethnicity,
University of Southern California

On the Citizen-subject: Commemorating 1970s Political Violence in Thailand
Sudarat Musikawong, graduate student in Sociology, UC Santa Cruz

Discussant: Herman Gray, Professor of Sociology, UC Santa Cruz

Co-sponsored by the Sociology Department

Saturday, October 29 / 1PM-5:30PM / Oakes 105

A symposium with Iain Boal, T.J. Clark, Joseph Matthews, and Michael Watts, members of RETORT and authors of Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (Verso, 2005); Jennifer Whitney, activist/organizer and an editor of We are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anticapitalism (Verso, 2003); Gopal Balakrishnan, New Left Review editor and a Rockefeller Fellow at the Center for Cultural Studies; and Robert Brenner, UCLA historian, political economist, and frequent contributor to New Left Review and Against the Current.

In the final decade of the 20th century, the transition to an international order based on capitalism, elections, and human rights seemed to form a trend-line extending into the far future. The U.S. sought to secure the undisputed hegemony it had won in the struggle against communism by committing its power to the protection and expansion of the zone of globalization. On the peripheries of this volatile circuitry of market forces, tightened neoliberal conditions of access to Western investment, aid, and moral legitimation resulted in a far-reaching attenuation of the sovereignty of weak and failing states. A decade of U.S.-led military harassment and disposal of rogue regimes in the name of human rights appeared to have consigned traditional statecraft to the past. Both the editors of the Economist and the authors of Empire declared that the Great Game of national power politics was an anachronism. Western neo-imperial doctrines and military practices were seen, across the political spectrum, as police enforcement of the rules of a global neoliberal order.

This account of the times has been put to a severe test in the aftermath of 9/11. Should the aggressive “unilateralism” of the U.S. response to this event be seen then as an atavistic regression from the previous norms of neoliberalism? Or, as the authors of Afflicted Powers maintain, is “neoliberalism mutating from an epoch of ‘agreements’ and austerity programs to one of outright war… those periodic waves of capitalist restructurings we call primitive accumulation”? Afflicted Powers is emerging as a singularly important analysis of the contemporary situation, and is attracting worldwide attention. Its view of the role of violence in the history of capitalism draws on both Marx’s and Polanyi’s conception of a coercive enclosure of “the commons”—i.e., the appropriation of myriad forms of common wealth embedded in the non-market environment upon which capitalism feeds. From the colossal privatizations of nationalized industries and public properties to an intensified colonization and patenting of nature, today’s “post-industrial” primitive accumulation leaves in its wake a landscape of gated affluence and burgeoning slums. Is this new round of imperial wars and occupations securing the conditions for the ongoing expansion of capitalism? Alternately, are they the result of the ideological fixations and delusions of military neoliberalism at an impasse?

The authors of Afflicted Powers suggest that there is a problem in conceptualizing the dialectic between war and capitalism under conditions of “the Spectacle.” For the strategic direction of state power in the geopolitical field has become increasingly subject to the performance criteria of televisual construction of social reality. How then should we understand the media-staged event structure of the geopolitical moment that begins with 9/11, pitting America against jihad? Has “the War against Terror” merely been a pretext for implementing the grand strategies of the new American Century? Or have the new Islamic vanguards shaken Empire in the realm of image power, provoking it to reckless overreach? Relatedly, readers are asked to reconsider the meaning of modernity in light of this militarized spectacle war between the U.S. and its Islamic nemesis.

Afflicted Powers challenges central assumptions underlying the discourse of opposition to the invasion of Iraq. Criticizing the slogan “No Blood for Oil,” the authors claim that the project of seizing the oil fields of Iraq cannot be understood in terms of any Malthusian scenario of an imminent exhaustion of world reserves. The alternative explanation they offer opens a window onto the vast force field of global demand, speculation, and war in which oil emerges as a strategic commodity, whose price movements “abound in metaphysical subtleties.” In the past, the U.S. has intervened in the region to stave off periodic threats to this vast petro-dollar circuitry in which imperial supervision and local state formation supervene on the logic of supply and demand. Why, then, did Washington decide to abandon the manageable risks of this status quo ante for the incalculable risks involved in attempting to seize and privatize the oil fields of Iraq?

In this genealogy of the current disaster, the authors address a directly related case in which the norms of realist statecraft have seemingly broken down. Why has U.S. support for Israel gone up in a period in which the latter has become a massive strategic liability, both in terms of its regional strategic interests and its hegemonic credibility? The authors of Afflicted Powers claim that the explanation does not lie with powerful domestic lobbies. Their alternative account underscores an implicit motif running through this work—that dimensions of the world system that have proven difficult to grasp are operative at the interface of state power, capital, and the mediasphere.

The possibility of an effective contemporary politics is at stake. The symposium will open with RETORT authors, who will comment on and extend the analysis of Afflicted Powers. Gopal Balakrishnan and Robert Brenner will offer commentary on Afflicted Powers based upon their own current research on the baffling intersections of geopolitics and capitalism. We expect a lively conversation, joined by members of our community.

Copies of Afflicted Powers are available at discount at the Literary Guillotine (204 Locust St., Santa Cruz, 457.1195). Audience members are encouraged to read the book before the symposium.

This conference is the first of three quarterly events associated with the Center for Cultural Studies’ Other Globalizations project, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.

Friday, October 28 / 5 PM / Oakes Learning Center

In several Balkan languages, “katun” means “temporary village,” and designates seasonal communities that form near bodies of water in the warm weather. iKatun’s projects take the form of katuns: temporary convergences of people, institutions, and materials in a particular space. iKatun is a collective of researchers, artists, and technologists who create installations, interventions, research materials, and software in physical space and cyberspace. iKatun projects explore issues surrounding information, power, and social exchange, particularly as they relate to public discourse, urban play, and political action.

Michael Mandiberg is a new media artist who uses the Internet, video, and performance to explore subjectivity, labor, and commerce. His recent projects include IN Network with Julia Steinmetz, Bush Poll (BushPoll.com), and The Exchange Program, a collaborative performance in which four sets of two people switched lives for 11 days. He is also the creator of Shop Mandiberg, where he put all of his possessions up for sale. His work is shown and written about internationally and online.

Sponsored by the Visual Studies Research Cluster