Tuesday, October 18 / 4 PM / Oakes Mural Room

This informal conversation will engage an emerging field pairing race and affect. We will discuss methodology, multidisciplinarity, messy associations, and how affect matters. The Critical Race Studies Cluster aims to build intellectual community among people with overlapping interests. To that end, 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

OPEN HOUSE & ROUNDTABLE
Tuesday, October 11 / 5 PM / Merrill College, Room 23

Please join us to meet members and discuss the 2005-06 goals of the cluster. Upcoming events include a continued reading group, bibliography and syllabi construction, collaborative projects with the Critical Race Studies Research Cluster and the Women of Color Research Cluster, and a spring guest speaker. New members, ideas, and suggestions are always welcome. For more information, please contact Heather Turcotte at hmturcotte@juno.com.

Friday, October 7 / 3 PM-5:30 PM / Oakes Mural Room

Madhavi Menon is Assistant Professor of Literature at American University. Her book, Wanton Words: Rhetoric and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama (Toronto, 2004), explores rhetoric as a mode of reading the past and its desires. Her readings of the erotics of rhetorical tropes help extend rhetorical analysis into new areas such as race and colonialism. Her forthcoming essay, “Spurning Teleology in Venus and Adonis” (GLQ 11.4, Fall 2005), demonstrates a queer approach to questions of temporality and literary form. Her current book project, “Unhistorical Shakespeare: Towards a Different History of Sexuality,” interrogates the theoretical parameters within which we study sexuality, and questions historicism, particularly its attendant foci on sameness and difference, as a mode of queer inquiry.

Advance reading for the seminar is available on ERES (instructor: Freccero; password: prosem). For further information, please contact Maria Frangos at mef@ucsc.edu.

Co-sponsored by the Queer Theory Research Cluster and the Pre- and Early Modern Studies Research Unit

Friday, May 27 / 4 PM / Oakes Mural Room

Ever since NTT Docomo launched its i-mode mobile internet service in 1999, Japan has had an international leadership role in the wireless revolution. Now mobile phones are a ubiquitous and essential part of Japanese life, not only for business people and youth, but across the social spectrum. The focus of the talk will be on ethnographic case studies of how mobile messaging and camera phone usage are embedded in the social networks and cultural ecologies of Japanese youth. The central argument is that current trends in mobile media point to a significant shift in the role of information and communication technology, a role that is more pervasive, lightweight, personal, and pedestrian, in contrast to the PC-centered uses that have dominated in the U.S.

Mizuko Ito is Research Scientist at the Annenberg Center for Communication, University of Southern California, and Visiting Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Media and Governance at Keio University in Japan. She is an anthropologist of technology use, and has done fieldwork on after-school computer clubs, mobile phone users in Tokyo, internet gaming sites, and other real and virtual locations. Her edited volume (with Daisuke Okabe and Misa Matsuda), Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life, will be published this year by MIT.

Sponsored by the Hybrid Media Research Cluster

Thursday, May 26 / 4 PM / Oakes Mural Room

Phillip E. Wegner is Associate Professor of English at the University of Florida, where he teaches twentieth-century literature, narrative theory, critical theory, and cultural studies. He is the author of Imaginary Communities: Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernity (California, 2002), and is completing work on a new book, “Living Between Two Deaths: Periodizing U.S. Culture, 1989-2001.” He writes, “If T2 stages the end of a Cold War and its deterministic logics, and gives expression to the dizzying sense of freedom the United States felt in this moment to impose its will unhindered on the entire globe, then T3 can be said to repeat this gesture, in order to show the constraints and burdens that come with such an unparalleled position. It would be September 11 that would help ‘us’ assume a new global role, thereby marking both the final closure of the world historical situation of the Cold War and the opening of a new period in global history, that of the terrible infinity of the new Empire’s ‘war on terror.’”

Sponsored by the Science Fiction Research Cluster

Thursday, May 5 / 4 PM / Oakes Mural Room

Sanjay Seth is Senior Lecturer in Politics at Latrobe University in Melbourne, Australia. He has published widely on political theory, postcoloniality, Indian history and politics, and Marxism. His Marxist Theory and Nationalist Politics: The Case of Colonial India (Sage) appeared in 1995. He is also founding co-editor of the journal Postcolonial Studies. His talk is from his recently completed book manuscript, “Subject to Pedagogy: Western Knowledge and Colonial India.” He writes about his paper, “The episode in question was that of the alleged ‘moral crisis’ of the educated Indian, who, many argued, had been plunged into confusion and moral disarray following his exposure to Western knowledge in the schools and universities established by his British ruler. In the discourse of moral crisis, the knowledge being disseminated through Western education was simultaneously put to use in explaining an unanticipated effect of this education. How adequate was Western knowledge to explaining its own effects? More generally, what is the status of the knowledge we produce when we ‘apply’ the categories of modern Western thought in order to understand or explain India?”

Monday, May 2 / 4 PM / Oakes Mural Room

Robert Bernasconi is the Moss Chair of Excellence in the Department of Philosophy, University of Memphis. He is the co-editor of Race and Racism in Continental Philosophy (Indiana, 2003), Concepts of Race in the Eighteenth Century (Thoemmes, 2001), In Proximity: Emmanuel Levinas and the Eighteenth Century (Texas Tech, 2001), and Rereading Levinas (Indiana, 1991), and the author of Heidegger in Question: The Art of Existing (Humanities Press International, 1993) and The Question of Language in Heidegger’s History of Being (Humanities, 1985), as well as numerous articles on continental philosophy. His talk is drawn from his ongoing work on the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas.

Co-sponsored by the History of Consciousness Department

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

Paola Bacchetta is Associate Professor of Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley. Her research interests encompass gender, sexuality, postcolonial theory, postmodern theory, feminist/womanist movements, right-wing movements, ethnic conflict, and qualitative research and field methods. She is co-editor of Right-Wing Women: From Conservatives to Extremists around the World (Routledge, 2002). Gender in the Hindu Nation: RSS Women as Ideologues (New Delhi: Women Unlimited) was published in 2004.

Sponsored by the Religion and Culture Research Cluster with cosponsorship from the Anthropology Department, the Center for Tolerance, Justice, and Community, and the Department of Women’s Studies

LECTURE:
Will to Power, Will to Live: Towards a Politics of Liberation
Monday, April 18 / 4–6 PM / Oakes Mural Room

SEMINAR:
Planetary Politics,  With Enrique Dussel, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Eduardo Mendieta
Tuesday, April 19 / 4–6 PM / Oakes Mural Room

SEMINAR READING:
• “Preface,” “Introduction,” and “The ‘World System’: Europe as ‘Center’ and Its ‘Periphery’ beyond Eurocentrism.” From Enrique Dussel, Beyond Philosophy: Ethics, History, Marxism, and Liberation Theology (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), edited and Introduction by Eduardo Mendieta.
• Enrique Dussel, “Six Theses towards a Critique of Political Reason: The Citizen as Political Agent,” Eduardo Mendieta, “Politics in an Age of Planetarization: Enrique Dussel’s Critique of Political Reason.” From David Ingram, ed. The Political (Blackwell, 2002).

Readings may be requested by email up to one week in advance from cult@ucsc.edu.

Enrique Dussel is Professor of Philosophy at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitina-Iztapalapa and the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. He is the main spokesperson for the Latin American movement known as liberation philosophy. He is author of over 50 books and 300 articles. His work in English includes The Underside of Modernity (Humanities, 1996), The Invention of the Americas (Continuum, 1995), Ethics and Community (Orbis, 1988), and Philosophy of Liberation (Orbis, 1985). He is presently finishing a two-volume work entitled Politics of Liberation.

The problem…is the question of the overcoming of the “world system” itself, such as it has developed until today for the last five hundred years. The problem is the exhaustion of a civilizing system that has come to its end. What presupposes the liberation of diverse types of oppressed and/or excluded populations are the overcoming of cynical-management reason (planetary administrative), of capitalism (as economic system), of liberalism (as political system), of Eurocentrism (as ideology), of machismo (in erotics), of the reign of the white race (in racism), the destruction of nature (in ecology), and so on.

— from “The ‘World System’: Europe as ‘Center’ and Its ‘Periphery’ beyond Eurocentrism”

In his Ethics of Liberation, Dussel developed an ethics that brought together the material dimension of all systems of ethical life with the formal or procedural dimension of all moral systems. The point of ethics is neither what is proper to an ethos, nor what is just, given conditions of equity, nor even what is allowed and possible within a horizon of materiality. Instead, the aim of an ethics is goodness or beneficence (bondad), which is the synthesis of the material, the formal, and the possible. Dussel argued that an ethics is not worth that name if it does not acknowledge that there are always victims of the established orders of ethos and justice. For this reason, every ethics must contain a critical dimension. In his Politics of Liberation, Dussel seeks to extend these insights to the realm of the political. In the first part of the Politics, Dussel provides a world-historical analysis of the origins of the modern political systems and their corresponding systems of political thought. In the second volume, Dussel elaborates what he has called “critical-political” principles: 1. The critical-strategic principle, or principle of liberation; 2. The critical-democratic principle, or the principle of the recognition of alterity; 3. The critical-material principle of deconstruction and creation, or the principle of solidarity.

SEMINAR PANELISTS:

Eduardo Mendieta is Rockefeller Fellow at the Center for Cultural Studies.

Nelson Maldonado-Torres is Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. His work reflects on religion, philosophical anthropology, social and cultural formations in the Americas, and the role of critical intellectual activity in the context of global coloniality. His forthcoming Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity examines Jewish, Latin American, and Black responses to modernity.

This lecture/seminar series is presented in conjunction with the Center’s Rockefeller foundation fellowship program in Other Globalizations: Histories, Trans-regionalism,and Cultural Formations.

LECTURE:
Will to Power, Will to Live: Towards a Politics of Liberation
Monday, April 18 / 4–6 PM / Oakes Mural Room

SEMINAR:
Planetary Politics,  With Enrique Dussel, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Eduardo Mendieta
Tuesday, April 19 / 4–6 PM / Oakes Mural Room

SEMINAR READING:
• “Preface,” “Introduction,” and “The ‘World System’: Europe as ‘Center’ and Its ‘Periphery’ beyond Eurocentrism.” From Enrique Dussel, Beyond Philosophy: Ethics, History, Marxism, and Liberation Theology (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), edited and Introduction by Eduardo Mendieta.
• Enrique Dussel, “Six Theses towards a Critique of Political Reason: The Citizen as Political Agent,” Eduardo Mendieta, “Politics in an Age of Planetarization: Enrique Dussel’s Critique of Political Reason.” From David Ingram, ed. The Political (Blackwell, 2002).

Readings may be requested by email up to one week in advance from cult@ucsc.edu.

Enrique Dussel is Professor of Philosophy at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitina-Iztapalapa and the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. He is the main spokesperson for the Latin American movement known as liberation philosophy. He is author of over 50 books and 300 articles. His work in English includes The Underside of Modernity (Humanities, 1996), The Invention of the Americas (Continuum, 1995), Ethics and Community (Orbis, 1988), and Philosophy of Liberation (Orbis, 1985). He is presently finishing a two-volume work entitled Politics of Liberation.

The problem…is the question of the overcoming of the “world system” itself, such as it has developed until today for the last five hundred years. The problem is the exhaustion of a civilizing system that has come to its end. What presupposes the liberation of diverse types of oppressed and/or excluded populations are the overcoming of cynical-management reason (planetary administrative), of capitalism (as economic system), of liberalism (as political system), of Eurocentrism (as ideology), of machismo (in erotics), of the reign of the white race (in racism), the destruction of nature (in ecology), and so on.

— from “The ‘World System’: Europe as ‘Center’ and Its ‘Periphery’ beyond Eurocentrism”

In his Ethics of Liberation, Dussel developed an ethics that brought together the material dimension of all systems of ethical life with the formal or procedural dimension of all moral systems. The point of ethics is neither what is proper to an ethos, nor what is just, given conditions of equity, nor even what is allowed and possible within a horizon of materiality. Instead, the aim of an ethics is goodness or beneficence (bondad), which is the synthesis of the material, the formal, and the possible. Dussel argued that an ethics is not worth that name if it does not acknowledge that there are always victims of the established orders of ethos and justice. For this reason, every ethics must contain a critical dimension. In his Politics of Liberation, Dussel seeks to extend these insights to the realm of the political. In the first part of the Politics, Dussel provides a world-historical analysis of the origins of the modern political systems and their corresponding systems of political thought. In the second volume, Dussel elaborates what he has called “critical-political” principles: 1. The critical-strategic principle, or principle of liberation; 2. The critical-democratic principle, or the principle of the recognition of alterity; 3. The critical-material principle of deconstruction and creation, or the principle of solidarity.

SEMINAR PANELISTS:

Eduardo Mendieta is Rockefeller Fellow at the Center for Cultural Studies.

Nelson Maldonado-Torres is Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. His work reflects on religion, philosophical anthropology, social and cultural formations in the Americas, and the role of critical intellectual activity in the context of global coloniality. His forthcoming Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity examines Jewish, Latin American, and Black responses to modernity.

This lecture/seminar series is presented in conjunction with the Center’s Rockefeller foundation fellowship program in Other Globalizations: Histories, Trans-regionalism,and Cultural Formations.